Rideau cottagers cry foul over mineral prospecting

Cottagers in the Rideau Lakes region of eastern Ontario claim that prospectors are tramping across their land, digging trenches and cutting down trees, sometimes without the owner's permission.

However, Jamie Kneen, a spokesman for the Ottawa environmental lobby group Mining Watch Canada, says there's little that landowners can do about it.

"You cannot deny them access," he said in a telephone interview with CBC News, citing the provisions of the Ontario Mining Act. "You can try to negotiate access routes and times. But you cannot [in many cases] stop them driving a bulldozer across your land or digging a trench."

In some parts of Canada, oil and mineral exploration companies cut down more trees than the forestry companies, with fewer controls over their activities.

Mining companies sometimes leave behind a hole in the ground, a trench, a pile of rubble or a swatch through the trees that are wide enough for a truck to pass through.

"We can sometimes shame them into cleaning up their mess," Kneen said. But shame doesn't always work.

The only alternative in many cases, he said, is to stake a claim on your own land, and demand the mineral rights in your own name.

And that is something thatmore cottagers are doing, he said. All it takes is a $25 fee for a prospector's licence, a small staking fee and some incidental charges.

Laws give rights to companies

The root of the problem — from the landowners' viewpoint — are provincial laws that they say give important access rights to Ontario's mining companies. The companies often have the right to search for minerals virtually anywhere they want in the province, as long as they have the mineral rights to the land.

Most cottagers own the land their house stands on, Kneen said. But that gives them only the surface rights. Few cottagers own the mineral rights — the rights to the land beneath the surface — because few people know they exist.

Mineral rights have a long history of being contentious. But officials with the Ontario Ministry of Northern Development and Mines in Sudbury said the act is being revised in the near future to tryto deal with this issue.

Roy Spooner, a ministry spokesman, acknowledged that the Mining Act was designed to encourage exploration for minerals in one of Ontario's most important industries.

Mining companies took $7 billion worth of minerals out of the ground in Ontario last year, and spent another $1.5 billion on equipment and services, exploration and development.

Spooner said the current act does, in fact, include protections for the landowner, but they are complex and they depend on specific cases and locations, and the narrow interpretation of regulations.

In general, he said, prospectors need prior permission to stake a property that has been developed with buildings, gardens, orchards or vineyards, and they generally need to pay compensation for any damage they may cause to developed properties.

Rules vary widely

But those rules don't necessarily apply to undeveloped plots of land, to farms or in certain townships. In many of these cases, the prospector can, in fact, enter a person's land without permission and take samples, drill cores or clear away the trees.

Spooner said these rules tend to vary widely, depending on the township, the region and whether the mineral rights are owned by a private individual or by the Crown.

He said prospecting doesn't necessarily damage the property. The days when prospectors had a pick and a mule are long gone. Now, mining companies can fly sometimes over a property with a helicopter, drill a sample from an adjoining property or conduct electrical tests on the soil.

Even so, prospecting has been a concern for years in many parts of Canada.

In the Ottawa region, prospectors search for mica, Kneen said. "They dig pits. They leave holes and roads."

In other areas, it is gravel pits. "They take a lot of farmland," he said.

But in the Rideau Lakes region of Perth, Westport and other scenic towns, the current problem is graphite.

The demand for graphite has shot up in recent years, along with the demand for carbon fibre and other space-age materials. Carbon fibre is used for hockey sticks, bicycles, airplanes and sometimes auto parts, as manufacturers search for new materials that are stronger and lighter than steel.

And that worries cottagers in the Rideau Lakes region because they are sitting on some of the best graphite deposits around.