I don't have blinders. I just know what is good for me, and what is good for me is what is good for Canada. :)
The trouble with bashing liberals is that they don't always make the kind of mistakes you would ordinarily credit them for. On the whole though, Canada is well rid of their far underrated "benevolent" totalitarianism. What the liberals stood for sounded good, but it often had unintended bad consequences. The uniform rejection of US investment into Canada and embracing of free trade for instance had the intention of allowing more CDN ownership of Canada, and allowing Canada to compete with its low cost natural resources, which was its forte in production. What happened was a flow of money into the US to get the better quality goods (which were often cheaper despite the dollar difference, or perceived cheaper because of the dropped tariffs), and a the growth of a US trade imbalance in non-retail goods. In the end the US fought this successfully on several fronts. by imposing selective tariffs underneath NAFTA, effectively negating it. A stagnation of CDN development also resulted because US capital markets had dried up from US fears of money flight, some provincial aquisitive governments, and regulations on both sides of the border limiting US investment. The entire country had been built by US investment such that by 1965, 80% of CDN business (money wise) was owned by US interests. Most mines, an exception being Noranda, were developed by US or English interests since about 1920. Noranda had even had a majority US investors before they shook them out after the Horne was found. (They did that by announcing they were planning the smelter after one hole in the H zone! The US investors as planned, backed out.)
The Trudeau government followed a scorched-earth policy bring the level back to 65% foreign ownership. This was achieved by draconian CDN ownership regs and CIDA. All this did was shrink the CDN economy. And many economic initiatives, while good intentioned, with an inflation cost spiral operative, served only to limit cash flow into investment in domestic capital markets.
Money to pursue large capital projects such as mines is limited in Canada. We cannot afford to build our own mines. Normally we allow large companies these days to come in and take over the development as in Snap Lake, Diamet, and Aviak diamond interests. Due to restrictive regs and unimaginative hidebound capital banks, few CDNs want to invest in their own industry. There is simply too much ignorance of our own industry. It is a "profit" without honour. Neither the US nor Canada seem to be have the will to change this situation. All free trade has done is allow the US to buy direct control of their larger investments such as Ford, and cherry pick their investment by forays into such CDN ignored plums as the Oil sands. They restrict small scale investor interest in CDN markets. This trend has been going on since the 1970's and has been reflected in all the flow-thru non-development drill offs. Despite flow thru financing of CDN exploration since that time, few "mines" that were found were ever run. That is precisely why our company is following a diametrically opposed development strategy of finding small scale mines that are capable of being restarted, bypassing the capital needs of large-scale grass-roots drill-and-build enterprisese. So far it looks like a group may be successful in the next few years with just that strategy, namely Roxmark Mines who have about 8 projects capable of being restarted, and advanced mill and mine infrastructure to do so. They look to be about 6 months from starting on a Moly mine and could be a year or two from restarting 2 gold projects underground. They have the Leitch, once the highest grade gold mine in Canada, and the Empire, a former high grade producer. Both of these ops have a mill to deliver to, and high grade partially-drilled-off near-surface resources. In my opinion these kind of restarts are the only kind of mining we are going to see in this capital environment. Far more proven by previous mining, and rarely if ever near to being "mined out". That is always almost a given when considering the previous 35 dollar an ounce price regime. Often you find when going into older mines, there is still lots of drilled off ore left in prepared but unmined stopes. Our group has been able to identify no less than 20 opportunities that allow "redoing" and going forward with. We are going ahead with 3 to five of them in the coming two years if we are able to capitalize.
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