Saturday, April 19, 2014

Historic Problem with Mining Law




This howl against the mining industry is very typical and can be repeated everywhere.  It is misguided and an espousal of bad practice but then it will not matter much in the long term.  In this case the mine will not proceed and the communities will ultimately wither away and disappear anyway.  The old lifeway is extinct and without any good reason the settlements will be abandoned.


Mining law is a continuing problem worldwide.  British Columbia probably has the best arrangement of a bad lot.  Yet here we are with thousands of field geologists been told by this person that they are not welcome.


Let me explain a harsh reality with mining.  Mines are rare and are located wherever Mother Nature decides to settle them.  This is just like the ocean or your favorite lake.  Fundamentally they belong to the global commons and most certainly not to any individual or community per se.  Thus governments are tasked with creating an equitable framework that allows them to happen.


They have to be found.  What has worked wonderfully is a sort of lottery system in which huge numbers of individuals gamble on discovery and go out and look.  Once mineral land is located it enters an effective investment auction system that establishes title, creates champions and continues the expensive property evaluation process.  All this activity has benefited the nearby communities throughout Canada.  Today the bulk of the first nations find employment through such resource extraction.  After all they actually want to live there.


The political problem is the attempt of various apparent ‘stakeholders’ to derive a transfer of wealth in the process of creating the asset itself.  This often simply impossible and often ruinous.  The real difficulty is that too much is not settled before the first plane leaves for the bush.  This is worsened by the outright ignorance of the political class itself in terms of understanding mining.


I do want to explain something.  Outside of coal mining and oil sand mining, the actual footprint is never more than about two square miles.  Once mined out, actual reclamation is well understood and enforced as well.  Thus it often becomes possible to create a developed asset there of some sort that can outlive the mine itself.   There is a natural acid leach problem that will often last for years for most mines.  The best solution is generally ignored out of scientific ignorance c= leaving the present unsatisfactory approach.


Thus a mine is a brief event that extracts wealth for humanity.  This is not true for agriculture especially as presently practiced.  This disturbs millions of square miles in often an unwise manner and presently directly produces dead zones in the ocean of thousands of square miles as well.
The ecological impact of a mine will be a pristine forest in a century or so leaving no creditable evidence of what happened.  The ecological impact of goat farming is the Sahara Desert and the arid Middle East.


The good news is that the technology exists which will eliminate the thousands of boots on the ground needed to discover an ore body.  Once properly deployed, mines will be readily located in abundance and will be opened only were welcome.




Opinion: Mine rejection is wakeup call


While the province stays mired in the past, First Nations are urging reforms


VANCOUVER SUN 
MARCH 27, 2014

Joe Alphonse and Roger William


Taseko Mines Ltd.’s bid to upturn a huge portion of the pristine Tsilhqot’in area of B.C. has now been rejected for the third time in almost 20 years, two of these after scathing independent panel reviews. Wakeup calls do not come much bigger than this.

Taseko and its politically funded supporters — B.C. Mines Minister Bill Bennett and his government — seem to be the only ones who do not realize this project is dead and that continuing with legal challenges will only add to the two decades and the more than $100 million of investors’ money the company says it has already thrown away on this non-starter.

Even the conservative Fraser Institute recognizes there is a problem and is calling for change. The institute’s latest survey of global mining executives found B.C. had slipped in the rankings to 32nd place in terms of confidence as a mining jurisdiction.

In a recent Vancouver Sun column, the institute’s Alana Wilson noted: “Uncertainty deters investment by increasing risk for investors as it decreases their confidence in being able to recoup and profit from investments.”

While the institute is known for being extremely supportive of B.C.’s mining industry, Wilson at least acknowledges that relations with First Nations need to be addressed, as do environmental issues. The changes the institute would like are probably very pro-industry but at least it recognized the status quo is a mess.

The mining industry in B.C. faces every bit as much of a challenge as Enbridge is facing with its Northern Gateway Pipeline, and it is time the government awakened to this fact. Yet it continues to stand by politically supportive companies such as Taseko, and blindly flogs dead horses such as the New Prosperity mine, which has generated nothing but financial losses for 20 years.

The old mining laws — which give mining first priority over land use and seek to let mining companies go where they want and mine what they want — are just not acceptable in the 21st century. First Nations say so, the courts say so, and the public says so.

The root of the problem is the free-entry staking process, in which anyone with a computer and a few bucks can stake a claim. This system allows areas to be claimed that never should be, and projects to be developed that simply can’t be allowed to proceed.

The textbook case of why this is a problem is now Taseko’s efforts to turn the waters and lands of the Tsilhqot’in into one of the world’s biggest open-pit mines just so the company could get to a very low-grade gold and copper deposit (it would on average need to move one tonne of earth just to find less than half a gram of gold). It should have walked away in 1995 when the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans told the company and the province to forget the idea. But the land was under claim — without the Tsilhqot’in’s consent — and so the battle continues 20 years later.

No wonder mining executives around the world are wary of B.C. as a safe jurisdiction in which to invest. No wonder smarter companies already recognize the new realities and seek to work in a meaningful way with First Nations from the outset.

The only surprise is that the B.C. government still thinks it is 1870, when First Nations’ rights in B.C. were not recognized, and mining can do what it wants, where it wants. This has to change, and the Tsilhqot’in Nation, like other First Nations, are not prepared to wait years or decades more for politicians in Victoria to see the light.

The Tsilhqot’in Nation is now putting the final touches to its mining policy, based on the culturally and ecologically conscious development of mineral resources in the Tsilhqot’in traditional territory.

It will define how relationships between the Tsilhqot’in and mining and exploration companies must be built on a foundation of respect for Tsilhqot’in values, rights and governance, and real partnerships.

This is not an anti-mining initiative.

Quite the contrary, it is aimed at creating a process under which projects that can be supported can proceed and that time and money is not wasted on projects that are doomed to be mired in confrontation for years before finally failing.

Had such a system been in place before, Taseko and its investors would now not be so much out of pocket with nothing to show for it, and the Tsilhqot’in and provincial and federal taxpayers would not have had to waste so much time and money on a non-starter project that lies in one of Canada’s only court-proven aboriginal rights areas.

Our 20-year-old landmark aboriginal rights and title case is now the subject of a title appeal before the Supreme Court of Canada.

Our hope is that in the future, the Taseko fiasco need never be repeated. Surely that is something everyone should hope for.

Joe Alphonse is chief of Tl’etinqox-t’in and the Tsilhqot’in tribal chair. Roger William is chief of the Xeni Gwet’in First Nations government.


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