The search for gold is the single most dramatic event of British Columbia’s early history. Although European settlement originally was founded on furs, it was the gold rushes of 1858 through the 1860s that changed the direction of development in this province for considerable time. These gold rushes not only brought a sharp increase in population and wealth but also initiated development of an early infrastructure of roads and services and directly influenced the shape of British Columbia’s politics.
It has been estimated that between 1860 and 1880 about $35 000 000 worth of gold was extracted from the 130 square kilometres (50 square miles) surrounding Barkerville. Although the later gold rushes were smaller, they also played an important role in our history.
The rush to British Columbia was only one of a series of sudden shifts in population and wealth that resulted from the search for placer gold. California and Australia both attracted hordes of miners in search of riches. This paper places the British Columbia gold rush in a world context; it drew less world attention and was smaller than either the Californian or Australian rushes.
AME BC represents 4,000 thousand individual and 360 corporate members and is the predominant voice of mineral exploration and mine development in British Columbia.
Vancouver, B.C. — January 13, 2012 — The Association for Mineral Exploration BC (AME BC) salutes Robert Hunter (1927-2007) and Robert Dickinson, who were jointly inducted into the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame on January 12 in recognition of their outstanding lifetime achievements to the Canadian minerals industry.
Hunter and Dickinson are founders of Hunter Dickinson Inc. Today, because of the vision and leadership of Mr. Hunter and Mr. Dickinson, HDI is a diversified, global mining group with more than 25 years of mineral development success. From its head office in Vancouver, B.C., HDI applies its unique strengths and capabilities to acquire, develop, operate and monetize mineral properties that provide consistently superior returns to shareholders.
HDI is characterized by the drive and commitment of its founders, senior management and multi-disciplinary team. It is known for its technical excellence, experience and reliability. And it is passionate about bringing responsible mineral development to life in creative ways for the benefit of shareholders, partners and communities. Read the rest of this entry »
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.
RIDLEY ISLAND, B.C. AND VANCOUVER - The sky is a hard grey and the small mountains of coal piled a dozen metres high are thick black. From this outpost in northwestern British Columbia, about 700 kilometres from Vancouver, coal trundles on conveyors from train cars to the piles, and then onward to docked ships destined for steel mills in China, Japan, and South Korea.
New equipment – huge rings of steel – lays nearby. The gear will increase the capacity of Ridley Terminals Inc. to unload coal from trains, one step in a four-year, multimillion-dollar effort to double exports to 24-million tonnes a year, and handle new and increased production from coal mines in British Columbia, Alberta and the United States.
It is the second time Canada has bet big on higher coal exports to steel makers in Asia. Last time, the bet on Japan failed badly when the forecasted prolonged boom didn’t last. Today, the same belief, and certainty, has been attached to China, the world’s largest steel-producing nation. Read the rest of this entry »
The Vancouver Sun, a broadsheet daily paper first published in 1912, has the largest circulation in the province of British Columbia.
Call 2011 a tale of two economies, which proved a boon to British Columbia on one hand, but still prompted wary concern on the other. Asia, particularly China, fairly rocketed forward in the post-recession recovery, carrying B.C.’s resource industries with it. Coal miners cashed in on record high prices, lumber producers continued to make record sales to China and resource developers rushed to push projects along, from new mines to pipelines and natural gas liquefaction plants.
B.C.’s real estate markets carried on from 2010’s strong rebound thanks in large part to an influx of investment from Asian investors and immigrants that helped push home prices in select markets up to levels that confounded observers and skewed average prices nationally. Yet provincial unemployment, while trending down, remained uncomfortably high and concerns remained about exposure to the markets that struggled.
The United States remained in the doldrums, Europe struggled through a sovereign debt crisis and the resulting fears of both regions sliding back into recession side-swiped expectations for stronger global growth. Read the rest of this entry »
This year’s winner of the Skookum Jim award talks about Aboriginal Peoples and mining.
For more than 40 years, Jerry Asp has been working toward improving the quality of life for Aboriginal Peoples, using the mining industry as the driving force. He is a founder of the Tahltan Nation Development Corporation (TNDC), one of the largest native-owned-and-operated heavy construction companies in Canada. He helped set up both the National Indian Businessman’s Association and the Canadian Aboriginals Minerals Association and he is now president of C3 Alliance Corporation.
All of this makes Asp arguably the pre-eminent expert on aboriginal and mining relations. It’s an expertise he has been called upon to share around the world and one for which he has won numerous awards and accolades, most notably this past year when he was named recipient of the prestigious Skookum Jim Award from the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada.
Mining and Exploration magazine asked Asp to comment on his award and his lifetime of service to the mining industry. Read the rest of this entry »
Vancouver, B.C. — December 14, 2011 — The Association for Mineral Exploration British Columbia (AME BC) is pleased to announce the 2011 recipients of its annual awards presented to individuals or teams for significant contributions to the mineral exploration industry in British Columbia and Western Canada.
“We are pleased to honour the diverse achievements of this year’s recipients,” said Mona Forster, AME BC’s Chairperson. “It is satisfying to see the traditions of discovery, development and dedication carried forward as we prepare to celebrate 100 years as an industry association.”
AME BC’s awards are named in honour of industry leaders who made transformative contributions to mineral exploration and development and to the progress of AME BC through advocacy and service. These awards are presented annually at Mineral Exploration Roundup, the world’s premier mineral exploration conference. Read the rest of this entry »
The first discovery of placer gold in the Fraser River in 1858 attracted thousands of prospectors and fortune-seekers to the wilderness of Western Canada, triggering the subsequent Cariboo gold rush of the 1860s and the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s. But as the easy pickings of gold nuggets were exhausted from the network of rivers and streams, resilient prospectors turned their attention to outcropping veins where precious metals could be extracted by hand on a limited scale.
In the summer of 1891, Eli Carpenter and Jack Seaton arrived on foot in what is now the Slocan Mining District of British Columbia, lured by tales of silver-rich deposits used by local native guides and hunters. In early September, they discovered an outcropping of sparkling silver-rich galena and collected samples for assaying.
As legend goes, the alliance between Carpenter, a French-Canadian former tight-rope walker, and Seaton, a wily Irishman from Tennessee, fell apart soon afterward amid allegations of double-dealing, with each taking on new partners to stake claims on Payne Mountain, where the initial discovery was made. What is certain is that both men sold their claims early to mining speculators for a pittance and moved on from the region. Read the rest of this entry »
Hitch said Canada’s mining industry is regarded as the
most efficient and environmentally safe in the world,
but the B.C. government needs to do a better job
telling people how mining works and how it contributes
to the province. (Winnipeg Free Press)
The Canadian Press – VICTORIA – Premier Christy Clark is about to find out her plans to chip away at the mountain of bureaucracy facing mining developments in British Columbia won’t be an easy climb if environmental groups have any say in the matter.
Opening eight new mines is a key plank of Clark’s jobs strategy, the most important policy initiative she’s launched since becoming premier early this year, and last week, the Liberals introduced minor changes to the Mines Act.
The move has triggered an avalanche of protest from the Sierra Club of B.C. which accused the government of looking to clear the way for mining companies to bulldoze the province. Sierra Club president George Heyman said Clark’s Liberals are heading in the opposite direction of public opinion if they loosen regulations to open more mines. Read the rest of this entry »
Vancouver, B.C. – (November 29, 2012) – Concern is rising in the British Columbia mining community that a successful program to train First Nations people for well paying mining jobs will be forced to shut down without the continuance of Federal funding. If there is no commitment for funding by either the Federal or BC governments by December 1st, the BC Aboriginal Mine Training Association (BC AMTA) will begin the formal shutdown process.
BC AMTA has candidates representing more than 120 Indian bands and currently has 60 employers in its network. To date, 222 Aboriginal people are working at well-paying mining jobs after going through the BC AMTA program. There are approximately 80 Aboriginal people including members of the Kamloops and Skeetschestn First Nations communities employed at the New Afton underground gold and copper mine under development 10 kilometers southwest of Kamloops. The mining operation is scheduled to begin production in July, 2012.
Two years ago, New Afton joined forces with the Association of Mineral Exploration BC and the Mining Association of BC and other companies to launch BC AMTA. Read the rest of this entry »
Stan Sudol is a Toronto, Canada-based communications consultant, mining columnist and blogger. stan.sudol@republicofmining.com
Biggest commodity super-cycle in the history of mankind
The future of mining has never been brighter, yet its image among the general population seems to have plunged lower than the famous Kidd Creek mine in Timmins, Ontario – the world’s deepest base metal operation. The largest rural to urban migration in the history of mankind is taking place in China. It has been often said, that China needs to build two cities the size of Toronto, Canada and Sydney, Australia to accommodate that growth, every year! Analysts estimate that China’s middle class is expanding so rapidly that it will soon overtake the current U.S. population of 312 million.
In October, 2011, the world’s population had passed the seven billion mark. India, Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey and many other developing countries are following China and urbanizing and industrializing their economies. Mining experts feel that over the next 25 years, we will need to dig out of the ground as many minerals as consumed since the beginning of mankind.
One of the biggest concerns is a shortage of skilled workers. In the next decade half the mining workforce in Canada is eligible to retire and there are significant difficulties attracting and engaging the digital generation.
According to the Ottawa-based Mining Industry Human Resource Council’s 2011 hiring report, the industry will need to hire betwee 75,280 to 141,540 new workers in Canada depending on the state of the global economy by 2021. Similar labour shortage issues exisit in other western mining jurisdicitions like Australia and the United States. Read the rest of this entry »
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.
VANCOUVER— The Canadian Press - A controversial proposal for a massive copper and gold mine in British Columbia will get another chance to become reality after Canada’s Environmental Assessment Agency agreed to a second review of the mine.
Taseko Mine’s original proposal failed the federal government’s first environment review, but the company has launched what it’s calling its New Prosperity proposal.
Federal Environment Minister Peter Kent instructed the agency to set up a process that will review the environmental concerns raised in the past assessment and consider the mining company’s changes.
With higher, longer-term prices for copper and gold, Taseko said it would spend an extra $300-million on the project to address the main concerns of the last environmental rejection, including the preservation of Fish Lake. Read the rest of this entry »
The Northern Miner, first published in 1915, during the Cobalt Silver Rush, is considered Canada’s leading authority on the mining industry.
I read the editorial submission of Chief Marilyn Baptiste, of the Xeni Gwet’in band of the Tsilhqot’in National Government (TNG), on The Northern Miner’s website on Nov. 2. It purported to list eight reasons why Taseko Mines’s resubmitted application to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEAA) for the New Prosperity gold-copper project in B.C. will fail.
Ms. Baptiste’s latest comments are consistent with her wholesale rejection of any constructive dialogue around New Prosperity, which nevertheless holds tremendous value regionally, provincially and nationally.
The sentiments expressed in Ms. Baptiste’s editorial do not represent the views of the vast majority of people in Williams Lake and Cariboo communities. Read the rest of this entry »
The Northern Miner, first published in 1915, during the Cobalt Silver Rush, is considered Canada’s leading authority on the mining industry.
Marilyn Baptiste is the elected chief of the Xeni Gwet’in band of the Tsilhqot’in First Nation, whose territory largely lies to the west of the Fraser River and Williams Lake, B.C., where Taseko Mines’ New Prosperity copper-gold project is located. See www.xeni.ca for more.
Investors hoping to cash in on Taseko Mines’ second bid to develop the Prosperity copper-gold mine (“New Prosperity”) should think back a year. At that time, despite assurances from the company and its president that the original Prosperity mine proposal would be accepted, it was soundly rejected by the federal government and the company’s share price plunged.
With New Prosperity, once again there is a proposal before the federal government’s Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEAA) and the company’s president is saying he is confident it will be approved. And once again the federal government will have no choice but to reject it.
Rafe Mair was a B.C. MLA 1975 to 1981, Minister of Environment from late 1978 through 1979. Since 1981 he has been a radio talk show host, and is recognized as one of B.C.’s pre-eminent journalists.
There are two mining stories out of last week in Lotusland. For openers, let’s deal with “Prosperity” lake which, before the corporate flacks got involved, was called Fish Lake.
The short story is that this is a mine prospect held by Taseko Mines. While the Provincial government approved it, it was turned down by the feds who then gave the company time to put in a new proposal, which they did. With the speed of light the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency received the new application last February and hasn’t yet decided anything.
This delay brought a fire and brimstone editorial from the Fraser Institute’s house paper, the Vancouver Sun, which threw unsourced “facts” at us, including a promise of 71,000 jobs with 5,400 new residents for the nearby town of Williams Lake. Read the rest of this entry »
Published by New Vanguard Media, The Global Commodities Reportis a digital magazine about the benefits of resource business.
The Kitimat aluminum smelter was built smack in the middle of the claimed traditional territory of the Haisla First Nation back in the oblivious 1950s. With a $2.5 billion upgrade in the works, it was time to re-engineer the social relationship as well.
A long overdue formal agreement, called the “Haisla Nation – Rio Tinto Alcan Legacy Agreement”, has been achieved between Rio Tinto Alcan, the owner and operator of the aluminum smelter at Kitimat, British Columbia, and the Haisla First Nation, both of whom reside at the headwaters of the Douglas Channel in northwestern BC.
While the first relationship protocol and series of meetings between the parties began just over a decade ago, the current relationship took work, but both parties ratified the 30-year renewable agreement in support of the aluminum operations at Kitimat. Read the rest of this entry »
