A former provincial energy minister-turned-consultant said First Nations will have the ultimate say on how the Ring of Fire mineral developments will unfold, and that includes the location of a proposed ferrochrome smelter.
George Smitherman is pitching for the furnaces to be located in the northwestern Ontario municipality of Greenstone, and the village of Exton, which is already designated as a future ore transloading junction.
Cliffs Natural Resources has maintained Sudbury is the frontrunner among four Northern Ontario communities to land the processing plant, and its 400-plus jobs, but only if provincial power rates are competitive with neighbouring jurisdictions. The international miner is expected to name the site for the plant sometime this year.
“If the company persists in seeing the decision narrowly on the basis of power, then this has great project risk.”
Smitherman said the Matawa tribal chiefs won't stand for the extraction of a resource from their traditional territories “to watch it trucked past their door.”
He said Cliffs' statements that it was considering filing for a domestic processing exemption to take chromite ore out of the province for refining should be of great concern to all Ontarians.
“This has got to be a decision taken out of the hands of the technocrats and into the hands of those steering the overall project.”
Smitherman said the First Nations are the big X factor in the advancement of the Ring of Fire development.
“Anyone who hasn't figured that out is at risk for a rude awakening.”
Smitherman said there are no obstacles to delivering power to Exton by the time Cliffs wants to start mining in 2015. The environmental assessment of the proposed Little Jackfish hydro project near Lake Nipigon is largely complete.
Smitherman is trumpeting Greenstone's proximity to the Ring of Fire deposits and its alliances with area First Nations as trump cards in the competition with Sudbury, Thunder Bay and Timmins to land the processor.
Smitherman and a technical team hired by the municipality went to Cleveland in November to lay out their client's case before Cliffs Natural Resources.
They're promoting a “holistic” plan that delivers power to new and existing mines, and gets First Nation communities off of diesel generation and onto the provincial grid.
Smitherman said their approach builds off an already-established provincial energy plan by Hydro One to run transmission lines from the Little Jackfish into Pickle Lake, Dryden and Ignace.
Smitherman said electricity is an “embedded issue” with the Ring of Fire, but in sizing up the immense potential of the mineral resources there, Ontarians have to figure out “what does it take for us, as a province, to take appropriate advantage of that opportunity?”
Making Ontario as competitive with Quebec, Manitoba and other jurisdictions requires making tough decisions about infrastructure, jobs, training, resource sharing and making social progress, he said.
“If the Ring of Fire is as big as we're told it is, then the policy response needs to be commensurate to that.”
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