Well-connected ex-politician Bob Rae must work with head and heart for First Nations as pressure mounts to develop Northern Ontario’s Ring of Fire
I’m looking at a map of northern Ontario where there’s a pretty patchwork of colours in the shape of a crescent moon: deep sea-blue for Freewest Resources, orange for KWG, bright sun-yellow for Probe, grass green for Fancamp, sky-blue for the Freewest/Spider/KWG partnership.
They are some of the thousands of claims staked by mining companies in the Ring of Fire — 5,120 square kilometres in the watersheds of Hudson and James bays and chock full of chromite, nickel, copper and zinc worth well over $100 billion. That’s a sizable chunk of boreal forest, itself a carbon sink in the order of the Amazon rain forest.
Imagine you’re on the shore of McFaulds Lake. You’re looking at trees and rock and muskeg — swampland, millions of acres of it. Turn around and you’ll see KWG’s base camp and maybe a drill or two pulling up core samples of chromite. Well, why not? you ask. There’s nothing else there.
Not so. It’s home for everything and everyone from black flies to black bears to First Nations peoples — Cree and Anishinaabek — whose ways of life will be forever altered if and when all those pretty coloured claims become mines.