Investors like [Ontario] northwest’s blue sky mining potential – by Ian Ross (Northern Ontario Business – January 4, 2013)

 Established in 1980, Northern Ontario Business provides Canadians and international investors with relevant, current and insightful editorial content and business news information about Ontario’s vibrant and resource-rich North. Ian Ross is the editor of Northern Ontario Business ianross@nob.on.ca.

The upcoming construction of a new Detroit-Windsor international bridge crossing may be grabbing all the headlines, but some Wall Street types and industrial movers and shakers think northwestern Ontario is the right place to deposit their capital.

The City of Thunder Bay and its economic development commission took home two awards in October for its mining presentation at the 4th annual North American Strategic Infrastructure Leadership Forum in Denver, Colo.

Steve Demmings, CEO of the Thunder Bay Community Economic Development Commission, and John Mason, mining services project manager, attended the Oct. 15-17 event to promote northwestern Ontario as a future infrastructure construction hot spot.

Their submission of a potential $80-billion stable of between nine and 13 mine projects in the region was enough to sway a jury of forum sponsors to pick Thunder Bay over four other nominated projects for the prestigious Strategic Project award.

“We received the award just prior to us doing our presentation,” said Mason, who filed their submission 10 days prior to the event. “Apparently, that’s the granddaddy of the awards and we were competing against an eclectic group.”

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Copper consumption to grow 4% annually through 2014—Fitch – by Dorothy Kosich (Mineweb.com – January 4, 2013)

http://www.mineweb.com/

The outlook for the base metals sector this year is stable as Fitch Ratings anticipates cautious spending and investment as well as improved profit margins.

RENO (MINEWEB) – Fitch Ratings forecasts that copper consumption will grow about 4% annually through 2014, based on a soft landing in China and a slow recovery in developed nations. European copper consumption is expected to remain depressed through this year.

“Fairly balanced markets are expected for 2013, while 2014 could show better supply,” said Fitch analysts.

Copper supply is expected to grow at about 3% annually through 2014 as production recovers from 2011 labor disruptions and new projects ramp up, offsetting lower grades in older mines.

Additional mine production of about one million tonnes per year in 2013 and 2014 “from the ramp-up of new projects in Africa’s copper belt, expansion projects, and recovery from operating disruptions,” said Fitch. “In 2014, nearly all the mine production growth will come from new greenfield projects and these are subject to higher risk of production shortfall.”

“New production from Africa, where infrastructure is less developed, also faces a higher risk of shortfall particularly from power disruption,” the analysts advised.

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Energy industry slams Matt Damon fracking film as Hollywood fiction – by Kelly Cryderman and Carrie Tait (Globe and Mail – January 4, 2013)

The 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.

Calgary — A blend of engineering and geology hardly makes for a Hollywood blockbuster. But the latest movie about hydraulic fracturing – yes, there’s more than one out there – has an A-lister taking shots at the controversial practise.

The film – Promised Land , co-written and starring Matt Damon – opens Friday, but the energy industry’s supporters are already fuming over how they have been painted as the bad guy. The movie, they argue, is full of scare-mongering rather than facts. And they say Hollywood has done just the same: made judgment calls without having all the necessary information.

Hollywood has used its broad reach to try to persuade the masses before. James Cameron’s Avatar was interpreted by some as a potshot against the oil-sands industry. Documentaries such as Thank You for Smoking chastized tobacco companies and their lobbyists, and Super Size Me went after fast food businesses. Gasland , released in 2010, criticized natural gas players and famously showed someone lighting tap water on fire. The energy industry, experts say, must battle Promised Land or risk losing ground in the fracking debate. The audience for Promised Land , after all, is full of folks who have not spent years figuring out how guar gum and water can be mixed together to shatter previously impenetrable rocks.

“There’s a lot of misinformation in any story,” Deborah Thompson, principal of communications and executive consultancy DT Communications, said. “It doesn’t matter if it is as contentious as this, in any story for any company, regardless of whatever industry they are in, you have to correct misinformation. While that doesn’t sound terribly Hollywood sexy, that’s what you have to do.”

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Excerpt from “The History of Mining: The events, technology and people involved in the industry that forged the modern world” – by Michael Coulson

To order a copy of The History of Mining please click here:http://www.harriman-house.com/products/books/23161/business/Michael-Coulson/The-History-of-Mining/

CECIL RHODES (1853-1902)

Once one of the British Empire’s most revered but also widely hated figures, Cecil John Rhodes enjoyed a burst of popularity after his death when his legacy, the Rhodes Scholar awards to Oriel College, Oxford, in particular marked him as a great philanthropist and visionary. Since then his reputation seems to have been in almost permanent decline as first his admiration for the Anglo Saxon ‘race’ and then his vision of a worldwide British Empire poisoned his public esteem and earned the contempt, particularly, of modern historians.

Rhodes was born in Bishops Stortford 30 miles north of London, the son of a clergyman. Whilst his brothers attended England’s great public schools and went up to Oxford, Rhodes was sickly and was educated locally. His health meant that he did not initially go to university but left school at 16. After being diagnosed with TB he went to South Africa to join his brother Herbert on his cotton farm in Natal. After a couple of years building up the farm Herbert, who had earlier spent a short time in the diamond fields near Kimberley in Griqualand West, returned to Kimberley and Rhodes followed. Herbert earlier had some success with his claims, but under Cecil’s direction things took on a more organised and businesslike tone.

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Female Newsmaker of the year [Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence] – by Lenny Carpenter (Wawatay News – January 3, 2014)

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

Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence’s national spotlight for her fight to remove the third party manager assigned to her First Nation and her decision to go on a hunger strike last month makes her Wawatay’s female newsmaker of the year.

Following the housing crisis in her community at the end of last year, Spence continued to oppose the third party manager imposed upon the community by the federal government.

In January, after Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development of Canada (AANDC) Minister John Duncan accused Spence and the leadership of Attawapiskat of withholding information so that the third party manager could release funds for essential services, Spence issued a reply indicating that the manager’s fees were billed to the First Nation at a rate of $20,000 a month.

“Why should my First Nation be paying $1,300 a day for some firm to issue payroll cheques for my First Nation with our already limited Band Support Funding?” Spence asked in her letter to Duncan. “We do not need a high priced manager to issue cheques, because we are capable of issuing cheques and managing our business affairs.”

After a federal court declined to remove the third party manager on a temporary basis in February, Spence said the decision did not affect the First Nation’s overall legal challenge. She had filed a court injunction against AANDC in December.

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When aboriginal conflicts aren’t stranger than fiction – by Christie Blatchford (National Post – January 4, 2013)

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

I started to read Doug Bland’s novel Uprising in 2009, shortly after it was first published.

I didn’t finish only because I was then embroiled in my own non-fiction account of the native occupation in Caledonia, Ont., three years earlier. As always for me, this is a time of great writerly insecurity, and I was afraid both of distraction and of being intimidated unto paralysis by the excellence of someone else’s book.

I still haven’t quite made my way through Uprising’s almost 500 pages, despite an all-day effort, but reading it now is considerably creepy-crawlier than it was before, amid the widespread protests, hunger strikes, flash mobs and assorted other actions of the aboriginal Idle No More movement.

Lieutenant-Colonel (retired) Bland, until 2011 the Chair of Defence Management Studies at Queen’s in Kingston, was already a respected author when Uprising was released, but not of fiction.

In fact, he says, he wrote the first draft “as a typical academic book,” realized afterwards that the only people who would read it were other academics, and did it again as fiction.

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To understand how we got to Attawapiskat, go back to the 1905 James Bay Treaty – by Jonathan Kay (National Post – January 4, 2013)

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

Attawapiskat First Nation chief Teresa Spence is not engaged in “terrorism,” as one Postmedia writer notoriously suggested last week. Terrorists blow themselves up. Ms. Spence, by contrast, is sitting in a snow-covered teepee on Victoria Island in the Ottawa River. Let’s not play the game of using the T-word to describe everyone we simply don’t like.

On the other hand, Ms. Spence isn’t a true “hunger striker” either, since she reportedly is drinking fish broth and various herbal potions. We don’t know how many calories she’s taking in on a daily basis, so we can’t discount the possibility that she really will starve herself to death. But she is not a true Bobby Sands-style hunger striker. Terminology is important, whether you’re talking about death by Semtex, or starvation.

Finally, Ms. Spence is not an icon of “grass roots” native rage — as some suggest. She is a band chief, with an office and salary paid for by regular Canadian taxpayers. Attawapiskat may be tiny and poor, but it has its own development corporation, airport, local services and homegrown management scandals. The band takes in millions from a local diamond mine. True “grass roots” organizations can only dream of such resources.

But even if Ms. Spence is not a terrorist, nor a true hunger striker, nor a genuine grass roots activist, I would argue that we still need to pay attention: The very real plight of Attawapiskat First Nation encapsulates everything that has gone wrong with aboriginal policy for generations.

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Misguided hunger strike is manufacturing dissent – by Peter Foster (National Post – January 4, 2013)

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

The aboriginal plight is the legacy of failed policies past, and of resistance from native leaders to changes in accountability, transparency, education and property rights that would inevitably undermine their own power

Nobody would deny the desperate conditions on many native reserves. Most Canadians are genuinely concerned and frustrated at how little improvement has been brought by the billions spent. However, to imagine that problems of poverty, ill health and poor education are best addressed — let alone solved — by histrionic threats, social-mediated mob scenes or blocked roads or rail lines is dangerous delusion.

Chief Theresa Spence, who was previously best known for declaring states of emergency — arguably rooted in her own mismanagement — at her Attawapiskat reserve, is suddenly being treated as some combination of Martin Luther King and Aung San Suu Kyi. Celebrity moths, bleeding hearts and clamberers up the greasy political pole have sought to invest her “hunger strike,” which is now into its fourth week, with noble purpose.

In fact, her initial threat to starve herself to death failing a meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Governor General David Johnston suggested either a bizarre degree of narcissism, or revealed her as a witless puppet. Perhaps both.

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Retired industry professionals address [mining] training gap – by Heather Campbell (Northern Ontario Business – January 4, 2013)

 Established in 1980, Northern Ontario Business provides Canadians and international investors with relevant, current and insightful editorial content and business news information about Ontario’s vibrant and resource-rich North.

A trio of Sudbury mining veterans, Dennis Shannon, Mike Mooney and Otto Rost, have teamed up to establish the National Mine Safety Training Centre (NMSTC). There are a lot of contractors working in the mines today who are not necessarily trained for a mine environment, said Shannon, NMSTC’s president.

Proper training ensures their safety and limits the liability of their employers.

Shannon is a retired educator who taught ground control at both Cambrian College and the Northern Centre for Advanced Technology (NORCAT). He and NORCAT past-president Darryl Lake founded the Ontario Centre for Ground Control Training and helped to create the first Ontario operating mine dedicated to training and product development.

Mooney, the chief financial officer, started two successful businesses – Ground Control, which he sold, and Shotcrete Plus, which continues as a father and son operation. Rost, the vice-president, is a design engineer who ran his own instrumentation and communication business. He has designed software for mine equipment monitoring that captures location, service, maintenance and availability.

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Male Newsmaker of the Year [Neskantaga Chief Peter Moonias]- by Shawn Bell (Wawatay News – January 3, 2013)

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

Neskantaga Chief Peter Moonias burst into the national media’s attention in the spring when he announced to the world that he would stop a bridge to the Ring of Fire from being built over the Attawapiskat River, by any means possible.

“They’re going to have to cross that river, and I told them if they want to cross that river, they’re going to have to kill me first. That’s how strongly I feel about my people’s rights here,” Moonias said in May.

Since then Neskantaga has become a thorn in the side of Cliffs Natural Resources, the mining giant that Moonias has pegged an “American mining bully.” Moonias’ efforts have brought international attention to the First Nations fight to be consulted and accommodated on what may be the biggest development ever in northern Ontario.

For those efforts he has earned Wawatay’s male newsmaker of the year. The First Nation is making true its claim to use any means possible to oppose the Ring of Fire until proper consultation gets completed.

In May the chief sent a series of letters to the Ontario government, demanding consultation and expressing his concerns over Cliffs’ announcement that it was going ahead with its Ring of Fire chromite mine, along with a north-south highway and a smelter in Sudbury.

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Environmental story of the year – by Shawn Bell (Wawatay News – January 3, 2013)

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

The Ontario Geologic Survey (OGS) claimed its aerial surveying of one of Ontario’s last pristine wildernesses was done with the best of intentions. The OGS wanted to update geologic records that were decades old, it said, and help First Nations in the area create land use plans based on geologic information.

And if the aerial surveying around Weenusk First Nation along the Hudson Bay coast resulted in a big increase of mineral exploration in the area, well, no one would be surprised. The only problem was that the First Nation did not even know the aerial surveying took place.

And when it did find out just weeks before the results were to be published on the internet for prospectors everywhere to see, it turned out the people Weenusk were not that interested in having their geologic information exposed to the world.

“Once you allow these processes to begin, our schedules and our land use plans don’t mean a thing,” said George Hunter, a community member and former chief of Weenusk. “We don’t want to allow the province to issue licenses for staking to take place, and the only advantage we have now is that nobody has access to the land.”

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