A Report to Mines Ministers

By a Task Force Appointed by the Intergovernmental Working Group on the Mining Industry

56th Annual Mines Ministers Conference
Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island
September 1999

CONCLUSIONS

The industry members of the Task Force have concluded that:

  1. There is a direct relationship between government geoscience, mineral exploration investment and the discovery and production from new mineral deposits. Other countries with untapped mineral wealth also recognize this relationship and are becoming more competitive for exploration dollars with each passing year.

  2. It is clear that the continued erosion of funding for government geoscience has contributed to Canada losing its competitive edge as a place to invest in mineral exploration.

  3. There has been a significant change in the structure of mineral exploration industry in the past decade. Junior companies are increasingly doing the majority of early stage grassroots exploration, adding value to the properties and marketing the advanced properties to major mining companies. These junior companies cannot fund large regional studies and will therefore invest their exploration dollars in areas with good geoscience databases either here or abroad.

  4. There are large areas of this country that have never been mapped in sufficient detail. There are many areas where geophysical data is outdated and needs to be redone by new high resolution methods.

  5. Many of the areas for which regional and or detailed maps exist were mapped many years ago and do not incorporate either current geoscientific thinking or new understanding of the occurrence and formation of mineral deposits. For example, two decades ago we did not know that Canada was about to become a diamond producing country.

  6. A review of the current status of geoscience map coverage in Canada demonstrates that there is a large gap between the current level of effort and the effort required to:

    Cover all areas of the country that have either not yet been mapped or not surveyed at a satisfactory scale; and,

    Update maps and surveys to incorporate advances in geoscientific thought.

  7. The Task Force has established a target that, if achieved over the next ten years, would sustain Canada's competitive advantage. This plan should be viewed as preliminary, but it does outline in general the scope of the total investment required by both levels of government.

  8. Despite the different geoscience needs of different jurisdictions in Canada, we believe that the country as a whole would benefit from a national geoscience mapping strategy. We would like to see both levels of government and industry work together to achieve this goal.

The industry members of the Task Force recommend that:

  1. In order to stimulate new investment in the mining sector in Canada, a collective commitment to reach the ten-year target proposed by this Task Force should be made by all provincial, territorial and federal governments; and,

  2. This target be achieved through a cooperative approach such as a national geoscience mapping strategy.