Ontario Mining Association says Key ministry gives mining its due

This article was provided by the Ontario Mining Association (OMA), an organization that was established in 1920 to represent the mining industry of the province.

Ontario’s Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation (MEDI) is now featuring mining on one of its marketing websites. Ontario’s mining sector and its contributions to the provincial economy are front and centre on MEDI’s website www.investinontario.com.

The industry is singled out in three sections: Mining in Ontario: Opportunities for growth; Mining in Ontario: What are the key activities? And; “Mining in Ontario: Who are the players?” The website touches on Ontario’s rich mineral endowment, its favourable access to capital, the strong mine supply and services sector, its fair mining laws and taxation and its skilled and educated workforce.

The site shows Ontario as home to 45% of Canada’s mine supply and services companies and that for attractiveness of mining policy, the province is ranked 13th out of 93 international jurisdictions, according to a Fraser Institute survey. The support of Ontario’s universities and colleges for mining is also demonstrated.

“It is most welcome to see an important ministry like MEDI feature the province’s mining industry on its website and showcase the attributes of our industry to the world,” said Ontario Mining Association President Chris Hodgson. “People in the sector know they are working in a world leading Canadian industry and it is good news to see MEDI help to share mining’s good news story.”

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NEWS RELEASE: Support Builds for New Deal to Revitalize Ontario Northland, Connect Ring of Fire

 • More stakeholders demand government pause its ONTC sell-off plan

• New website launches today to support the New Deal

NORTH BAY, ONTARIO (Dec. 17, 2012) – The New Deal for Northern Ontario www.newdealnorth.ca), an initiative to revitalize the Ontario Northland Transportation Commission (ONTC), build a rail link to the Ring of Fire and create thousands of new jobs, has expanded its base of support among key stakeholders.

Liberal leadership candidate Harinder Takhar recently issued a policy statement calling for “Divestiture of the ONTC to an independent, self-sustaining organization, and the development of a new rail line for the ‘Ring of Fire’ operations.”

Takhar’s statement is closely aligned with the New Deal plan to transfer ownership of provincially-held ONTC’s railroad and other assets to a new ports authority to be operated under the Canada Marine Act. ONTC operations will be strengthened, and a new rail line to the Ring of Fire mineral deposits will be developed to ship chromite, nickel and other minerals and finished products to markets around the world.

MPP Glen Murray, another Liberal leadership candidate, has called on the government to “pause” its plan to divest the ONTC, while Gerard Kennedy is seeking a “review” of the sell-off decision and further examination of ONTC’s potential role in developing the Ring of Fire mineral deposits.

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Potanin comes out as CEO in Norilsk Nickel boardroom war deal – by Polina Devitt (Mineweb.com – December 17, 2012)

http://www.mineweb.com/

As the Norilsk Nickel boardroom war comes to a Kremlin/Abramovich–enforced understanding, long-time co-owner, Vladimir Potanin has emerged as the incoming CEO.

MOSCOW (REUTERS) – Norilsk Nickel named longtime co-owner Vladimir Potanin as its chief executive on Monday under a deal to end a boardroom war at the world’s top nickel and palladium producer.

Kremlin-backed oligarch Roman Abramovich will take control of a 20 percent voting stake to act as a buffer between Potanin and rival Oleg Deripaska, who owns a share in Norilsk through UC RUSAL, the world’s largest aluminium producer.

Speaking after his unanimous election by the Norilsk board, Potanin said he planned to stay in the job for between 18 months and two years. The peace deal will last for 10 years, with the core shareholders agreeing to keep their stakes for five.

Abramovich, the billionaire owner of Chelsea soccer club, could also act as a conduit for the Kremlin at the cash-rich company that mines the vast mineral deposits of Russia’s far north.

Having brought an end to the four-year feud between Potanin and Deripaska, he could potentially end up sidelining them as President Vladimir Putin seeks to restore order at the $30 billion miner that was privatised in the mid-1990s.

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Mine CEO [Darryl Stretch] accuses chiefs of slander – by Jonathan Migneault (Sudbury Star – December 17, 2012)

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

The president of a gold prospecting company has accused two First Nations chiefs of making “slanderous and defamatory remarks” against him in the media.

Darryl Stretch, the president of Solid Gold Resources Corporation, has given Dave Babin, chief of the Wahgoshig First Nation, and Harvey Yesno, grand chief of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, until today to issue a public apology for comments they made at a Sudbury press conference on Nov. 7.

“In the event that you do not respond to this notice I will take whatever action is available to me,” Stretch said in his letter to Babin and Yesno. Babin has said he has no plans to respond to Stretch’s request for a public apology. The three parties have feuded over Stretch’s requests to do mining exploration on First Nation territory.

In March, Stretch told the Globe and Mail the Wahgoshig First Nation wanted his company to pay $100,000 to study whether its drilling would be on a burial ground.

“It’s not my obligation to go find arrowheads for those people, period,” Stretch told the Globe. “If they don’t like you, you don’t work. What kind of deal is that? Because I didn’t do it right, the way the Indians wanted me to? Because I didn’t give them money? Because I didn’t beg them for permission to go? It’s just ridiculous, the whole concept.”

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U.S. ruling over Teck’s Trail, B.C. smelter may have ripple effect – by Dene Moore (Globe and Mail – December 17, 2012)

Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

 TRAIL, B.C. — On a beach in northeast Washington state near the Canadian border, Patti Bailey grabs a handful of what looks like sand and rolls the dark grains through her hands.

It’s slag, the grainy waste from the Teck Resources Ltd. lead and zinc smelter in Trail, B.C., about 10 kilometres north of the border.

“They’re little time bombs and they’re releasing zinc, copper, arsenic and other metals into the environment,” said Ms. Bailey, an environmental planner for the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation.

A Washington state judge has ruled that Teck is liable for the costs of cleaning up contamination in the Columbia River south of the border from decades of dumping slag and effluent from the company’s Trail operations.

In a decision announced late last week, Judge Lonny Suko ruled that, “for decades Teck’s leadership knew its slag and effluent flowed from Trail downstream and are now found in Lake Roosevelt, but nonetheless Teck continued discharging wastes into the Columbia River.”

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Why training workers in Canada beats importing them from abroad – by Barrie McKenna (Globe and Mail – December 17, 2012)

Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

OTTAWA — Fast-tracking the entry of foreign workers to toil in Canada’s mines, oil fields and construction sites is certainly expedient. The work is there. So bring them in and get it done, for the sake of the economy. But a rented foreign work force is hardly an enduring solution to a skills shortage that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has called “the biggest challenge our country faces.” At best, it’s a stop-gap.

Labour shortages are now a permanent feature of Canada’s labour landscape. The country is staring at a decade or more of critical labour scarcities as the massive baby boom generation retires and the economy grows. Hundreds of thousands of jobs will go begging for electricians, welders, pipe fitters, heavy equipment mechanics and many other trades.

The federal government’s recent announcement that it intends to bring in an extra 3,000 skilled tradespeople next year may be welcome news for employers.

It’s one thing to bring in foreigners to do jobs Canadians can’t or won’t do. Farmers have been doing it for years to harvest crops. But the program betrays the national interest if it is being used as a cover to import workers whose only asset is a willingness to work for a lot less than Canadians.

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Battle for Inmet Mining turns hostile – by Pav Jordan (Globe and Mail – December 17, 2012)

Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

First Quantum Minerals Ltd. has made a hostile, $5.1-billion takeover offer for Inmet Mining Corp., taking the bid directly to shareholders after two earlier offers were snubbed by the owner of one of the world’s largest undeveloped copper assets.

First Quantum, Canada’s largest pure-play copper producer, is offering $72 a share to Inmet, compared with an earlier approach of $70 a share, or $4.9-billion, which Inmet rejected on the grounds that it was “highly conditional” and not in shareholders’ interests. First Quantum’s initial offer, made in late November, was $62.50 a share.

The cash-and-stock offer comes a few days after Inmet raised its copper reserves estimate on its flagship copper project in Central America, Cobre Panama, by 27 per cent and extended the expected mine life by nine years.

Cobre Panama will be one of the few large-scale copper projects to be developed in coming years. It will produce some 300,000 tonnes of copper a year, worth about $1.1-billion (U.S) at current prices and putting it on a similar scale to giant mines in Chile and Peru. The project has had its challenges, among them sharply rising costs and concerns about how its owners will foot a development bill of $6.2-billion.

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NEWS RELEASE: Wabauskang First Nation Heads to Court Over Rubicon Mineral’s Phoenix Gold Mine Project in Red Lake

 Wabauskang First Nation

Treaty 3
December 17, 2012

Wabauskang First Nation has instructed its lawyers to file a lawsuit at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice opposing Rubicon Mineral’s proposed Phoenix Gold Mine project in Red Lake, Ontario.

“This has been an extremely frustrating process for our First Nation from day one,” said Wabauskang Chief Leslie Cameron. “Despite our concerns that the entire process review was deeply flawed, Rubicon refused to withdraw its mine application last fall and Ontario approved it over our objections. We didn’t want to go to court, so even though we don’t think Ontario had the authority to approve the mine, we tried to work with the company over the last year to resolve our concerns. We’ve been unsuccessful, so we’re forced to go to court to ensure that our interests are protected.”

Relying on last year’s court win by the Grassy Narrows First Nation in Keewatin, Wabauskang has consistently taken the position that only Canada, not Ontario, can justify an infringement of its Treaty rights. Wabauskang has also repeatedly complained to both Ontario and the federal government that constitutional obligations to consult and accommodate have been wrongly delegated to mining companies. Both Ontario and Canada have ignored Wabauskang’s concerns.

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Considering the next Nexen – by Conrad Black (National Post – December 15, 2012)

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

The federal government’s new guidelines on foreign acquisitions of Canadian companies are commendable, as far as they go. They require investment reciprocity on the part of the nation of the company seeking to acquire Canadian assets, and mandate special scrutiny in cases involving our natural resources — especially the oil sands.

Stephen Harper was accurate in saying that it was not sensible to have privatized PetroCanada, while indulging unlimited acquisitions of other petroleum assets in this country by interests controlled by foreign governments.

On the other hand, the strategic value of our oil sands might not prove to be as significant as some expect. New oil and gas technologies already have served to reduced U.S. oil imports from 60% to 45% of that country’s requirements. And that trend now seems likely to continue until the U.S. retrieves its status of energy self-sufficiency that started to slip away in the Eisenhower era.

This cannot fail to reduce international oil prices, which may slip back down to $50 a barrel. Given this, sales of oil sands assets and companies at prices tied to current oil prices look advantageous to the seller. This appears to have been the case with the Nexen acquisition, just approved by the federal government.

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Ottawa’s new foreign takeover rules won’t work in the real world – by Diane Francis (National Post – December 15, 2012)

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

Ottawa has made a mistake by allowing the buyout of Nexen Inc. by China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC) and the buyout of Progress Energy Resources Corp. by Petronas of Malaysia.

Apparently, the lobbying and debate behind closed doors was fierce and, in the end, a “Canadian” compromise was offered up as policy. And this equivocation — “conscription if necessary but not necessarily conscription” — won’t work in the real world.

After the approvals were announced, Prime Minister Stephen Harper framed this as the “end of a trend,” not the “beginning” of a buyout frenzy by more sovereign-owned enterprises (SOEs). He ring-fenced the oil sands from further SOE buyouts unless in “exceptional circumstances” and set lower threshholds for Investment Canada reviews of foreign bids. But this is not the end. This is the beginning of the beginning. Phone calls are already being made to launch new buyouts by foreigners here.

The Chinese, Russians and others have gamed and will continue to game our system. I would argue that CNOOC’s bid itself was outrageous: an aggressive, uninvited entry into the Canadian economic space before the issues had been properly debated in the aftermath of the Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc. and TMX Group Inc. takeovers were rebuffed and rejected.

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To Stop Climate Change, Students Aim at College Portfolios [coal, oil and gas stocks] – by Justin Gillis (New York Times – December 04, 2012)

http://www.nytimes.com/

SWARTHMORE, Pa. — A group of Swarthmore College students is asking the school administration to take a seemingly simple step to combat pollution and climate change: sell off the endowment’s holdings in large fossil fuel companies. For months, they have been getting a simple answer: no.

As they consider how to ratchet up their campaign, the students suddenly find themselves at the vanguard of a national movement.

In recent weeks, college students on dozens of campuses have demanded that university endowment funds rid themselves of coal, oil and gas stocks. The students see it as a tactic that could force climate change, barely discussed in the presidential campaign, back onto the national political agenda.

“We’ve reached this point of intense urgency that we need to act on climate change now, but the situation is bleaker than it’s ever been from a political perspective,” said William Lawrence, a Swarthmore senior from East Lansing, Mich.

Students who have signed on see it as a conscious imitation of the successful effort in the 1980s to pressure colleges and other institutions to divest themselves of the stocks of companies doing business in South Africa under apartheid.

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The politics of a painkiller – Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal Editorial (December 14, 2012)

The Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal is the daily newspaper of Northwestern Ontario.

Leona Aglukkaq has got politics down pat. The federal Health Minister recently approved generic versions of the highly-addictive opioid painkiller OxyContin for sale in Canada. The patent for OxyContin — which is the market name for time-released oxycodone tablets — expired and, in the interest of private-sector initiative, the government opened the door for other companies to step in with their own, no-name versions.

That’s great for the companies; oxycodone painkillers are huge sellers. It’s also good for people in need of those drugs, as well as health care budgets. The generics are much cheaper than the name brand versions and their painkilling abilities are effective.

The issue, though, is one that affects everyone else. Oxycodone is a fiercely addictive painkiller and the introduction of generic versions will cost society far too much to go ahead.

The problem is, those struggling with an oxy addiction — and there are many — pass their struggle on to others. Drug stores are being held up to the point where many pharmacy owners are refusing to stock generic oxy. Convenience stores, homes and vehicles are robbed and whatever taken is quickly flipped to pay for the next pill.

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