Asleep at the switch

In the early 1990s, he devoted his energies to stopping development of diamond deposits in Canada’s Northwest Territories, thankfully without success. Now John Turner has warned the world that Canada is being staked “at a rate of 12,000 acres an hour,” thereby undermining his efforts to protect the nation’s wilderness, which he claims is disappearing at an alarming rate.

The former prime minister of Canada trumpeted his dire warning on the editorial pages of The Globe and Mail. We were shocked to hear of it, and dismayed too, for obvious reasons.

We are, after all, North America’s mining newspaper. We should have known about the Great Canadian Staking Rush. Yet we were caught snoozing at the switch, unaware that ground equal to the entire national park system in Ontario could have been staked in a 40-hour work week. Red-faced and embarrassed does not begin to describe how we felt. It was humiliating beyond words.

Of course we snapped to attention and vowed to get to the bottom of things. As a former prime minister of Canada, John Turner surely wouldn’t throw numbers around lightly, or pull them from thin air. We checked the article to be sure. Yes, there it was: “The most recent data on mineral claims indicate that Canada is being staked at the rate of 12,000 acres an hour and logged at the rate of 280 acres an hour.”

A battle plan was immediately drawn up, with one reporter assigned the task of finding out where the staking was going on, while another investigated who exactly was doing the staking. A third was sent to find out what sort of mineral commodity the mysterious stakers were interested in cornering. A fourth was sent out for sandwiches and coffee. Really strong coffee. Double espresso.

At the end of the day, the sheepish reporters filed in with the bad news. There was some exploration work going on here and there — Newfoundland, northern Quebec and Ontario, Lac de Gras . . . the usual places — but no Great Canadian staking rush. Mining executives laughed in their faces. Geologists were openly rude, saying things like “what planet are you on?” and worse. Prospectors snickered at first, then started ranting about government bureaucrats pulling the plug on their prospecting grants. Un-staking at the rate of 12,000 acres per hour was more like it, they yelled.

The reporters wanted to call it a day. They wanted to get back to the news they had been covering the past year — mine closings, low gold prices, undersubscribed financings, mining companies going dot.com, and the like — but we dragged them back. Not so fast.

Something must be going on, we said, because at the rate of 12,000 acres per hour, all of Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island would be staked in one year, with enough time left over to cover ground equal to Lakes Manitoba and Winnipegosis.

As humiliated editors of North America’s mining newspaper, we urged them to dig deeper. John Turner was not only the prime minister of Canada, albeit only for a few months; he was a man of numbers. As finance minister (1972-75) during the free-spending Liberal government of Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Turner personally presided over the years of transition from surpluses to deficits.

And off the reporters went, on the trail of Turner’s Great Canadian Staking Rush. Needless to say, tensions ran high in the newsroom. Who was staking so much of Canada and why? And for what?

The mystery was solved when one enterprising reporter hauled out staking data for 1997, the last good year the industry had experienced. As it turned out, Canada was being staked at a rate of 12,000 acres per hour that year. Well, northern Alberta to be more precise. A paper-staking rush there represented 85% of the total area staked in the country. The commodity of interest was diamonds, which have yet to be found in commercial quantities in the province.

Mystery solved. Turner wasn’t wrong exactly, but his information was dated and egregiously misleading. As North America’s mining newspaper, we felt obliged to set the record straight. Times are tough for mining, and far more claims are lapsing for lack of financing to explore them than are being staked.

To suggest, as Turner has, that mining interests have launched an assault on wilderness is insulting and untruthful. A claim does not a mine make, or a wilderness unmake. Even at the 1997 rate of 12,000 acres per hour, it would take only about 12 hours to stake all of the producing and past-producing mines in Canada. All of them. Even the great ones that built the nation.