More than 16 years have passed since a small mining company discovered a rich nickel deposit in a remote part of northern Ontario and christened the region with a name that has stuck: the Ring of Fire.
Successive governments and companies have touted the potential of the region, entranced by optimistic estimates of tens of billions of dollars of minerals – including those critical to electric vehicle battery production – buried in the wetlands.
In the early 2010s, Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government promoted the Ring of Fire as a means to jump-start Ontario’s economy. Today, Premier Doug Ford has identified the region’s critical minerals as a vital component of his government’s plan to build an EV manufacturing industry. The Premier has been saying since 2018 he’s ready to hop on a bulldozer to get development moving. But all this talk has yielded no decisions.
The promise of prosperity for Ontario, and much-needed economic benefits to the First Nations who live in the Ring of Fire area, remains on the distant horizon.
The region’s Indigenous communities are divided over the merits and risks of the development, as a recent Globe feature reported. Their participation in lengthy and complex environmental consultations consumes significant administrative resources. That has not built desperately needed new homes, or curbed the rate of youth suicide, or helped lift boil water advisories that have been in place for a generation.
While the First Nations continue to live in unacceptable circumstances, the gulf between the federal and provincial governments over potential development has only grown.
It is time for clarity.
Instead of working together, Ottawa and Ontario are locked in a dispute over who should be making decisions.
The Supreme Court of Canada last fall ruled that the federal government overstepped its authority to assess the environmental impact of major resource projects. It did not dispute Ottawa’s role in environmental oversight but said it must respect Canada’s division of powers. In the same breath, the court suggested the provinces and Ottawa could exercise their respective powers “harmoniously,” in the spirit of co-operative federalism.
Mr. Ford greeted the ruling with glee, saying it will allow Ontario to “get shovels in the ground” as it establishes that the provinces and territories have primary jurisdiction over regulating mining projects.
But Ottawa maintains development in the Ring of Fire is “clearly a federal area of jurisdiction.” It has vowed to amend the Impact Assessment Act to address the court ruling. The act regulates resource proposals based on issues under federal jurisdiction – such as impacts on Indigenous peoples, birds, fish, endangered species and climate change.
The court’s enjoinder to seek joint leadership in the vital matter of environmental protection has not been heeded. But there is a lot to assess.
The wetlands and boreal forest are home to threatened wildlife such as wolverine and woodland caribou. According to the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, the peatlands there store the equivalent of about two billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. Disruption through mining could release massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, undermining the environmental value of an EV manufacturing chain.
The lack of consensus among the First Nations of the region is another hurdle. And it is far from clear that any minerals could be extracted in a profitable way.
A decade ago, an American mining company had spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to develop the Ring of Fire before it bailed out and complained that plans for a required road and rail moved at snails’ pace. Now, the biggest proposed project is owned by Australia’s Wyloo. But the same snail’s pace of reviews is unchanged. Two First Nations are working on two years-long reviews of potential roads and Ottawa is conducting a regional environment assessment.
There is still not a single assessment for mining in the Ring of Fire, and such a process can also take years. Wyloo understandably is waiting for decisions on roads before launching an application.
It is not good for industry, and it isn’t fair to the First Nations whose standard of living lies in the balance, to let this continue to drag out. Both levels of government need to agree to a streamlined assessment process.