EDITORIAL PAGE — Mining Week celebrates Canadian accomplishment

One of the goals of Canada’s National Mining Week is to communicate the importance of the industry to people who rarely think about how metals and minerals affect their daily lives.

Until recently, this was not a job the mining industry had done well. After all, communication is an art, not a science. Massaging public opinion does not come easily to industry leaders, most of whom are scientifically inclined and therefore used to basing decisions on fact. Others felt insulted that an industry that contributed so much to Canadians’ standard of living should be asked to justify its existence.

Those attitudes have changed, however, and today the industry is struggling with how best to present its new face. It is no longer sufficient to rattle off statistics that show Canada is the world’s largest mineral exporter, with metals and mineral products accounting for about 15% of our total exports and contributing more than $10 billion to the Canadian trade surplus.

And, most likely, elementary school students would yawn if told that Canada is the world’s largest producer of potash, uranium and zinc, the second-largest producer of asbestos and nickel, third in copper and aluminum metal and fifth in gold and lead.

A more useful exercise is to challenge people to imagine a world without metals and minerals. Another is to confront some of the stereotypes they may still hold about mining — namely that it is a low-technology, “sunset” industry and environmentally unsafe to boot. A third is to spark pride by stressing that mining is one of the things Canadians do better than anyone else in the world. Still another method is to trigger interest in our mining heritage and how it is interwoven with events that led to Canada’s coming of age. And a fifth is to show that the industry has a strong future, thanks to important new discoveries such as Voisey’s Bay in Labrador.

This year, the mining industry finally got a boost from the federal government and its minister of natural resources, Anne McLellan, as well as strong backing from most provincial governments and industry organizations.

National Mining Week, which this year ran from May 13 to 19, turned out to be a celebration of Canadian achievement in mining, both at home and abroad.

It has been a long time since our federal government boldly stated that “mining is a rich vein running through the lives of all Canadians” and that “not a day passes that we are not healthier, richer and better-informed because of the treasures we extract from the earth.”

The timing was not accidental, for there is, at present, strong public interest in mining, triggered by Bre-X Resources’ huge gold discovery in Indonesia and the bidding war for the rich Voisey’s Bay nickel deposit. Even so, it was encouraging to see both federal and provincial politicians acting as ambassadors of mining, and reminding Canadians that the sophisticated technology used in the industry makes it a key component of the “new economy.” No doubt, some Canadians were surprised to learn that 85% of the people in the mining sector use advanced technology to carry out their work.

In fact, Canada currently ranks third in the world in the overall export of technical expertise; with geoscience and mining services contributing significantly to these exports.

While government support is clearly welcome, National Mining Week provides an opportunity for everyone who makes his or her living from mining to be an industry ambassador. A little evangelism can’t hurt; after all, nothing sells better than by word of mouth.