Sharp opinions about mines and mining from Jack Caldwell

From an Aboriginal I know and respect.   He forwarded me the e-mail repeated below from the Premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty:   

From: dmcguinty@premier.gov.on.ca    Date: Wed, 7 May 2008 12:17:37 -0400

Conversation: An e-mail from the Premier of Ontario    Subject: An e-mail from the Premier of Ontario

Thank you for writing to me regarding the incarceration of Robert Lovelace of the Ardoch Algonquin First Nation.

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This week is Mining Week in British Columbia.  Some of the events include:

• PricewaterhouseCoopers (one word!) releases their 2007 Annual Report on the BC mining Industry:  $988 per table of eight non-members at the Marriott.
• Also at the Marriott, the Mining Suppliers, Contractors and Consultants Association of BC meet on Tuesday.  If you need to ask more, you can’t go.
• On Wednesday on the lawn in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery is the only event that appears to be free:  pavilions showcasing the roles of minerals and mining in our lives. I wonder if the folk threatening to demonstrate the 2010 Olympics will be demonstrating on Wednesday–could make for a fun day.
• Women in Mining are holding a wine and cheese (not a more sober cheese and wine) do at the Hyatt Regency on Wednesday.
• Then for $52.50 each on Thursday you can attend the BC Mining Person of the Year and Sustainability Award at the Pan Pacific Hotel. 

All in all a busy and expensive week awaits us. I shall probably go only to the lawn event.  I do not like hotels at the best of times, so why go to more of those glass & brass & pass the buck places when I do not have to? 

As a “public service” I repeat this invitation–at the very least take a look at the submissions document; it contains many good ideas to make mining safer:

The Department of Labour would like your feedback on effective ways to improve the identification and management of hazards in the underground mining industry. The submissions document is available download in PDF format and outlines some of the approaches that could be used to achieve this.

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For an example of what a good conference powerpoint presentation should be, take a look at Cameco Corporation: Northern Saskatchewan Strategy Mining Division.   This is from the CIM Edmonton conference just ended. 

I must thank the company for making this presentation available for public dissemination so fast.  And congratulate them not only on a fine presentation but on a commitment to fine work.  

The presentation tells it so well, that the absence of a live presenter is no impediment to understanding and benefiting from the time spent browsing through the presentation.  Go take a look and support and invest in their efforts. 

                                                                Key Lake

Here is a link to a precious document.  Sure to be of interest if you are a student of mining and international politics.  If the promises set out in this document are fulfilled, it will change the course of things in African mining. 

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Tribes fighting tribes for control of resources, for revenge, and for the shear thrill of being young and vicious.  Here is a haunting picture from the New Yorker that has just published a superb piece by Jared Diamond in which he traces the deeds of Daniel Wemp in the New Guinea Highlands as he goes about organizing his relatives to kill in order to revenge the killing of his “beloved paternal uncle Soll.”  

Reading Diamond’s article, we soon come to realize the power of family and tribe to induce irrational loyalties, to induce murderous acts, and to substitute for the reason that is at the basis of a lawful society. 

On a seeming unrelated topics, I notice in a document the date of which I cannot establish and which seems to be issued by the Secretariat for the Ministry of Mine and Industries, Kabul, Afghanistan, the following: 

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A new word: scruppies.  Defined as a socially conscious upwardly mobile person. 

They espouse causes that involve no support costs:

• A good scruppie decries the death of 500 ducks–it costs nothing to say how terrible it is and to demand action. 
• A good scuppie remains discretely silent about twenty people killed on the road between Edmonton and Fort McMurray—to do something means expenditure. 

It is only a short time before the mining industry feels the wrath of a legion of sruppies.  Let me know if you are first.  Or maybe they never will, for a truly honorable scruppie will sit back and enjoy the checks coming from the family inheritance, discretely invested in profitable mining?

The cynic in me delights in this kind of news report.  It is all just about money! Principles, hurt feelings, even physical harm are assuaged by cash.  Noble principles of birth, morality, ethics, religion: all subject to the whim of cash.  Please comment to prove me wrong.  Here is the news report: 

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The Edmonton CIM conference came to a crescendo ending today with a session on backfill and a session on the impediments to progress in mining.  The night before I was invited by a work colleague to the McDonald Hotel and its Harvest restaurant.  This is one of those grand hotels built across Canada to provide rail-travellers luxury accommodation as they traversed the country.   And we ate, drank, and laughed well. 

At the dinner was a young man whose parents indulge in a taste like mine for 1970s style orange and green bathrooms.  Seriously though, this young man is, in my opinion, one of those who will dominate the mining industry in the years to come: as much because of shining intelligence as urbane manners and a perfect-pitch sense of humor–afterall if it is not fun, why do it?

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The CIM session on mining in British Columbia was dominated by the absence of a powerline.  Specifically a powerline up Highway 37 through the backbone of the Province.  The absence of this decade-long-promised powerline is a major impediment to the opening of new mines in the north of British Columbia. 

For example, Imperial Metals’ Red Chris property is bedevilled by two impediments:

• Power — which would be available were the powerline to be installed
• Federal Permits –which were rescinded due to a legal technicality.

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