The No-parking zone

Ontario prospectors are shortly to gather for an annual show-and-tell session in Toronto, making this week a convenient time to take a look at how that part of the mineral industry is faring.

Certainly there are more prospectors and independent contractors working than in years just past; there has been a resurgence in Canadian exploration, not merely because metal prices have improved but also because the mineral industry, burned by offshore scandals and deals-gone-bad, has rediscovered the developed world as a hunting ground. Moreover, lower-risk exploration in established mining camps has come back into fashion, as operators look for ways to get value out of more advanced projects.

In these respects, Ontario prospectors, especially the self-employed geologists and technicians whose livelihoods are tied to junior companies’ exploration budgets, have benefited from a worldwide upturn in commodity prices and an industry-wide realization that future production depends completely on having new, good development projects coming down the pipeline. That’s great news, as far as it goes.

What’s not nearly as good news is the atmosphere that still surrounds mining in the public-policy sphere — because in Ontario there still seems to be a political imperative to hamstring the industries that built this province. Out of that imperative has grown a land-access problem that has disproportionately hurt the “small business” end of the mining industry.

When you’re Inco, when you’re Falconbridge, when you’re Goldcorp or Placer Dome, immediate questions of land access probably don’t matter much. Property deals can be done, and projects can be judged on their mineral potential and their economics, with reasonable assurance that title won’t evaporate; and even if it does, there are other projects and other places.

On the other hand, when you’re a junior or an individual staker, land withdrawals and restrictions can be crippling. Sometimes they knock out your one good property; sometimes they derail your best exploration idea.

There have been some candles in the darkness. Negotiations between the Ontario Prospectors Association and the Partnership for Public Lands have resolved real or perceived conflicts between mineral exploration and protected-areas measures at 88 locations.

But the most helpful suggestion, floated at last year’s Exploration and Geoscience Symposium, was the creation of a Mineral Reserve covering a large part of the Abitibi greenstone belt. Despite support from the prospectors, and from the general public and local government, there has been no recognition of the idea from the province. Some kind of reply, at least, is overdue. As we pointed out in an editorial last year, the Australian state of Tasmania has had similar provisions for prospective areas for the past decade, without environmental tragedies besetting the island.

In his Statistical Account of Upper Canada, published in 1822, Robert Gourlay asserted that the most common complaint of farmers in the province was about how difficult it was to obtain clear title to land. For Ontario prospectors, not much has changed. It’s time for the Abitibi Mineral Reserve: just a little fair play for Ontario prospectors.