Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal is the daily newspaper of Northwestern Ontario.
IT would be easy to slip into despair over the interruption in Northern Ontario’s prosperous mining promise with the indefinite suspension of operations by leading player Cliffs Natural Resources.
It would be easy to start casting more blame on suspects including the provincial government for dithering and First Nations for holding up production with varying demands for consultation, among others.
There is plenty of blame to go around but money talks loudest in ventures of this size and a company this big is a hostage to its share price. That is dictated by the ebbs and flows of the market and commodity prices which are slumping.
Would Cliffs have shifted into neutral — it has not shut off the engine — if frustration over the pace of talks with government, First Nations and competitors had not been complicated by the lowered world price of the chromite that it seeks to extract from the remote north of Ontario and other minerals that it mines elsewhere?
Facing development costs of $3.3 billion, the company apparently decided too much was at stake with too little known to commit that kind of money to a process riddled with this much uncertainty.
Politicians are putting a brave face on this, saying other players are still in the game. But Cliffs is the biggest and its work the most advanced. This is serious, but not insurmountable.
A determined political effort to enable a working environment among the main players can bring Cliffs back to at least the point of reconsideration. That effort is essential for more than this.
The worst enemy the Ontario economy can face is uncertainty. The Cliffs scenario sends all the wrong signals to any industrial or business player. If that isn’t fixed, nothing else matters.