Editorial: Quebec’s growing mining ambivalence

If you’re wondering how the Quebec mining industry’s lobbying efforts are coming along to amend the provincial government’s mining-restrictive Bill 14, tabled in May to update the Mining Act, look no further than the increasingly frustrated and gloomy statements by the Quebec Mining Exploration Association (AEMQ), which says that it is “appalled” that the government is proposing to usher in a “dark chapter in the mining industry.”

The bill was introduced by Quebec’s Minister of Natural Resources and Wildlife Serge Simard in May 2011. It was overshadowed at the time by the Liberal government’s unveiling of its ambitious, multi-decade Plan Nord development program to open up the province’s Far North to resource development.

The government has described Bill 14 as “introducing a major change of legislative direction” based on “three key principles of sustainable development, to ensure that mining projects are better integrated into the community and to optimize mineral potential in Quebec’s regions.”

(If you need a hint about where the government’s head is at, the bill would replace the name Mining Act with the bureaucratic mouthful An Act respecting the development of mineral resources in keeping with the principles of sustainable development.)

Probably the least controversial major change would be accelerated, boosted payments by miners to the government to cover the cost of rehabilitating an exhausted mine site. Miners would have to pony up 25% of the projected rehabilitation cost in the first year of operation, and the remaining 75% by the third year, instead of the current 75% of costs within 15 years of starting operations.

Another tweak would be that uranium explorers would have to publicly announce that they are searching for the metal, and immediately report any uranium discoveries. They would also need to gain permission from landholders to drill within 500 metres of a groundwater catchment well.

And now the sticking point: the bill, if turned into law, would effectively give a municipality in Quebec the option to reject mineral exploration within its jurisdiction.

Given the tenor of the times, when municipal governments are often left-leaning and loathe to enforce simple bylaws, such as kicking out Occupy Wall Street-type protesters from living in public parks, it’s a pretty safe prediction that this bill, if passed, would result in significant exploration projects being quashed by a peppering of local politicians who are ideologically opposed to all mining activity, be it for political, environmental or other reasons.

There is also the obvious problem that municipal leaders and bureaucracies often don’t have the technical skill set to properly evaluate mineral projects, and so there would be a tendency for local politicians to err on the side of caution under an avalanche of technical data and give the thumbs-down to mineral exploration in their jurisdictions.

This setting would soon result in an ever-changing, province-wide patchwork of hundreds of pro- and anti-mining municipal jurisdictions for mineral explorers to navigate, with mineral exploration banned outright around the perimeters of urban areas and nebulously defined “vacation areas.”

Or, as the AEMQ put it recently, Bill 14 “endorses the abandonment of the [Quebec] government’s fiduciary responsibility of managing mineral resources,” and thus the government is “setting up an environment of unprecedented instability.”

AEMQ’s big brother, the Quebec Mining Association, is also speaking up again against Bill 14, saying it “deplores” the provincial government’s stance against the industry, and describes the government as showing “an incomprehension of the realities of the mining industry.”

Rubbing salt into the wounds, any compensation for exploration projects expropriated by the province would only cover direct exploration expenses incurred, omit other costs – such as legal and administrative ones – and ignore the market value of the deposit, had it been unopposed.

Characteristic of the slap-and-caress world of Quebec politics, the mining industry is simultaneously hailing the provincial government for newly issuing a certificate of authorization for Highway 167’s extension into the Otish Mountains region, which paves the way for developments of several advanced mining projects, including Stornoway Diamond’s Renard diamond project, Strateco’s Matoush uranium project, Western Troy’s MacLeod Lake molybdenum-copper project and Eastmain Resources’ Eastmain gold project.