http://www.timescolonist.com/index.html
 
Boom-bust cycle cited as cause
 
Twenty per cent of mining companies in Canada have already begun laying off employees this summer in a sector that has taken a recent beating in the markets. The good news for existing workers is that employment appears to be getting more stable, with 76 per cent of the 140 mining executives surveyed not considering any further layoffs in 2012, according to a new report.
 
“What you’re seeing now in the market is [mining] companies are taking a wait-and-see approach,” said Andrew Pollard, president and chief executive of the Mining Recruitment Group in Vancouver.
 
Firms in the mining sector have been scaling back on their exploration and development plans (80 per cent) and reducing overhead costs (71 per cent), according to the survey by Pollard’s company.

“There are a lot of unknowns, [but] the fundamentals of the industry are quite sound over the long term,” said Pollard, noting 82 per cent of executives are bullish over a three year period, despite shortterm caution. Read the rest of this entry »

http://www.timescolonist.com/index.html
 
United Church publicly opposes Northern Gateway project

Rev. Logan McMenamie is speaking out against the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, saying it doesn’t respect the interconnectedness of living things. McMenamie, of Christ Church Cathedral on Burdett Avenue, is one of many religious leaders across Canada focusing on the pipeline – something McMenamie says concerns “the sanctity of the Earth.”
 
“What I preached on was my own perspective,” he said of his Sunday sermon, adding that he doesn’t speak on behalf of the Anglican Church of Canada. “I think [the sermon] resonated with many in the congregation.”
 
He’s not alone in bringing the debate to a religious forum. On Tuesday, the United Church of Canada decided to publicly oppose the project. The pipeline proposed by Calgary-based Enbridge Inc. would do severe environmental damage, traversing waterways where salmon spawn, said Ray Jones, the chair of the church’s aboriginal ministries council. And the potential for an oil spill in the port of Kitimat is very real, he said. Read the rest of this entry »

Northern Ontario’s First Nations Voice: http://wawataynews.ca/

Before the creation of Nishnawbe Aski Nation there was not a lot of funding to go around, save for a few very small programs at the community level, recalled Eabameetong’s Harvey Yesno. “Our focus at the time was bringing basic services like policing, housing and electrification into our communities,” said Yesno.

Yesno had arrived onto the political stage in the late 1970s as a young chief after having served as his community’s economic development officer and band manager. By this time, many family groups had already moved off the land from their traditional trap lines and onto reserves. In those days, the reserves had very little infrastructure or even programs and services. Many communities did not have airports, social programming or reliable access to the outside world.

First Nations had recently been granted the right to vote in Canadian elections, and were only recently able to step off reserve lands to go hunting without permission from the minister of Indian Affairs. Children were still required by law to attend residential schools, and many were being taken from their communities and adopted into white families as per the federal government’s policy of assimilation. Read the rest of this entry »

http://www.timescolonist.com/index.html

Calvin Sandborn is legal director of the University of Victoria Environmental Law Centre.

In July 2010, an Enbridge oil pipeline ruptured near Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. Three million litres of oil spilled into the river, causing extensive damage, killing fish and wildlife, and leading to the evacuation of local homes. The spill cost $800 million to clean up – the most expensive onshore spill in U.S. history.
 
It looks like one of the biggest victims of this spill will be Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline proposal. But the more important lesson is being missed. For the Michigan disaster highlights Ottawa’s supreme folly – dismantling our environmental laws at the same time as it approves dramatic expansions in resource industries.
 
Last month, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board issued a scathing report on the Kalamazoo spill, concluding:
 
-Enbridge failed to fix the corroded pipe for five years, even though they knew about the corrosion problem. Read the rest of this entry »

http://af.reuters.com/

MARIKANA, South Africa Aug 15 (Reuters) - Thousands of striking miners armed with machetes and sticks faced off with South African police on Wednesday at Lonmin’s Marikana mine after it halted production following the deaths of 10 people in fighting between rival unions.

Lonmin, the world’s third-largest platinum producer, has threatened to sack 3,000 rock drill operators if they fail to end a wildcat pay strike that started on Friday at Marikana, its flagship mine 100 km (60 miles) northwest of Johannesburg.

The illegal stay-away and the union clashes have forced London-headquartered Lonmin to halt mining at all its operations in South Africa, which account for 12 percent of global platinum output. South Africa has 80 percent of known platinum reserves.

On Wednesday, scores of police backed by helicopters lined up opposite a crowd of around 2,500 miners who had taken up position on a rocky outcrop overlooking the mine. “The situation is stable but tense. We are busy with negotiations and are maintaining a high visibility in the area,” national police spokesman Dennis Adrio said. Read the rest of this entry »

http://mg.co.za/

Police say no further incidents have been reported at Lonmin’s violence-stricken Marikana mine in the North West, where 10 people have been killed. “Police have been monitoring the situation at the mine throughout Tuesday night,” Captain Dennis Adriao said on Wednesday morning. “We have not received any reports of violence or deaths.”
 
Violence erupted when about 3 000 Lonmin rock drill operators started an illegal work stoppage and protest march on Friday at the company’s Western Platinum mine. It was the deadliest violence yet in a union membership turf war between the dominant National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the newer Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU).
 
A tenth body was found on Tuesday. A South African Press Association reporter who was on the scene said the body was lying face upwards 100m away from a hilltop where workers gathered earlier on Tuesday. The man was wearing khaki clothes.
 
Nine other people – two police officers, two security guards, three protesters and two other men – have been killed in the violent protests since Friday. Read the rest of this entry »

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Pierre Gratton is President and CEO, Mining Association of Canada.

The rail and mining industries have a dependeant relationship. Without rail freight service, mining companies would be challenged to operate since Canada’s vast geography doesn’t exactly make delivering products to ports and smelters easy. And without the mining industry, the railways would lose their biggest client.

Our industries are a natural fit, but issues over market power have complicated our relationship. As a general rule, the more competition, the more likely customers will receive better service at lower prices. No competition breeds market power, which results in high prices and leaves customers with no alternate provider to turn to – repercussions of what’s known as a natural monopoly.

The Canadian railways are often considered a typical example of a natural monopoly. The high costs of laying track and servicing Canada’s vast geography have resulted in a lack of competition among the railways – Canadian Pacific (CP) and Canadian National (CN). To further aggravate the issue, the remote locations of mining operations often mean shippers are limited to just one of the two railways, and frequently stranded without alternative shipping methods. Read the rest of this entry »

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Speaking with reporters in Vancouver on Tuesday morning, Alberta premier Alison Redford flatly, and rightly, rejected calls by British Columbia premier Christy Clark to cut B.C. in for a share of the profits from the Northern Gateway pipeline.

As important as it is to develop the infrastructure necessary to carry Canadian energy products to market, from Alberta or elsewhere, such pipelines cannot be built at any price to satisfy opportunistic leaders looking for a quick buck or a bump in the polls. Ms. Redford did the right thing, for Alberta and Canada, by refusing to deal with Ms. Clark on the latter’s terms.
 
The Northern Gateway pipeline, which is still awaiting regulatory approval, would ship petroleum products from the Alberta oil fields across British Columbian soil to ports on the Pacific Coast. From there, tankers would haul Alberta’s oil to the growing, and energy starved, markets of Asia. There are risks to this plan. The pipeline itself could rupture and cause a spill — Enbridge Inc., the company that would build and operate Northern Gateway, has done itself no favours through its shoddy handling of similar spills involving pipelines it operates in the U.S.

And even if the pipeline itself functions perfectly, there is the potential for the tanker ships that would transport the oil to foreign ports to wreck and spill their cargoes. These are legitimate issues that should concern B.C. voters, and Ms. Clark was not wrong to speak out forcefully on her province’s behalf. Read the rest of this entry »

The Toronto Star, has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

When the prime minister gets out of the nation’s capital and sees how his policies affect people lives, welcome changes occur.  They’re often subtle and sometimes hard to interpret. But Stephen Harper listens to local opinion, allows questions from the media (which he almost never does in Ottawa) and adjusts his course ever so slightly.
 
Last week’s West Coast visit was an interesting example. Harper went to Vancouver to attend Senator Gerry St. Germain’s barbecue, a 28-year Conservative tradition, and to re-announce his party’s plan to offer paid leave to parents who take time off work to care for a child with a life-threatening illness.
 
But British Columbians wanted to talk about the North Gateway project, a 1,172-kilometre pipeline proposed by Enbridge to carry bitumen from Alberta’s oilsands to tankers plying the dangerous waters between Kitimat and the Queen Charlotte Islands. And talk they did, giving him an angry earful.
 
In Ottawa, Harper had been adamant that he wanted the $6-billion pipeline built and clear that he was prepared to use his executive power to dislodge obstacles and prevent delays. Read the rest of this entry »

The Vancouver Sun, a broadsheet daily paper first published in 1912, has the largest circulation in the province of British Columbia.

Exporation strong but slowing Chinese demand, eurozone crisis hamper financings

Junior mining companies are going through the toughest bear market since the 2008 financial meltdown, according to the Association for Mineral Exploration British Columbia.
 
In a quarterly letter to members posted on the association’s website, AME B.C. president Gavin Dirom said tough economic conditions have hit the sector again, prompted by worries about Europe’s sovereign debt crisis and China’s slowing demand for copper.
 
“Although the global mineral exploration and development sector may still be in a multi-year commodity super-cycle, very challenging equity financing and bear market conditions were the reality during the second quarter of 2012,” Dirom said in the open letter to members. “Members of AME B.C., especially prospectors and junior explorers, are experiencing the impact of these tough economic conditions.”
 
Dirom noted that equity capital raised on Toronto’s venture capital exchange, the TSX-Venture, was down 62 per cent in the period January to May over the same period of 2011. ”Gold companies, for example, were only able to raise $445 million through equity placements in May and June, which is the lowest two-month total since late 2008.” Read the rest of this entry »

http://www.nugget.ca/

The provincial government is trying to cause the ONTC to malfunction as it continues with its divestment plan, according to the president of CAW Local 103.
 
“They are not allowing us to replace people who are leaving,” says Brian Kelly. “There’s a hiring freeze in place, so when someone retires or quits, we can’t replace them.”
 
The province announced in March its plan to divest the Crown corporation and, since then, Kelly said, has been putting roadblocks in place to its continued viability. The hiring freeze, he said, is causing difficulties in all sectors of the operation. Hiring, he said, is taking place on a case-by-case basis.
 
“What’s happening is the younger people are quite concerned about their future, the skilled trades people, so they are taking whatever comes their way,” Kelly said.He said particularly hard hit are Ontera and the shop areas. Operations in Cochrane are also feeling the pain, as employees there pull up stakes for jobs at the Detour Lake mining complex. Read the rest of this entry »

The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

The first court appearance Tuesday of Crown counsel for the Ministry of Labour and an agent for lawyers representing Vale Ltd. and one of its supervisors officially launched what is expected to be a protracted, complicated trial on charges under the Occupational Health and Safety Act.
 
Vale is facing nine charges under the act and supervisor Keith Birnie is facing six charges after an almost yearlong investigation by the Labour ministry into the June 8, 2011, deaths of two men at Stobie Mine.
 
It only took minutes for a justice of the peace in the Ontario Court of Justice to adjourn the matter until Sept. 12, when a judge will begin hearing the case in the criminal division of provincial court. Vale and the supervisor are charged with failing to take reasonable precautions to prevent the movement of material through an ore pass at Stobie Mine where Jason Chenier, 35, and Jordan Fram, 26, were killed.
 
The men died after being overcome by a run of 350 tons of muck from the No. 7 ore pass of the century-old mine while they were working at the 3,000-foot level. Birnie is facing charges similar to the ones laid against his employer. Read the rest of this entry »