Recorders brace for action when Ontario lifts caution

Ontario’s mining recorders’ offices in Sudbury and Larder Lake have been swamped with calls from individual prospectors since the province announced that part of a Cobalt-area land caution will be lifted (T.N.M., Feb. 5/90). The caution — notice that ownership of the land is under dispute — has prevented any staking in the affected area since 1974. Now prospectors are eager to get at the reopened claims.

According to Mike Weirmeir, mining recorder for the Larder Lake mining district, his office expects to be “exceptionally busy in April” and plans to hire extra staff to handle the volume of paper work created by the staking rush. “At least a dozen majors have been doing research” on the area added Leo Owsiacki, resident geologist for the Cobalt district.

The land claims will officially open at 7 a.m., April 3.

Exploration interest is focused on the Fawcett, MacMurchy and Natal twps., in the northwest corner of the claim group, where several old gold prospects are known to occur within a greenstone belt.

Another pocket hosting a concentration of gold occurrences surrounds the Bryce Twp. on a southern arm of the Kirkland Lake greenstone belt. According to Owsiacki, this area has been experiencing a lot of exploration activity, and prospectors are eager to move inside the cautioned zone.

The decision to lift partially the land caution was made as part of an agreement between the government and the Bear Island Band, who registered the caution 16 years ago. The reopened areas include part or all of 40 townships surrounding the 10,000-sq.-km, Teme- Augama Anishnabai land claim.

This 112-year old land claim was recently dismissed by the Ontario Court of Appeal. In 1984, the Supreme Court of Ontario ruled that the Indians’ rights to the land had been ceded to the Crown for the equivalent of $25 under a treaty signed in 1850. Even though another Indian from an unrelated tribe signed over the land, the court upheld the 1984 decision that the Temagami Indians are bound by the treaty.

Disheartened by the outcome, the band will seek permission to appeal the case in the Supreme Court of Canada.

According to Weirmeir, although the reopened areas lie within the boundary of the 110 townships placed under caution, they are “outside the boundaries of the land claim” and are, therefore, unaffected by the legal dispute.

But if the courts lift the entire land caution, as the Ontario government has requested, 10,000 sq. km will be open for not only prospecting but logging as well: a victory for the resource industry, but a blow to Indians fighting for land rights across the country.