This is an excerpt from an article in the Northern Miner,
a weekly mining industry trade publication. It underscores
what promises to be a disastrous lands use policy driven
by the conservative government and promoted we think, by
spies in the civil service in the pay of Falconbridge
Corporation. Successive governments in Ontario have been
progressively more hostile to mining and exploration trying
to reduce it by Draconian legislation that would make
directors personally responsible for all mistake companies
make (since withdrawn) and making it expensive and scary to
explore in Ontario. It has become almost impossible to meet
or know that one could meet environmental whims of the
government by their conveniently withdrawing regulatory
guidelines in favour of arbitrary decisions by multiple
gov't departments to mine permitting. The government has
just a general bad attitude towards the business of mining
and metals.
It is all a plot by lawyers and other shallow thinkers to
launch a new techno society with clean hands and white paper
and leap away from the image of grime and sunset industries.
Figure a lawyer for such idle pollyanna dreams. He drives to
work in a German BMW mined from the Rammelsburg earth by
Turkish labour in the GmbH while good nazii overloards look
on twiddling switches and shouting commands generated by
computer screens. The lawyers business is all black and white
and antiseptic, theoretical. The soot faced miner, saloon
bound, in a nothern shanty town toils by day in the sunless
city for a conglomerate whose paper resides in the solicitor's
vaults. Poor, primitive inheritor of McTaggart's legacy, such
an object of embarrassment when visiting dignitaries from the
G7 countries come to scorn our primitive ways. He made his
country rich once. Now he drinks daught ale and mines stopes
apace by dim flickering light of aging halls housing ignorant
rabble.
All the underground contract narrow veins mined in the world
are mined by 60,000 Canadians. 's a fact. With alimak and jumbo,
electric over hydraulic. We used to make almost 90% of all our
mining equipment. Longyear of Ontario was the largest diamond
drilling company in the world. Morissette of Northern Ontario
was the largest underground diamond drilling company in the
world. Noranda was the largest mining company in the world.
Toronto was the largest mine financing city in the world in
many ways. Seventy-five percent of all worldwide geophysical
contract and equipment sales came from Canada. In 1980 I could,
with local calls in the city of Toronto, outfit a complete
gold mine with ll equipment from underground crusher to
surface bunkhouse, men and materials.
It was all made in Canada at one time. I could just about do
the same in Vancouver. About two years ago I made some calls
looking for a manufacturer of vibratory drives for screens on
the west coast. I was told by one outfit that no such people
adorned the landscape in BC. All the mining equipment
manufacturers had left. Killed by successive generations
of progressive governments.
No more the hewer of la roche. We is ramping into the future,
massah. Led by the far sighted visionaries who protect our
nests. Bureaucrance and Green, solicitors to Tom Swift, making
us hostages to more vigorous ascendant nations who have the
benefit of our technology and who eschew such frippery as
killing industry to give stillbirth to New Age Sacred Cow.
If we are awake is may not be too late to protest by ballot. A
simple technique for a new outlook might be to scribe one's X
beside those of occupations and qualifications that are NOT legal,
politically scientific, or layabout in any way. Deliver me from
the theoreticians and give me some one who has done, and can do.
--CMN
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Clipping from;
The Northern Miner
Commentary by Lorne Burden
Consulting geologist based in Peterborough, Ont.
In a letter published in the Northern Miner's April 20 issue,
Chris Hodgson, minister of northern development and mines,
defended his Lands for Life initiative by indicating that
Ontario's land-use planning has tended to be "top heavy,
driven primarily by government bureacrats," and that it has
"has appeared haphazard."
The Lands for Life initiative was to represent a fundamental
change in the development of land use strategies. Throughout
the initiative, the government continued to indicate that the
Lands for Life process was to be fair, open and transparent
to all. On Oct. 30, 1998, the Ministry of Natural Resources
released a report containing the consolidated recommendations
of the Lands for Life initiative, developed through open public
consultation and compromise between all Crown land user groups.
The recommendations included a detailed listing and map showing
all-new areas recommended for alienation; a total of 2,720 sq.
Km of Crown lands were to be withdrawn from mineral exploration
and development.
On March 29, 1999, Ontario Premier Mike Harris announced
Ontario's Living Legacy land use strategy - a strategy that
will see a minimum of 24,000 sq. Km of Crown land withdrawn
from mineral exploration and development. This is an 782%
increase in lands withdrawn over those recommended by the Lands
for Life initiative.
The increase was not made by open public consultation or
compromise but by bureacrats and politicians in back room deals
with special interest groups. This is a slap in the face to all
those citizens who believed and participated in the Lands for
Life initiative, and especially those who were members of the
"round tables" who thought they would finally make a difference
on how government would work to the benefit of all.
Minister Hodgson said in his April letter, "we could go back
to the old system of land-use planning used by the Liberals and
NDP, in which government imposes new land use restrictions on
you, and you'll have to learn to live with it. But that is not
right." If Chris Hodgson is a man of principle and stands behind
what he says, he should immediately withdraw his support for
Ontario's Living Legacy, and resign his position as minister of
northern development and mines in protest, because he knows
Ontario's Living Legacy "is not right"
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