EDITORIAL PAGE — Give us a break

We are a high-wage, highly educated society. We cant simply rely on shipping out our natural gas and crude oil and lumps of rock. So says Robert Fairholm, managing economist at DRI/McGraw-Hill in Toronto. Mr. Fairholm was quoted in a recent doom-and-gloom article in The Financial Post. The headline, Resource firms face grim reality, was, of course, cataclysmic in tone.

Two points need to made here. The first addresses Mr. Fairholms remark about how Canada should not rely on shipping out lumps of rock. To which we pose the question, Why not? It seems to be a perfectly agreeable arrangement. Canada ships its rocks to other countries. In comes hard, foreign currency. Weve been doing it successfully for more than a century. Mr. Fairholms statement implies something is wrong or shameful or too low-brow about mining, that it is beneath the citizenry (speaking figuratively, of course; literally, it is).

Furthermore, we do it better with each passing year. The industry is cleaner environmentally. It is safer in terms of lost-frequency accidents (at about three per 200,000 employee-hours versus the Ontario average of slightly more than five. Believe it or not, a nurse is more likely to suffer accidents than a jumbo operator). In addition, workers in mining require more education than ever before.

And, contrary to popular belief, high-tech industries and mining are not mutually exclusive endeavors. With every passing year, the technological component in mining rises, from the latest gizmos in geophysics to computerized production drills to expert systems in mills.

In fact, we do some things so well that we have become world-renowned. In geophysics, for example, techniques have been invented here and the tools have been developed and manufactured in this country. Today, they are used worldwide.

As well, it is not accidental that every country attempting to build its own mining industry comes knocking on Canadas door. Delegations from Argentina, Chile, China, Greenland, Ivory Coast, Mongolia and Russia have been here trying to drum up interest in their exploration and mining projects. Why? Because our experience and expertise in profitably wresting rocks from the ground is known the world over.

And yet we get such lousy press at home.

To be fair to Mr. Fairholm, he was not suggesting that mining be phased out. He was merely pointing out that a diversified economy is a more stable economy. But, implicitly, these kinds of statements always denigrate the industry. Thats our beef.

A second gnawing point relates to the general tone of the article and what the headline refers to as minings grim reality. Once again, it seems, the sky is falling. Every time we run into the bottom of a base metals cycle, the doomsayers come out in droves. The perfect model of such reporting was a now-infamous declaration by a U.S. business magazine that heralded The Death of Mining on its front cover.

That was back in the last recession in the early 1980s. Mining is still alive. In fact, it went through an unbelievable period in the late 1980s when companies such as Inco posted incredible numbers about $900 million in profit for two years running.

With that in mind, we would remind all non-mining types that this is a cyclical industry. The troughs can be worrisome and structural changes especially of a global nature do occur. (Of greater concern is the way governments in Canada treat the industry, but thats another story.)