Bruce Duncan's Canada Carbon Corp. ( CCB) slumped three cents to 4.5 cents on 3.29 million shares, following a two-week-long halt. The regulators allowed the lengthy halt so the company could sort out the latest "mixed messages" from Quebec's Commission for the Protection of Agricultural Land (CPTAQ) concerning the Miller graphite project at Grenville-sur-la-rouge (GSLR) in southwestern Quebec. The CPTAQ has apparently abandoned its review of whether the ground hosting Miller should be removed from the reserve of protected agricultural land. CPTAQ said it closed the review because the new GSLR council told it that Canada Carbon's application did not conform with municipal regulations.
Not so, says Mr. Duncan. He points to not one but two certificates of compliance that the former GSLR council submitted to the CPTAQ, one late in 2016 and the other last March, declaring that the company's application did indeed conform with its regulations. That, says Mr. Duncan -- or his lawyer, more likely -- crystallized Canada Carbon's rights. Its rights were arguably crystallized further last June, when Quebec's Superior Court ruled against a request from a private group that would have forced the GLSLR municipality to withdraw the certificates.
It did not end there. Mr. Duncan's brush with Quebec's Twilight Zone continued last fall, when key members of the group opposed to the project were elected to the municipal government, including Thomas Arnold as mayor. The new government promptly passed a resolution declaring that Canada Carbon's application to CPTAQ did not conform to its regulations, but Mr. Duncan says that the project remains in compliance, since the time limit to contest the validity of the zoning bylaw had passed and Quebec's mining act now has precedence over municipal bylaws.
At the heart of the dispute is Miller, where Canada Carbon hopes to build an open-pit mine that would extract 1.2 million tonnes of marble and about 900,000 tonnes of graphite-bearing rock over a 10-year period. That suggests a modest operation, running at about 300 tonnes per day. Whatever the mining rate, it is a far cry from the 450,000-tonne-per-day Bingham Canyon open-pit mine pictured in an on-line petition that Mr. Arnold's group began circulating about a year ago. The image is enough to give GSLR's citizens the shivers, but then, Bingham Canyon, the largest mine in history, is four kilometres in diameter and nearly one kilometre deep. Indeed, counting the benches in the pit wall is akin to counting tree rings on a felled sequoia tree. Miller, by contrast would be infinitesimal in comparison. (Mr. Duncan says that his company pointed out the misleading nature of the comparison, to no avail.)
From Stockwatch. |
