Editorial: Oliver rises to finance minister

Although the move was long anticipated due to his chronic ill health, it still felt surprising that Canada’s third-longest serving finance minister, Jim Flaherty, was finally resigning from cabinet after eight years in the post.

He’ll wrap up his term with a mixed record, having squandered years of federal surpluses by instituting tax cuts and throwing the federal government into years of back-to-back deficits that deepened after the global economy slid into recession in 2008. The books were only technically restored to balance in the February 2014 budget.

 A bit bigger of a shocker was that his swiftly announced successor would be Joe Oliver, who is a relative newcomer to the federal cabinet, but a minister well familiar to Canada’s mining community after his three-year stint as natural resources minister.

Despite displaying a prickly and highly partisan personality as natural resources minister, Oliver — today a remarkably spry 73 — was a tireless worker in the role and always on top of his file, which grew increasingly focused on the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipeline issues.

Before entering politics by winning his northern Toronto seat three years ago, Oliver spent decades on Bay Street working as an investment banker with Merrill Lynch and later serving in such roles as executive director of the Ontario Securities Commission and president of the Investment Dealers Association of Canada.

The Canadian mining industry can only benefit from having a finance minister with such an astute sense of its particular needs.

Oliver’s vacated spot has been filled by the promotion of junior minister Greg Rickford to natural resources minister. Rickford, 46, has been member of parliament for Kenora since 2008, and will retain responsibility for economic development in Northern Ontario, including the Ring of Fire region. A bilingual lawyer and nurse with an MBA from Laval University, Rickford has spent part of his time in government as a parliamentary secretary on aboriginal files, which should serve him well in his new role.

This latter promotion, in turn, has led to Southern Ontario backbencher Ed Holder joining the cabinet to replace Rickford as minister of state for science and technology.

• So far, at least, it looks like the showdown between Russia and the Ukraine over Crimea has had little spillover into direct mining-related investment.

On the Ukrainian side, Canadian junior Black Iron closed a $3-million financing, updated a feasibility study and signed a rail agreement during the middle of the Revolution in late January. Its Shymanivske iron-ore project is 350 km south of Kiev, well away from the political turmoil in the capital and to the far east.

More recently, on the day after the controversial March 16 referendum regarding Crimea rejoining Russia, Russia-focused Canadian junior Global Cobalt produced a letter from the Russian ambassador to Canada, Georgiy Mamedov, stating that “Russia is committed to inviting Canadian companies to invest and work in Russia. We welcome foreign investment and will work closely with mining and exploration companies as part of that strategy. Global Cobalt Corp. is the type of company that we encourage to be active in Russia, and we are very supportive of the company’s efforts to be successful in its activity.”

Things seem to be business as usual at the large, global financial institutions, too. Two days after the referendum, the World Bank’s International Finance Group said it would  provide KuibyshevAzot, a leader in Russia’s chemical industry in the Samara region, with US$150 million in debt financing to support its expansion and modernization. With the loan, the IFC said it wanted to “improve foreign investors’ confidence in Russian industries.”

Russia has been a member and shareholder of the IFC since 1993, and has a US$2.2-billion portfolio in the country, which is 9% of its global portfolio.

Next up, we’ll see if Russia attempts to annex the Donbass coal-mining region in eastern Ukraine, which similarly has historically belonged to Russia and has a large Russian–Ukrainian population.