David Gill and Charles Ficner gave a fascinating talk Wednesday (2009-06-05) on Ontario’s mining legislation. Over the course of an hour and a half presentation, interspersed with questions from the audience, they painted a compelling picture of a mining act that does not serve the citizens of Ontario financially, socially, or environmentally.

Here is a brief summary of some of the areas they touched on:

“As things now stand, the government acts:

• to take property away from its legal owners so as to give it to mining firms for nothing,
• to allow prospectors to enter onto private land, remove the trees, strip the overburden, make massive exploratory trenches, build roads to do extensive drilling work, disturb the water table – and deny the owners of the lands the use and enjoyment of their property – as is guaranteed in their deeds;
• to ignore and to overturn draft official plans that are prepared by municipal governments with wide input and with a careful and balanced consideration of the wide range of land uses and the needs of the residents of their municipalities, and concluded that mining is not a reasonable use in some of those areas;
• to allow mineral exploration and mining firms to claim the publicly-owned minerals under public land for nothing, and
• to allow mineral exploration firms to do their exploratory work without any prior assessment of their impacts of those activities on the rights or interests of others or on the environment.

The current policy towards mining is premised on the view that the minerals that we own are worth nothing if they are left in the ground, and that it is better to get at them, no matter how little we get for them, and no matter how much damage is done in the getting.  

As a result, the Ministry of Northern Development and Mines has created a policy regime that aims to encourage mining at any cost.

The effect of the Mining Act and the associated regulations, policies and practices is:  

• to give mining companies the key to the vault of valuable minerals that are owned by the citizens of Ontario, and to tell them:
• that they are free to take their most massive trucks and their biggest loaders into that vault and help themselves to anything that they want,
• that they don’t have to pay a cent for anything that they take,
• that they can have among the lowest corporate tax rate of any corporations in the Province on the profits that they make, and
• that they can have all of that wealth of the citizens of the Province, because the government hopes that those companies might eventually find something that they want, and hire a few of Ontario‘s citizens to help them load it up and take it away. 

Ontario does get a few jobs in exchange, and the Province does get some corporate taxes as well, but at rates that are among the lowest for any business operations.

Mineral exploration and mining firms are given extraordinary privileges by our Provincial government.  Those privileges need to be brought into balance with the rights and the needs of all of the Citizens of the Province.” http://ato.smartcapital.ca/miningactreform

To learn more about this issue, and how to have input into Bill 173 (which is concerned with reforming the Mining Act – it is in committee over the summer, so this is the time to become involved), visit their website at http://ato.smartcapital.ca/miningactreform.