19 October 2015
Guest Column by John Kearney, President, Canadian Zinc, in: News/North, October 19, 2015
The mining and exploration resource sector in the Northwest Territories is the single largest contributor to the NWT GDP.
Despite the long history of mining in the NWT, exploration expenditures have fallen to record lows. The area of mineral tenure has fallen from 20 per cent in 2005 to the current level of about 2 per cent. Exploration spending statistics reported by Natural Resources Canada show exploration investment in the NWT has fallen significantly since 2007, is declining rapidly and significantly lags behind our neighbouring territories, Nunavut and Yukon.
To rejuvenate and grow mining investment in the NWT, in 2013, the NWT & Nunavut Chamber of Mines partnered with the Government of the NWT to help develop the first ever NWT Mineral Development Strategy (MDS).
The strategy is not being developed in isolation. It is an integral part of a broader effort to build a sustainable Northern economy. The MDS recognizes that while mineral development contributes substantially to the economic viability of NWT commw1ities, there is a need to ensure that the negative long-term impacts of mining are minimized to protect and maintain the land and its people. The Chamber of Mines recognizes that land-use planning provides certainty to the mineral exploration and development industry. The conservation areas draft action plan, recently announced by the GNWT Department of Environment and Natural Resources (ENR), which has as one of its stated objectives to achieve a target of 40 per cent in conservation areas in the NWT, is completely at odds with the MDS and needlessly risks the NWT's investment reputation in Canada and internationally.
The president of the NWT Chamber of Commerce called the draft action plan "absurd" and the president of the chamber of mines said, "We believe that if this initiative is allowed to proceed unchecked, it will seriously damage the NWT's already struggling minerals industry."
The GNWT's Mining Recorder's Office reports more than 32 per cent of NWT lands are already off-limits to exploration. There are more lands that are effectively off-limits to exploration. Examples include the Upper Thelon and White Beach Point.
It is important to understand the enormous negative impact of 32 per cent of the land being off limits to low impact exploration, let alone increasing this to 40 per cent. Canada's national goal for conservation is 17 per cent. Economic mineral deposits are very hard to find. There is no guarantee that a deposit will ever be found on the 60 per cent of the lands that are not withdrawn, as areas with mineral potential and their access corridors are rarely taken into account when lands are selected for conservation. Foreclosing responsible exploration and potential development hurts the future of the entire territory and future generations.
The conservation areas draft action plan, if implemented, would ensure less royalty, corporate tax and fee revenues for territorial and aboriginal governments, fewer contracts to sustain aboriginal and Northern suppliers, less employment for Northerners and less personal, municipal, school and payroll taxes and the loss of direct, indirect and induced income from the resource industry. Unemployment and service cutbacks in all levels of government will follow.
ENR says that a new conservation plan is needed to balance the MDS. This is nonsense. One of the core principles of the Minerals Development Strategy is that the environment must be considered and respected and that progressive environmental oversight and management practices will make certain the NWT land remains healthy for future generations. The MDS has its own built-in conservation protections while facilitating responsible development.
The draft plan's predecessor, the Protected Areas Strategy (PAS) was launched in the late
1990s. Funded with more than $25 million of taxpayer's money, the PAS aggressively took environmental protection and anti-development messages to communities. The success the PAS marketing campaign had in creating uncertainty and removing lands from development contributed to the serious decline in mineral exploration investment. This was in part due to the lack of a similarly funded marketing campaign to raise community awareness about the opportunities and benefits provided by responsible resource development.
While the Chamber of Mines has participated in the PAS steering committee, we have been frustrated with its profound conservation bias from the start. Shortly into the process we developed serious concerns with its aggressive approach to convince communities to support the removal of huge tracts of land from potential development.
Our concerns fell on deaf ears. We continued to voice these concerns, but they were never addressed. It was partly in response to these concerns that the chamber of mines supported the adoption by the GNWT of a minerals development strategy.
Recognizing the importance of responsible resource development to the Northern economy, the NWT should not undo the small amount of progress made by MDS by adopting the proposed conservation areas draft action plan with its excessive and unnecessary land conservation objectives.
