Lands for Votes

Big Tories, Big Industry and Big Greens Carve up the land

HighGrader Magazine May/June 1999
by Mick Lowe
A Tragedy in Three Acts in which Mike and Monte and Mike and sundry other White, over-50 Men in Suits, go Tenting in a Cave, enjoy some Bully Camaraderie, and carve up Northern Ontario
around the Old Campfire.

But can they make it stick?

"You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners," Glaucon said to Socrates.
"Like ourselves," replied Socrates. "And they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave."
-Book VII, Plato's Republic, c.380-370 B.C.
Lands for Votes



We were strange prisoners indeed that morning of the final Monday in March of the waning Millenium, inside the Inco Cavern at Sudbury's Science North. Our's was an elite group, the Northern 400, if you will. Dark business suits and dazzling white shirtfronts abounded. So did mayors and reeves and local councillors, drawn from Sudbury, Timmins and Hearst, senior bureaucrats from the Ministries of Natural Resources and Northern Development and Mines, television crews, assorted hacks and flacks, and businessmen and industrialists from across the North.
And like the prisoners in Plato's famous Allegory of the Cave, we were convened to witness a Dope Show. In Plato's case the prisoners saw only the dim simulacra of reality, firelit shadows cast on a screen arrayed before them. Before long, of course, they began to believe that the shadows on the screen were reality.
What we saw in our cave two-and-a-half millenia after Plato's was this: an ersatz Northern Ontario campground moved indoors, inside a cave. There were trees, ten to fifteen feet high, some of them, leafless birches and green pines that seemed to grow from the cement floor of our cave. Their bases were artfully covered with real leaf litter and cedar chips and pine cones that someone had laboriously transported to the scene.
There were several picnic tables bearing coffee mugs and a Coleman camp lantern; there was a cedar strip canoe and even a tent. Like the dull, moving figures on Plato's scrim, a looped video was projected onto a giant screen upon which dim images of Northern Ontario were endlessly repeated, and they moved above us, over and over and over, as we waited patiently, humbly, politely, for the Dope Show to begin.
At last the campground was animated by human form; eight or so white males, pretty much like us except that their neckties had been removed, took their places at the picnic tables before us.
(A few days later a Queen's Park correspondent for the Toronto Star would speculate that the purpose of the play about to begin was to "soften" the image of the Great Convenor, thus enhancing his standing with the female electorate. Was the hope that, by removing that most powerful of male appendages, the necktie, female voters could somehow be confused about the total absence of their own gender at the picnic tables?)
But these eight were not like us. It was, we knew, important to be at the picnic tables, because these were the Great, our Bosses, recognizable from countless television scrums, corporate annual reports and 30 second spots for environmental causes. At the first table were three Ministers of the Crown: John Snobelen of Natural Resources, Chris Hodgson, of Northern Development and Mines, and the First Minister, the Boss of Bosses himself, Mike Harris.
At the second table were the Powerful Adversaries, who had, nevertheless, been reconciled by the Boss of Bosses and were now here, around the imitation campfire, basking in the reflected glow of the greatness of the Boss of Bosses.
There was Raymond Royer, President and CEO of Domtar and Mike Sopko, CEO of Inco Ltd., two fine, blue chip Canadian companies. And there was Monte Hummell of the World Wildlife Fund and John Riley from the Federation of Ontario Naturalists, two fine Canadian environmental groups.
Although each of them earned their livelihoods from Northern Ontario, only one of them, the Great Convenor himself, actually lived anywhere near the vast parcels of land that they had carved up, by mutual agreement, behind closed doors. (see Lake Couchiching Confidential page 5)
But maybe that was precisely the point.
After brief introductions the Great Convenor began to speak and who could doubt that we were, indeed, eyewitnesses to history? We were present for the unveiling of the "largest expansion of parks and protected areas in the history of Ontario," Harris told us solemnly, the greatest effusion of parks and protected areas "in sheers numbers, anywhere in Canada." A total of 12 % of a huge swath of land, from just north of Peterborough in the south, to the 51st parallel in the north, would be set aside and protected from further industrial development for all time.
The protected areas would encompass more than 9.5 million hectares, an area nearly three-quarters the size of England, an area equal to all of southern Ontario (but which emphatically was not southern Ontario, which was, in fact, where almost all of the Great Men themselves resided).
The eight other Great Men listened appreciatively while the Boss of Bosses spoke, and, one by one, they followed him to the podium to praise him, and his initiative, and the process that had led up to this historic day.
I contemplated the pine cones and leaf litter and cedar chips at the base of the trees, and the upturned, slightly foolish looking faces of the boys around the picnic table as they verbally jerked one another off and pretended to be camping.
One of the "Key Highlights" of "Ontario's Living Legacy" according to the glossy press kit presented to the media minutes before the show began, was the promise that there would be "no net loss of jobs as a result of Living Legacy."
I mulled this over and wondered how many northerners had been put to work hauling in the trees and leaf litter and cedar chips and pine cones.
I thought of those other storied, fabulist promises: "The cheque is in the mail," "Downloading will be revenue neutral," etc., and a still, small, voice within delivered itself of a certain prophetic epiphany; "Nothing good will come of this day. Nothing good at all."

David Comba already knew this. I'd met Comba in Sudbury the week before, where he had come to forewarn his colleagues, members of the Sudbury Prospectors and Developers Association, about the drastic consequences the imminent Lands for Life announcment would have on their access to land, their mining claims and their economic future.
A honcho with the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada, Comba's organization had been part of the Lands for Life process from the beginning, with prospectors sitting on each of the three roundtables that conducted seemingly endless rounds of public consultation over the preceding 22 months.
At first, as North Bay geologist/prospector and Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Roundtable member Frank Tagliamonte would recall later, "I thought this was a very innovative, democratic, very public process. It was not bureaucrats, politicians and interest groups huddling in dark corners and doing deals....It made you feel good."
But some time in the summer of 1998, Comba told the Sudbury prospectors, something began to go seriously awry. Instead of the full roundtables meeting, only the chairs of each of the three roundtables attended meetings, and this time they were behind closed doors.
The result, Comba predicted darkly, would have disastrous consequences for the future of Ontario's mining industry. The forest industry had cut a separate deal with the environmental lobby, Comba reported.
In return for guarantees of access to fibre elsewhere, the lumber/paper interests had agreed to give up access to fully 12% of Northern Ontario lands. This was all very well for the forest industry, because it was able to inventory the location, size and species of its resource, able therefore to horse trade to minimize its losses through the Lands for Life process.
Mining, and especially mines exploration, Comba emphasized, was a different matter. Because much of Ontario's mineral potential remains undiscovered, a 12% set aside could mean a concomitant loss of mineral development for all time - or not. By definition, no one really knew. Mineral exploration would be prohibited in the new parks and protected areas.
But didn't this also mean, conversely, that the mining industry still had the remaining 88% of north central Ontario to explore? Not really, Comba continued, because experience had shown that lands adjacent to park boundaries tended to be off limits to mining, too, though this was de facto rather than de jure.
Considerable public and environmental outcry would likely greet any mining development anywhere near a park or protected area. While such a development might even be legally permitted, the operator would likely have considerable difficulty raising capital for a development that could face endless court challenges.
(Indeed, I thought of a quarry operation that had been proposed near the entrance to Windy Lake Provincial Park northwest of Sudbury. A legal challenge via the Ontario Municipal Board, and one that I supported, had thrown the pit into some kind of regulatory limbo.)
Nor was that all, Comba continued. A number of the new parks, so-called "Signature" areas, would run along watercourses. But the rivers in Northern Ontario tended to flow north and south while the Greenstone Belts, which contained many of the north's most promising geophysical anomalies, ran underground east and west.
The probability of intersections were therefore extremely high, and in such an event Comba was betting on the environmental lobby's ability to stop new mining development. The upshot was that a great deal more than 12% of north central Ontario would be off limits to future mineral development.
As Comba spoke I found myself, almost sub-consciously, doing mental arithmetic about the group before him. Total number of Sudbury-area prospectors attending the meeting: 72. Total number of women in the audience: two. Number under age of 30: zero. Under 40: one? Over sixty: fully half.
From my vantage point at the back of the room the audience was a sea of white hair and balding heads. I contrasted this with meetings of environmental-aboriginal support groups I had attended in Toronto where the attendees were youthful, spirited, gender balanced and wise in the ways of the Internet, e-mail and mass media. It wasn't hard to tell which group had a future.
After the meeting I spoke with Frank Tagliamonte about the Lands for Life process. I told him that, for me, it had gone off the rails from the outset by its failure to include Northern Ontario aboriginal peoples in a way that they themselves found acceptable.
He nodded. "I know. The Aboriginal people had two concerns: first, that Lands for Life would complicate their land claims, and second, they feared that the whole process would lead to their betrayal. Guess what? Who has been betrayed but the people of Northern Ontario?"

We emerged from our cave that Monday morning in March just as Plato said we would, dazzled by the bright spring sunshine, unsure whether reality was out here, or back in the cave. The media was pretty sure the carefully stage managed reality of the cave was the real deal, and why not? There were almost no discouraging words heard about the Lands for Life announcement in the days that followed our release from the cave.
The Dope Show, it seemed, was the only show, and the whole thing was an undoubted media triumph for the Harris government.
Still, from here and there, came rumours of dissent. There was, first of all, a court challenge to Lands for Life that had been filed in the Ontario Court, General Division, by the Nishnabe Aski Nation in December, 1998. The motion, which seeks to set aside the Lands for Life process entirely, has two main thrusts, according to NAN lawyer Michael Sherry. The first is that recent Supreme Court decisions place the onus on government to consult, in a serious, meaningful way, with aboriginal peoples in land use decisions that may affect them, which the Harris government had clearly failed to do in this case. Secondly, the government had circumvented the Environmental Assessment Act in in the Lands for Life process, and that, too, was against the law.
Sherry expected there would be a brief court appearance in May, but that the case would not proceed to arguments until the fall of 1999, at the earliest.
There were also rumours that Comba's PDAC might file suit, especially over the thousands of existing claims that had been "parked" by Lands for Life. The government has given some sort of guarantee concerning recompense or offsets, "but they're not worth a fart in a windstorm," in Comba's words. PDAC's lawsuit is still under internal legal review, according to Comba, but in the third week of April the Association took out an ad in The Northern Miner urging its members not to sign a government contract that had been mailed to them concerning their parked claims. There were also rumours that a certain Toronto-based environmental group was itself displeased by the less-than-transparent Lands for Life process, and that it, too, was considering court action, but that could not be confirmed before press time.
As for me, I sit at my word processor, an old man on a river bank, contemplating time and the river and Northern Ontario. I think about Plato and that morning in the cave, and I ponder how time can bend and blur reality. I can see the past and the present of my beloved North Country quite clearly, but I can see no earthly way for my teenaged daughters to earn a living in Northern Ontario in the new millenium, as I have done in the last one. It's the vision of the future I can't seem to grasp. Is that because there isn't one?

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