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Lots of active non-action in the Ring of Fire this week. Cliffs Natural Resources continued to walk back from its Ring of Fire adventure with an announcement that Dana Byrne, vice president responsible for government and public relations, will retire on July 1.
“Over the past three years, Mr. Byrne has been extensively involved with the company’s chromite project in the Ring of Fire located in Northern Ontario,” the company said in its announcement. “His work with the First Nations and familiarity with all aspects of the government’s interests in this project has and continues to be invaluable to Cliffs.”
Byrne will maintain his invaluable 34-year ties with the Ohio miner through a one-year consultancy.
His replacement is Raga Elim, who vacates his position as director – global government relations to take up the job of vice president – global corporate and government affairs, as well as responsibility for the company’s global communications and public affairs functions.
Elim, who has been with Cliffs but a couple of years, previously served as the head of Rio Tinto’s Washington, D.C. government affairs office. He has extensive experience with a variety of American governments and was “a speechwriter at the last four Presidential Election Conventions for one of the major political parties,” which suggests, we suppose, that he is well-connected in a vague but interesting way.
In any event, the global world is now his oyster.
Meanwhile, the CBC has uncovered the shocking information that First Nation communities in the Ring of Fire region may not be in a position to benefit from the illusionary mega-development because they have low education levels, addiction issues and inadequate public infrastructure.
Not sure where they thought they were going with this exposé, but the Mother Corp seems to be castigating “the government” and “big mining” for not solving the intractable social problems that plague Ontario’s remote Aboriginal communities.
Presumably, those big, bad politicians and mining bosses are trying – once again — to end-run Ontario’s plucky-but-disadvantaged First Nations so they won’t have to share the immense “benefits” of this phantom economic boom with their trusting treaty partners.
Of course, the CBC is chuffed because it FOIed a February briefing note by a federal policy wonk, who enthuses about Northern Ontario being “poised to become a mining mecca for its billions of dollars in chrome, copper, nickel and platinum deposits.”
The Power & Politics crew must have missed subsequent memos about plummeting commodity prices, upheaval in the mining industry, utter confusion surrounding Ontario’s Ring of Fire development plans and the sense of malaise settling over this much-anticipated economic boom. Poised, it ain’t.
They also haven’t been following their own CBC news reports that have detailed and discussed the shocking facts about those intractable social problems.
February. Federal policy wonk. Aboriginal Affairs department.
How would this relate, in any way, to today’s on-the-ground reality? Sounds like Evan and his reporter just got back from a five-year posting to Afghanistan and haven’t kept up with the news from home.
Almost everyone – certainly anyone involved in the Ring of Fire – knows that the region’s communities are struggling, but no one knows exactly what to do about it. Let’s hope the Power & Politics people will provide constructive suggestions once they get up to speed.
Noront Resources, meanwhile, continues to beaver away at its Ring of Fire projects. The company announced Friday that it had agreed to sell its interest in the Windfall Lake project for $5 million, which it will use to “further the development of its Eagle’s Nest project” in the Ring of Fire.
With Cliffs and its north-south road sidelined for the nonce, Noront has given notice that it is willing to take the lead on an east-west approach to Ring of Fire development — if other key players insist on tripping over their own feet.
For the original version of this column, click here: http://insupportofmining.wordpress.com/2013/06/28/the-week-that-was-in-the-ring-of-fire/