The Toronto Star, has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

For most Canadians, the 700,000 km of crude oil and natural gas pipelines that criss-cross the country are out-of-sight and out-of-mind. Until the massive energy infrastructure intersects with international politics, the economy and environmental activism.

Projects like Keystone XL, Enbridge’s Line 9, Northern Gateway bristle with controversy (despite U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s pledge Friday to approve Keystone on his first day in office).

But the pipelines that carry millions of barrels of oil and millions of cubic feet of natural gas could transport Canada itself into the ranks of the world’s energy super powers.

But only if we move beyond our single biggest customer, the U.S., and begin supplying energy to the rest of the world – particularly energy-gobbling emerging markets, soon. 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.

Although miners were the villains in James Cameron’s blockbuster movie Avatar, about a 22nd-century mining colony exploiting a local tribe on a lush moon called Pandora, the Canadian-born director’s latest business project involves real-life asteroid mining.
 
Mr. Cameron has joined a group of technology tycoons, including Google chief executive officer Larry Page and executive chairman Eric Schmidt, in a company called Planetary Resources Inc., of Seattle, which announced a plan last month to work toward mining valuable minerals from asteroids for profit.
 
While it sounds more like a science fiction story than a business plan, the possibility of mining in space is rapidly emerging, and several Canadian companies and agencies are quietly working on projects that will be needed when the search for off-Earth resources begins.
 
“It’s a new paradigm. Canada is a mining country with a lot of mining expertise,” said Jean-Claude Piedboeuf, director of space exploration development with the Canadian Space Agency in Ottawa. “So what we’re looking at is how we can apply this expertise in space.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Toronto Star, has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

As artificial constructs go, the phantom colossus of emerging economic superpowers known as BRICS has had an overhyped 11-year run and needs to be retired.

The acronym was coined by a global economist at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the New York investment bank, in 2001. At that time, Brazil, Russia, India and China – the first countries to which Wall Street applied this new marketing term (South Africa, the “S” in BRICS, was added last year) – were, or at least appeared to be, characterized by rapid GDP growth that outpaced the developed world, and the adoption of Western-friendly free-trade practices, deregulation policies, and streamlined bureaucracies.

If not one of the bigger hoaxes of the new century, the BRICS certainly aren’t the threat to the old world order they’ve long been touted as.

The torrid GDP growth rate that prevailed in the BRICS countries through the 2000s has markedly slowed in each of them. And the Western-friendly reforms have stalled or were stillborn. 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.

CALGARY— Ottawa has placed 905,000 hectares of the northern offshore up for bids, clearing the way for energy companies to snap up exploration rights for an area half the size of Lake Ontario. The scale of the offer indicates eagerness in the oil patch to drill for new finds in Canada’s northern waters less than two years after such plans were put on hold following the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico and a major Arctic drilling safety review.

The Arctic exploration auction resumes as the Harper government is promoting greater development of the country’s resources. It has taken steps to speed regulatory approvals for major energy projects such as the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, promising to limit the ability of environmental groups and other opponents to block or delay new developments.

The prospect of further northern drilling fits squarely with that mandate, said Jason MacDonald, spokesman for John Duncan, Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, which oversees the northern land auction.

“The bid call reflects the potential that we see for resource development,” he said. 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.

It is almost unheard of for CEOs to grant media interviews about human resource matters because in most companies hiring does not require the scarce resource of CEO attention.

But Steve Letwin, chief executive officer of Iamgold Corp., Canada’s sixth-largest gold producer last year with mines in Suriname, Burkina Faso, Mali and Quebec, not only agreed to be interviewed about the serious global labour shortage confronting the resource sector now, but he also spoke frankly about the striking adjustments his company is making to address the shortage of skilled workers.

“We have this massive gap between the mining people who are ready for retirement and young people who are willing to go to locations that are not downtown Toronto,” Mr. Letwin said. “We’ve raised our children – and I have three of them – to want the good life. That’s fine, but the good life is not defined as somewhere in West Africa or deep in the jungles of South America or northern Quebec. So to get people educated, trained and motivated to go to these spots is not exactly easy.”

The Mining Industry Human Resources Council was set up in 1996 to help mining workers transition out of the industry bec Read the rest of this entry »

www.mineweb.com

Rick Rule’s presentation at the New York Hard Assets Conference earlier this week sees some light for the informed junior resource investor despite current patterns which have mostly been Bad or Ugly!

NEW YORK (MINEWEB) - In a highly entertaining keynote address to the New York Hard Assets Investment Conference, Rick Rule of Global Resource Investments, now part of the Sprott Group, who professes to be a contrarian investor presented his views on resource investment in a financial meltdown – a very relevant speech in the current environment when so many resource stocks have been decimated.
 
He divided much of his talk into three categories – The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.
 
So as not to depress people too much at the start of his talk he examined The Good first and said there is much that is Good for the investor.  Primarily he reckons the natural resource bull market remains intact despite the recent poor performance of the markets.    There are very good fundamental reasons for this driven by a dramatic increase in living standards for the poor in the emerging market economies.   As people become more free they become more rich – and the things they buy are made of ‘stuff’, while in the West we are mostly buying what could be termed luxuries rather than ‘stuff’. Read the rest of this entry »

www.mineweb.com

Speaking at the New York Hard Assets Investment Conference this week, respected analyst Adrian Day gave the reasons for his belief that the recent resource boom is still far from over.

NEW YORK (MINEWEB) – Not surprisingly – given metal price performance at the time – the audience at the New York Hard Assets Investment Conference was a little depressed. With gold heading down to the low $1500s – the lowest for several months and, of course, junior mining stocks, which is the sector most of the audience would be there to hear about, having been particularly hard hit.
 
What the audience really wanted advice on was addressed in one of the earlier keynote presentations by Adrian Day.  Is the resource boom over? was the title of his talk and he prefaced it with an immediate No!    In particular he made some very salient points about global copper production and the copper market itself.  He pointed out that the shortest full copper price cycle in recent history was 17 years, while the current copper cycle only started in 2001 – so if this is the end of the current resource boom this would be the shortest such cycle in over 200 years by a very long margin – which he did not see as likely.
 
Also he made the very apposite point that most of the world’s copper production comes from old mines where production is declining – either for technical or falling grade reasons – while it takes at least a 10 year lead time – mostly a lot longer to bring a significant new copper mine on stream so it is relatively straightforward assessing he future production scenario given that almost certainly there will not be a new major copper mine opened in the next 25 years which is not already known about. 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.

In a joint announcement two weeks ago, the United States and Japan (along with ConocoPhillips, the U.S.-based multinational oil company) announced the world’s first successful field trial (in Alaska) of a technology that uses carbon dioxide to free natural gas from methane hydrates – the globally abundant hunks of porous ice that trap huge amounts of natural gas in deposits, onshore and offshore, around the world. It’s a neat feat. You use CO2, which isn’t wanted, to produce natural gas, which is. But it’s more than neat – much more.

Methane hydrates constitute the world’s No. 1 reservoir of fossil fuel. Ubiquitous along vast stretches of Earth’s continental shelves, they hold enough natural gas to fuel the world for a thousand years – and beyond. Who says so? Using the most conservative of assumptions, the U.S. Geological and Geophysical Service says so.

The U.S. now produces 21 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of natural gas a year. But it possesses 330,000 tcf of natural gas in its methane hydrate resource – theoretically enough to supply the country for 3,000 years (give or take). Using less conservative numbers (for example, a methane hydrate resource of 670,000 tcf), the U.S. is good to go for 6,000 years (give or take). 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.

Conventional wisdom says that Canada is fighting a crippling bout of Dutch Disease. Canada’s petro-infused currency, which has risen 55 per cent against the U.S. dollar in the past decade, continues to linger around parity with the greenback. That is clobbering exports, making Canadian auto plants uncompetitive and hammering the manufacturing heartland of Ontario and Quebec – or so the thinking goes.
 
But the conventional wisdom is wrong, according to three researchers who will publish a study Wednesday that largely debunks the Dutch Disease theory, which has become a frequent talking point amid rising tensions between the oil-rich West and battered factories of the East.
 
Several key manufacturing industries often linked to the phenomenon show no symptoms at all of currency damage, including autos, food, aerospace and heavy industry, according to the report, Dutch Disease or Failure to Compete?, being released Wednesday. Read the rest of this entry »

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Most Canadians are probably more familiar with Dutch elm disease than the similarly named “Dutch disease,” so when NDP leader Thomas Mulcair diagnosed Canada’s economy as suffering from the ailment it made headlines. According to Mr. Mulcair, “In six years since the Conservatives have arrived, we’ve lost 500,000 good-paying manufacturing jobs” because of a high petro-dollar. But is his diagnosis correct?

Dutch disease describes an ailment that the Netherlands contracted in the 1960s, when its broad economy faltered as it became a major exporter of natural gas. The currency became overvalued and the economy suffered from deindustrialization directly linked to the loss of exports and an increase in cheaper imports. Since then, the phenomenon has been discovered in other petroleumbased economies, such as Venezuela and several West African nations.

A superficial comparison of the Canadian economy and Dutch-diseased economies does show similarities, but not a more substantive look focusing on Dutch disease’s two major components: a high currency caused by an increase in natural resource exports and a directly linked decline in manufacturing. Read the rest of this entry »

 Maclean’s is the largest circulation weekly news magazine in Canada, reporting on Canadian issues such as politics, pop culture, and current events.

The Tories’ decision to protect the ‘strategic’ asset in 2010 has backfired on shareholders.

Stock analysts who are bullish on potash have two powerful arguments in their corner: people have to eat, and land is something that nobody’s making any more of. As billions in Asia adopt middle-class habits to go with their rising affluence, their food needs will need to be met by global agriculture—somehow. The Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan (PCS) sees its product, used as a yield-enhancing fertilizer component, as part of the solution; it’s a tale told as often in PCS investor documents as the Christmas story is in December.
 
“Each year, the global population grows by about 75 million,” says the company’s 2011 online overview. “It is a simple reality that more people mean more food must be produced.” Most of the growth, the slide show adds, is in urban areas—and “urban consumers tend to eat higher-quality diets that include meat, fruits and vegetables.”
 
But while people have to eat, there’s nothing that says they have to eat the most land-intensive agricultural products—which means, basically, beef. (In Simon Fairlie’s meat-friendly 2010 sustainability book Meat: A Benign Extravagance, he estimates that it takes about 10 lb. of feed grain to produce a pound of beef.) Read the rest of this entry »

 Maclean’s is the largest circulation weekly news magazine in Canada, reporting on Canadian issues such as politics, pop culture, and current events.

Cross-border crime is only one of the issues affecting ‘the Fort McMurray of the U.S.’s north’

The strip clubs in Williston, N.D., are the rowdiest that Tatiana, an exotic dancer who has performed in Las Vegas and New York, has ever seen. Oil workers coming off the nearby rigs pack the city’s two clubs, Whispers and Heartbreakers, every night. They smell like work. They wear dirty T-shirts. They fall asleep face first on the bar. And then there are the prostitutes. Tatiana, who asked that her real name not be used, noticed them wandering though the crowd looking for customers on her first night in North Dakota. “They’re not in there to tip the dancers,” she says with a laugh.
 
Williston is the heart of Bakken oil country, the Fort McMurray of the U.S.’s north, for all the good, and bad, that brings. There are at least 3.1 billion barrels of recoverable oil trapped in the Bakken shale, a teardrop-shaped formation spread between North Dakota, eastern Montana and Saskatchewan, and likely many billions more. In recent years, new technology and high prices have made that oil both easier to get at and more valuable to sell. Today the race to pump it out—via a complex process known as hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”—is running at an Olympic pace.
 
As a result, North Dakota’s economy is the hottest in the U.S. Unemployment there was just three per cent in March, the lowest in the country. In neighbouring Montana, where oil exploration has been far more modest, the jobless rate stands at six per cent, well shy of the national average of nine per cent. 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.

TROU DU NORD, HAITI— Its capital is blighted with earthquake rubble. Its countryside is shorn of trees, chopped down for fuel. And yet, Haiti’s land may hold the key to relieving centuries of poverty, disaster and disease: There is gold hidden in its hills – and silver and copper, too.

A flurry of exploratory drilling in the past year has found precious metals worth potentially $20-billion deep below the tropical ridges in the country’s northeastern mountains. Now, a mining company is drilling around the clock to determine how to get those metals out.

“If the mining companies are honest and if Haiti has a good government, then here is a way for this country to move forward,” said Bureau of Mines director Dieuseul Anglade.

Haiti’s geological vulnerability is also its promise. Massive tectonic plates squeeze the island with horrifying consequences, but deep cracks between them form convenient veins for gold, silver and copper pushed up from the hot innards of the planet. Prospectors from California to Chile know earthquake faults often have, quite literally, a golden lining. 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.

In the decades prior to 2000, Canada made progress in moving away from being an economy of resource extraction. By that year, as labour economist Jim Stanford has pointed out in an analysis for the Centre for Policy Alternatives, well over half of Canada’s exports consisted of an increasingly sophisticated portfolio of value-added products in areas such as automotive assembly, telecommunications, aerospace technology and more.

But in the past decade, the clock has been turned back. Because of a boom in the oil and gas sector and a range of other factors, the economy has reverted toward being a staples-driven enterprise. “In July, 2011, unprocessed and semi-processed resource exports accounted for two-thirds of Canada’s total exports, the highest in decades,” Mr. Stanford wrote. “Compare that to 1999, when finished goods made up almost 60 per cent of our exports.”
 
That’s quite a change. A tilt, to be sure, that fits the old cliché about Canadians being hewers of wood and drawers of water. Our fur-trading legends, Radisson and Groseilliers, would no doubt heartily approve. But didn’t someone say the way to go in the 21st century is the knowledge economy? Read the rest of this entry »

http://www.canada.com/index.html

VANCOUVER — Marshall Tichauer was still in his teens when his father decided it was time for him to make his own way in the world. “I turned 18. My father said, ‘Get a job’ and kicked me out,” Tichauer recalled.

Jobs weren’t difficult to find in the early 1960s. Tichauer lived in West Vancouver. He landed a job just up the highway at Britannia mine, which was still very much the Howe Sound company town it had been in its heyday in the 1920s and ’30s as the largest copper mine in the then-British Empire.

Like many of British Columbia’s major early industrial mines, Britannia got its start after a series of gold rushes that began in the Fraser River system in 1858 before spreading east and north to Rossland and Barkerville.

Those early prospecting opportunities threw open the door to waves of European and Asian adventurers across the British Columbia mainland — mining, not fish, furs or timber, was the catalyst for the settlement of the province. Read the rest of this entry »