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Gold/Mining/Energy : Donner Minerals (DML.V) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: zedex who wrote (10075)	12/16/1998 9:25:00 AM
From: 1king	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 11676

12/13/98 By BOB BENSON The Telegram Don't hold your breath — Voisey's Bay nickel likely won't be developed until 2010, according to hard rock mining journalist and author Mick Lowe. “My feeling is it won't be done with Inco and I'm not at all sure it will resemble the project before us now,” Lowe said last week during a visit to St. John's. “The key log in the log jam is aboriginal rights, and until they are resolved legally I am not sure anything can happen on the ground in Northern Labrador, morally and politically.” Lowe was in St. John's to promote his book Premature Bonanza — Standoff at Voisey's Bay. It relates how Inco Ltd., the world's nickel producer, outbid another mining giant, Falconbridge Ltd., and paid $4.6 billion for the ownership of the ore body in Labrador. “It seemed there might well be a joker in the Voisey's Bay deck that Inco and Falconbridge had never faced in its other Canadian operations — aboriginal land claims,” Lowe writes. “The Voisey's ore body was on land claimed by both the Innu and the Inuit peoples, and such matters are ignored at one's peril, as the Quebec government learned when it tried to bring another James Bay hydro development on stream.” In addition to the aboriginal land claims, other factors such as international nickel demand and prices will also contribute to a possible delay in the development timetable, Lowe said. “Say the Inuit settle by 2000, and the Innu by 2002. It's only then negotiations can start on the developing Voisey's Bay,” he said. “It might be possible to start some construction in 2007, but that assumes the issue of the location and the smelter will be resolved. There are the imponderables of world nickel demand, because right now the world doesn't need any more nickel.” Lowe has been following the mining industry for 25 years from his home near Sudbury, Ont., where nickel has been mined for more than a century. “I live in a mining and smelter town, and for five generations it's been a good living for a lot of people,” he said. But there's also a down side. “A recent United Nations report said Inco is the third largest polluter of toxins in North America,” he said, “but base metal mining and refining is heavy industry so at some point their has to be a trade-off for jobs.” Lowe said the trade off in Northern Labrador would be to exchange a pristine and untouched environment for jobs and infrastructure and lakes filled with mine tailings and toxic materials. Lowe first came to the province in the fall of 1996 to see the Voisey's Bay. He returned in February 1998. “On the first trip, everything seemed ready to go,” Lowe said. “When I came back, I found more issues and questions cropping up. I am aware of the environmentalists' objections to locating a smelter in Argentia. If it goes to Labrador, where will the power come from? These questions of the smelter location will have to be resolved, and so far I don't see that happening.” Lowe said he came to the province convinced the people of Newfoundland and Labrador deserve financial and other benefits from Voisey's Bay. He still believes that, and he sides with the provincial government policy of no mine, no smelter. But visits with the Innu in Labrador also opened his eyes to their point of view. “When flying over Labrador from Goose Bay to Nain, you don't see a fence, or house, and you think it's nothing but an empty area in which you could have a mine,” he said. “But I soon came to understand the aboriginal view of the land. It's a place to find shelter, a place to fish and hunt, a refuge, and it will be ruined by the mine.” In the meantime, Inco has an incurred a large debt because of the Voisey's Bay purchase. “Inco is shrinking before your eyes,” he said. “It's likely Inco will have to sell the property or itself be taken over by another industry player.” Like many members of the mining industry at the time of the Voisey's Bay purchase in 1996, Inco likely thought it was only a matter of time before the project got under way, the author said. But, he added, no one factored in aboriginal land claims or the province's insistence there could be no development without building the smelter here. “All those factors, and the environmental impact statements, just might work out in favour of Newfoundland and Labrador,” Lowe said. “They will provide enough lead time to iron out the wrinkles so when development comes around it will be for the benefit of the people.” ************* Remember this guy is a long time INCO basher from Sudbury (according to many) and most of this is biased opinion straying occasionally from fact. 1King