EDITORIAL PAGE — Mining and government (2)

During the past 100 years and more, the mining industry and the organizations which sprang up around it — the provincial associations, the Mining Association of Canada and the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada — have adapted to the changes in government policy-making. All the while, the industry’s conduit to government, through the mining ministries of various provincial administrations, remained effective.

In the past few years, this has changed. The authority of mining ministries in some provinces has eroded. This erosion was identified by the Kingston, Ont.-based Centre for Resource Studies (CRS) in a paper entitled “Environmental Policy-Making and Ontario’s Mining Industry.” Written by Olga Richardson, the paper, a summary of a CRS-sponsored seminar in late 1992, reviewed how the concerns of mining “have been pushed from the political agenda.” Specifically, Richardson’s review focused on environmental issues and their effects on policy-making in Ontario. To demonstrate her point, Richardson reviews the process by which three recent pieces of legislation were created.

First, there was the Municipal-Industrial Strategy for Abatement. The process of hammering out this piece of legislation was costly and time-consuming. But at least the industries involved were first identified and then consulted and, finally, included in drafting the technical aspects of the legislation. “While the process had moved away from the purely clientele-based one (industry working with its designated government ministry), the relative influence of the mining industry over environmental groups still favored the former,” Richardson notes.

A second piece of proposed legislation, the Clean Air Program (CAP), was purely an in-house creation of the Ontario Ministry of the Environment (MOE). Industry input was limited to post-release responses. The bill, ill-conceived and seriously flawed, was withdrawn and is now being recast as the Air Management Strategy of Ontario, Richardson notes.

Then came the Environmental Bill of Rights. The genesis of this bill goes back to a private members’ bill (while the New Democratic Party was in opposition) and became a government initiative when the NDP gained office. This bill was not as extreme as the CAP, yet the process of creating it excluded the mining industry. Mining was not represented on the task force which developed the regulations, although the industry was later consulted and, according to the Ontario Mining Association, there were improvements in the second draft.

Without delving into specific provisions of the bill, the interesting point raised in Richardson’s analysis of the process of decision-making in Ontario is that industry no longer has quite as powerful and understanding a government partner.

In spite of a memorandum of agreement between MOE and the Ontario Ministry of Northern Development and Mines to eliminate jurisdictional overlap, the nature of mining activities will continue to remain a concern to both ministries.

“The MOE,” Richardson concludes, “has established its pre-eminent position.” In short, government policy vis-a-vis mining has run the gamut from an emphasis on maximum growth to growth with the larger societal concerns taken into account to growth if — and only if — the environmental movement, through its government partner, the ministry of the environment, gives its blessing.

It’s little wonder that mining’s on the run.