Page 18 the government is welcome Letwin told the chamber audience It s not to take away from the need to be environmentally friendly or the need to work with our partners but it really seems to take a lot longer to day and it s a lot more expensive to get projects going The problem is when you extend a project over time you become vul nerable to price swings That can hurt you quite badly he said add ing that gold mining can be difcult IAMGOLD will be spending more than 1 billion at Cote Lake before earning a cent In a news release the company said the initial capital cost will be 14 billion I think it is a generic concern be cause we have seen delays W e haven t encountered too many de lays so far Id say it has been about a sixweek delay in some of our stuf I am not going to name names but it is always a concern of mine when it comes to a project this size that it is not going to move as quickly as you want it too Letwin said Y ou know if we call on our busi ness partners to help us we will be specifc about what were seeing and why we need the help Premier Doug Ford raised eyebrows during the 2018 Spring election when he suggested he was prepared to drive a bulldozer himself up to the Ring of Fire area in order to get that multibilliondollar mining project un derway When it comes to transparency On tario still lags behind When the Fra ser Institute asked about transparency in the permitting process 50 of re spondents in Ontario 48 of respon dents in British Columbia and 40 of respondents in Quebec cited a lack of transparency as a deterrent to invest ment In contrast only 9 of respon dents in Sweden and W estern Australia saw the level of transparency as a de terrent to investment This is an area where many Canadian jurisdictions performed poorly com pared to their counterparts in the Unit ed States Australia and Scandinavia As with transparency a number of the jurisdictions in the United States Aus tralia and Scandinavia outperformed many of the Canadian jurisdictions in providing confdence that the neces sary permits would be granted On this measure Quebec and Ontario per form better than British Columbia and W estern Australia performs better than all three jurisdictions Specifcally in Quebec and Ontario 90 and 88 of respondents indicated that they were either highly confdent or confdent that they would receive the necessary permits compared to 73 in British Columbia According to the Ontario Mining As sociation OMA there are 38 mine sites operating in Ontario Nickel gold copper zinc and plati num group metals Diamonds salt gypsum talc calcium carbonate nepheline syenite and other industrial minerals Ontario is the lar gest producer in Canada of gold platinum group metals and nickel and the second lar gest pro ducer of copper The province is also a major producer of salt and structural materials Mining benefts all areas of the prov ince providing a broad scope of em ployment and entrepreneuria l oppor tunities Ontario is one of the safest mining jurisdictions in the world and mining is one of the safest industrie s in On tario achieving a 96 improvement in lost time injury frequency over the past 30 years V alue of mineral production in On tario was 99 billion in 2017 Newlyelected T immins mayor Geor ge Pirie the former CEO of Placer Dome Canada feels T immins is one city that still has enormous po tential In his opening address to citiz ens and the new council Pirie outlined a num ber of possibilities Our mining sector will continue to prosper as there is no better place to explore than from a base in T immins There is no better place to locate your mills refneries and smelters than here in T imm ins There is no bet ter administrat ive center than here in T immins from which to run your gold base metal battery metal diamond or ferrochrome operations from stated Pirie Pirie added Our ener gy sector is un limited with geothermal potential in our deep mines and frigid cold air in the upper leve ls Why is this poten tially important Because the lar gest single cost in the cloud computing world that mines big data is air con ditioning Is it possible to attr act these companies to T immins W ell I can only ask why not Sudbury has a neu trino laboratory Lack of transpar ency seen as a deterr ent to investment The one concern I have as a Canadian is that we get bogged in the mass of r egulations Contd from pg 16