Ontario tries again to update antiquated Mining Act

New staking practices, measures to avoid claim disputes and streamlined procedures for mine development are some of the changes to Ontario’s Mining Act proposed recently by Mines Minister Sean Conway.

But the minister also included added responsibilities for the industry in a Green Paper he introduced in the legislature Dec 12. Those include making claim stakers responsible for determining areas that are environmentally sensitive, requiring that developers submit a plan to eventually close the mine, to estimate the cost of closing the mine and to deposit a bond based on that estimate in order to offset the expense of mine closing. A total of 49 r ecommendations are included in the discussion paper. And, while the proposals are generally welcomed by the industry, there is some skepticism that they will, in fact, become law. Several previous cabinet ministers have attempted to change the Mining Act since 1972, but each attempt has been thwarted by various circumstances.

In general, however, the industry is likely to support the proposed changes because most of them have been fully discussed in previous proposals.

“The recommendations address most of the problems we’ve been recommending the government take action on for the past 15 years,” says John Larche, president of the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC).

“The Act had to be changed to meet the needs of modern day exploration. It’s long overdue.”

What’s more, the current minister is perceived to be prepared to push the changes through.

“We feel Conway has a commitment to do something right for the industry,” says Anthony Andrews, managing director of the PDAC.

Conway, speaking at the Ontario Mines and Minerals symposium shortly after tabling the paper in the legislature, said he has set a deadline of March 31, 1989, for comments on the Green Paper. He then plans to introduce draft legislation upon which he expects final revisions to the Act will be made and become law before the end of 1989.

Immediately after the minister’s announcement Larche said that the recommendations regarding security of tenure would be particularly welcomed by the industry.

Those recommendations would see a time limit of one year for claim disputes to be filed. If adopted, it would mean that once a claim is deemed to be in good standing for a year, a dispute could not be filed at a later date unless based on provisions of the Criminal Code such as fraud.

This would likely reduce the amount of claim jumping whereby a claim that was not disputed during the period when preliminary exploration was done is disputed after the value of the property has been determined.

Disputing a claim would also require an increased fee and must be accompanied by a detailed statement of claim and would consider the right of the purchaser to re-stake claims.

Regarding the actual staking of claims, the minister proposes that perimeter staking be permitted and that map staking in certain designated area be allowed, particularly in very remote areas of the province. The PDAC has long supported perimeter staking but has always opposed map staking for fear it would put the individual prospector at a disadvantage.

Claim staking could also only be undertaken by licensed prospectors, as it is now. However, license applicants would be required to pass “a simple test on prospecting, staking, surface rights holder’s compensation, survival skills, etc.”

The license would be renewable on the license holder’s birthday rather than having all licenses expire on March 31, and claims tags, which are currently only valid for the year the license is valid, would remain valid as long as the prospectors’s license is in good standing.

Assessment work would be measured in dollar value rather than by man-hours worked, a change long sought by the industry in order to better reflect the work done and to allow the operator to determine the most productive type of work.

The process of developing a mine will be streamlined under the proposed changes by introducing what Conway calls a “single-window” approach to regulatory approval.

Under this method, an individual or company will be able to go to the Ministry of Northern Development and Mines (MNDM) to determine what has to be done in order to meet the requirements of other government ministries or departments. Currently it is up to the developer, who faces a bewildering array of regulatory requirements and no clear guidelines about who to see at which ministry for what approval.

Furthermore, the MNDM will be required to issue a permit to mine before any mining is done. That permit will mean that all requirements have been met.

Therefore, the operator need have no fear that after operations begin he might find that he is in contravention of some regulation of, for example, the Ministry of Natural Resources.

Finally, the revisions would see some details of the law become regulations rather than statutes. For instance, fee schedules established in 1906 when the original Act was implemented have not been changed because they were established in the Act. Fees would become a matter of regulation and therefore could be changed more readily.