Getting the beast’s attention

This week, the Porcupine Prospectors and Developers Association (PPDA) has been holding “Mining Week in Timmins,” where the local industry takes to the streets — or, more precisely, the Timmins Square Mall — to get the importance of mining across to the general public.

Regular readers of this newspaper might be forgiven for thinking that in Timmins, it’s been Mining Week, every week, ever since the Porcupine Fire was put out. A city founded on the mines, and still dependent on the mines, should be eternally conscious of the industry that gives it its life’s blood. It is perhaps a mark of the times that the PPDA feels the need to make that point in its home town. Mining — like few other industries — has to turn out to buff its public image even in what should be the friendliest territory.

Credit, first of all, should go to the PPDA for making the effort, especially among schoolchildren. We live in a world where government-run school systems seem to try harder to sell a belief system than to teach basic intellectual skills. Running counter to that, as the PPDA is doing with its educational contests for pupils and as the Mining Matters program is doing through the efforts of interested and independently minded teachers, is one of the best investments the industry can make.

And the other investment is in making the case to the adults. Timmins is one thing, but put on a show about mining in Toronto or Vancouver and some people might wonder just what planet you had come from. The message that mining is integral to our advanced society is one that a lot of people have forgotten. Good for the PPDA for delivering that message again.

For the last half-decade, Ontario prospectors have been at the sharp end of the mining industry’s struggle for reliable and predictable land access. It was the individual prospector and the small exploration company that paid for the green bona fides of the Harris government, through the Living Legacy program’s abridgement of the free-miner principle.

None of this would have happened if it wasn’t acceptable among the elites to beat up on an entire industry. When policy-makers (in both politics and the civil service) won’t stand up for an economically valuable industry, there is something very wrong with the way policy is made, or with the people that make it.

We doubt very much that there’s anything wrong with the public itself, but ordinary people don’t often have the need, the time, or the resources to do policy analysis of their own. For that, they count on representative government, and rely on the judgment of the people they elect.

Those representatives, in turn, are often thought to be sensitive to public opinion; which, perhaps, they would be if they ran into enough of it. They don’t always. Still, hearing what ordinary people have to say can be a refreshing experience for a politician.

Unfortunately, ordinary people also often have to rely on others for information to form their opinions; and they wind up having to trust that job to the press, which is notorious for doing it badly most of the time. Mining Weeks like the one in Timmins can do much to bypass a mass media that knows little about mining and doesn’t greatly care to learn.

We’ve said this before: ordinary people will listen hardest to other ordinary people whose day-to-day concerns mirror their own. The more the general public sees of mining people, the more it should recognize that we have a great deal in common. And when it does, that will be a very good thing for mining’s future.