NW Ontario Business Class Worried By Thought of First Nations Alliance With Human Rights, ENGOs and Celebrities

See below typical example of business class boosterism. The forest industry is more than dead with a rising Canadian petrodollar and a tanking US housing market.To add insult to injury nobody reads newspapers. All bets now on the cyclical mining industry.The only thing standing in the way of the latest boom and bust fantasy in the northern ontario resource colony are First Nations who are asserting their aboriginal and treaty rights.

From www.chroniclejournal.com

Editorials
Platinex offers its side of the story
By CJ
Thursday, April 24, 2008

WHILE the members of Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation are said in a letter here Wednesday by one of their jailed leaders to be caught “between two conflicting laws” – theirs and Ontario‘s – Platinex Inc., is under no such restriction. Platinex is a junior mining exploration company that operates under the Mining Act now being examined with respect to a Supreme Court of Canada decision which says, in effect, that First Nations should be consulted prior to development on their traditional lands. Platinex is being vilified for having moved drilling equipment onto land 40 km from K.I., and accused of avoiding formal talks with the band which told Platinex to leave – and seized its equipment – prompting the company to sue. The matter went to an Ontario court which attempted, unsuccessfully, to mediate the dispute in order to allow K.I. to permit Platinex to continue looking for promising mineral signs that would benefit the band and the Northern Ontario economy if a mine were to result. The benefits of a platinum mine would ultimately benefit all of Canada since Platinex‘s goal is to find platinum to be used in the production of fuel cell technology that one day will replace the internal combustion engine and vastly reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that now emanate from every tailpipe in the country.
For the time being, Platinex is being used as the whipping boy by every aboriginal supporter in sight for the fact that six K.I. band members are in jail for having defied a court order to allow the company to go about its business.
Platinex president and CEO James Trusler has remained silent, in deference to the legal process, until an inflammatory press release Tuesday from Ontario NDP leader Howard Hampton prompted him to speak with The Chronicle-Journal.
Hampton “condemned the McGuinty Liberals for awarding Platinex Inc., 72,000 acres of new mining claims in Northern Ontario.” He called this “outrageous” while six K.I. band members “languish in jail.” The new claims are adjacent to Webequie, Marten Falls, Fort Hope, Neskantaga and Gull Bay, sending “a chilling message to First Nations across the North,” Hampton wrote.
Trusler‘s take is much different, proving again that those who act on one side of a story are often forced to reconsider.
Platinex is a little company that tramps the bush in search of promising land, stakes it, and drills it to find platinum. The Ontario government is putting a lot of faith in renewed mining activity in Northern Ontario to try to make up what is being lost in forestry. Mr. Hampton knows that.
Platinex has been accused of barging into K.I. territory without having first secured a memorandum of understanding with the band. Trusler says, “We offered one of the more generous MOUs that‘s been offered in industry . . . and we‘re quite willing to work with other First Nations. So I really don‘t appreciate Mr. Hampton trying to escalate the situation.”
As to the new claims issued by the province, based on surveys conducted by the province to enable new exploration, “We plan to go forward and talk to various First Nations and execute our exploration plans with their cooperation.”
This puts a new light on what has led the NDP, various aboriginal political organizations and lately celebrities to use this case to bash the mining activity that promises to benefit a part of Ontario that needs it. K.I. supporters want the band members released and exploration activity stopped. The government cannot simply reverse a judge‘s decision and mining is far too important to be suspended across Northern Ontario. Have all of these activists asked if the members of the five reserves adjacent to the new mining claims want no part of them? For that matter, have they asked the people of Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug if they wish to forego the promise of platinum production?
All parties, not just K.I., are engulfed in conflicting and changing laws and claims here but as always, there is a compromise to be found. Ratcheting up the political heat won‘t help. Considering all of the facts will.

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