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Strategies & Market Trends : Ride the Tiger with CD -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: riversides who wrote (174021)	9/5/2009 11:27:07 PM
From: E. Charters	Respond to of 312968

We can only hope that it won't all grind to a halt. Apparently the Ontario government is keen to get mining to grind to a halt. Witness the sword in the side of Ontario Mining which is the Boreal initiative. Whew hah! We hardly know what is up there, given the lack of access, but we know the greenstone belts are voluminous. (After that we can look in the sea of pink.. the granites and gneisses) We don't send people up there every day to drill and prospect. It will be 500 years before we have done looking at 10% of it in depth. We are still finding mines in downtown Timmins where the looking has been going on for 100 years in depth. There must be 200,000 drill holes in that 25 mile sector. There are whole townships up in the Boreal where I will be there are not 10 drill holes. It would appear that at least from the previous liberal government perspective they wanted to sunset the mining industry on Federal lands as much as possible, painting it as a devastator of wilderness etc.. It is hard to deal with the comic book attitudes of the lawyer-legislator. And they can rouse the usual paranoid leftist rabble who see every case of eyesore industry in far off corners of the world as part of the death of a 1000 cuts to their precious wild kingdom.. (which most of them, never having left their city condos, have ever seen except in old National Geographics left in the dentist office.) I have flown over a few thousand miles more than most people, and trekked a few hundred miles of it. It is a great experience. One I recommend to many. Once you see a fee hundred miles of it from the air, you realize that it is some lonely expanse of wild. There ain't nothing up there. I have lived in tents 40 miles off the highway for a year and not seen another living individual. I don't think it will ever be in serious jeopardy from any force. Given the natural rate of evolution of finds, mining and the metal prices, and death of mines, it would seem that it will remain the way it is for millenia. Mines that did operate up there have for decades been abandoned, the incentive to return never beckoning, with the right combination of metal price, cost of labour, technology, and the right group of adventurers of sufficient prospecting acument and mining engineering skills to revive them. No more Lac Minerals or Northgates to find small gold mines to their liking. We just didn't carry the ball into the new millenia. But is precisely this cyclical inertia that allows the preservation of this resource, making it unnecessary to get antsy about man and mammon turning their bleary neandrathal sights to making it an industrial wasteland. It's very size, remoteness, lack of transport and climate make it unlikely that any but the most attractive targets will ever get developed. And few of those, given the daunting difficulty of seeing thru all that overburden with hand prospecting methods. No one is going to send a drill on spec into that outback to poke away at input targets, 10,000 to the mile. Until we find some magic wand that discriminates gold, copper and diamonds, some magic promotion that will allow the money to follow us into that crapshoot, and magic markets to support the enterprise it is doubtful that the black spruce of swamp-one-north need tremble in fear of being bulldozed by thousands of hobnailed prospector's boots. I admit it is hard to argue with some aspects of that culture, as there were lots of stories of bad deals going down in this area. And some areas today as well. The worst environmental excesses were in the Communist countries were the race to keep ahead of the west led to no holds barred industrial madness. Indeed the worst cyanide spill in history was from a Rumanian metal plating plant perched on the side of a seismically active mountain where the earthen dam kept back liquor of 12 lbs to the ton CN! No excuse for that at all. It could never have happened in our Canada even as far back as the 1930's. I have a book on tailings dam construction and water effluent disposal that was written back then, and you could use it as a blueprint for today's practice. Non industry people think that we ran flat out in the old days and pollution regs are something brand new. In fact by the late 1950's pollution regs were some stiff in Canada. By 1970 I recall they were harebrained. We were taking perfectly clean water in Quebec, just pumped from a mine, and putting 25 bags of lime into it a day, despite the fact that the testing center in Montreal told us it was better than the drinking water there! EC<:-}