Expect action on Ring of Fire in 2018: MPP – by Jim Moodie (Sudbury Star – December 21, 2017)

http://www.thesudburystar.com/

It won’t be too long after ringing in the New Year that the Ring of Fire will begin to feel a bit closer to reality. “We’re talking about shovels in the ground in 2018,” said Glenn Thibeault this week, in reference to a pair of roads the Wynne government is committed to building to the mineral-rich region.

Earlier in the day the Sudbury MPP met with representatives of Noront Resources, which plans to both extract chromite from the James Bay deposits and refine it through a smelter that will be built somewhere in Northern Ontario — potentially Sudbury.

Noront CEO Alan Coutts was thrilled in August when the Liberal government announced it would fund road construction to The Ring, telling The Star at the time this was “the catalyst that was needed.”

One road will be an east-west route linking the fly-in First Nation communities of Webequie and Nibinamik to an existing highway north of Pickle Lake; the other will connect Marten Falls First Nation to the provincial highway network via a north-south artery.

The province did not place an exact dollar value on the projects, but said the move is part of a $1-billion commitment made earlier to develop infrastructure in the remote part of the province.

Feasibility studies have since been undertaken and “now we’re going to move into environmental assessments,” Thibeault told The Star.

For the rest of this article: http://www.thesudburystar.com/2017/12/21/expect-action-on-ring-of-fire-in-2018-mpp