Editor’s Picks: top stories of week 12

Regrettably, there is little in the way of tax cuts in this budget, either personal or corporate, though are a few goodies for the mining industry overall.

Most notably, some $60 million in new money is being allocated for a much-needed streamlining of environmental assessment and permitting, with a new “Major Projects Management Office” being created and a commitment to halve the regulatory review period. Plus, there are improvements to capital-cost allowances.

For mineral explorers, the good times are a-gonna keep rollin’, with the ever-popular flow-through share scheme — the Mineral Exploration Tax Credit — being extended for another year. Money under the newly extended program must be spent on exploration by the end of calendar 2009.

On the labour front, the federal government is making further commitments to aboriginal job training, which will be critical to solving the staffing problems at remote mines in Canada’s Far North.

The federal Aboriginal Skills and Employment Partnership (ASEP) initiative with provincial and territorial governments, aboriginal organizations and the private sector has had a budget of $85 million over six years, supporting 7,000 aboriginals in nine projects across Canada, including a training program at the Victor diamond mine in northern Ontario. With this new budget, the federal government will provide another $105 million for ASEP over the next five years to provide skills training to an additional 9,000 aboriginals.

The budget has already drawn the support of the Mining Association of British Columbia and the Association of Mineral Exploration of British Columbia.

The Mining Association of Canada and the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada each gave the budget mixed reviews, owing to the end of some tax breaks for oil sands development and an overall failure to expand spending on the geosciences, particularly the Cooperative Geological Mapping Strategy.

For our more charity minded readers, the federal government is wisely removing the last of the capital-gains taxes imposed on listed stocks donated to private foundations, building on last year’s decision to remove them on stocks donated to public foundations. Last year’s decision helped precipitate a small avalanche in charitable donations, and we expect this latest capital-gains exemption to generate very substantial donations to private foundations.

The Conservative Party’s budget is likely to pass in the spring with the support of the Bloc Quebecois party.

You could chalk that up to today’s record uranium prices, but not so: the project economics are based on uranium oxide prices in the US$30s. Cigar Lake’s grade — over 20% U₃O₈ — simply makes the project very hard to kill.

Meanwhile, China reported 22 people killed and several missing after flooding at a state-owned coal mine in the countrys northeastern province of Shenyang. Despite an official mandate to improve safety, Chinas mines remain the worlds deadliest with the government reporting about 4,750 deaths in coal mine accidents last year, an astounding average of 13 per day.