Sudbury as a stand-in for dispossed, deprived, and despoiled local mining communities

The Republic of Mining is a Sudbury, Ontario-based blog on mining.  I recommend it if you are interested in a quiet and sober view of a segment of mining—focussed on Sudbury and the greater Canada.  Unlike this blog, The Republic of Mining in uncontroversial.  Their world perspective is respect and praise.  Seems I grew up and live in a different time and place.  California is its own place and breaks most rules usually in the lead.  And Vancouver is branded the banana-belt Republic in the rest of Canada.  So I am explained, if not excused.

Thus I was neither surprised nor distressed to see no mention on the Republic of Mining about the city manager of Sudbury demanding more money from the province and the feds for Sudbury.  The report reads: 

A passionate presentation before North Bay city council, Sudbury mayor John Rodriguez explained how his city and many other northern communities are not getting their fair share of resource revenue sharing from the federal and provincial governments. He says it’s essential and urgent to get a funding framework in place so that more tax revenue from the mining sector flows back to municipalities such as Sudbury, Timmins and Kirkland Lake. He says in the last ten year Sudbury has seen a half a billion dollars of deficit in infrastructure. To put is simply says Rodriguez, “They’re not sharing in the wealth”.

This plea is particularly interesting coming as it does from a civilized place in a civilized nation.  All too often one reads similar pleas from local communities in far-away uncivilized places and it is too easy to brush them off with a wave as locals greedy for more money from the good people who invest in mining companies and who live in civilized places like Toronto, Vancouver, or London. 

Somehow this plea, coming from people you probably voted for (or would if you could,) makes all the more real the reality of the need of local people to get some of the benefits of mining-generated income to make local communities work. 

Thus we await with great interest the analysis by the Republic of Mining of this “greed” by local people demanding a greater share of the money derived from mining.  And we await with interest the outcome: will the province and/or the feds cough up more—or do they, and the mining companies in cahoots, feel they are already paying enough to those greedy locals who should be grateful, not greedy, that fine foreigners are investing in their backward and deprived areas.