Book excerpt: How the sparks of conflict in Ontario’s Ring of Fire set alight

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 10, “From backrooms to bulldozers,” of Ring of Fire: High Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness. Read more about the book, written by Virginia Heffernan and published by ECW Press, here. This chapter details how a clash between Indigenous rights, Ontario’s Mining Act and hapless politicians sets the stage for conflict in the mineral-rich region.

Dalton McGuinty was Ontario premier in 2007 when the Ring of Fire was discovered. At the time, the courts were starting to consistently side with First Nations across Canada over the right to be consulted about development on their traditional lands. The province was clumsily playing catch-up.

Ontario’s inability to manage disputes between resource developers and First Nations asserting their legal right to consultation — which often involves coordination among several different ministries — culminated in 2008 when Justice Patrick Smith imprisoned Chief Donny Morris and five other members of the Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (KI) First Nation for contempt of court. Morris and other community members had been fighting for a decade to stop Platinex Resources from drilling for platinum on KI’s traditional lands 600 km north of Thunder Bay, just northwest of the Ring of Fire. Platinex fought back, suing the KI First Nation and the Ontario government for disrupting exploration on claims it had legitimately staked and explored under the Ontario Mining Act.

The case went to the Ontario Court of Appeal, which ruled that the six-month jail sentences meted out by Justice Smith were too harsh. The appeal court reduced them to the ten weeks of time served. Ontario then settled with Platinex, paying $5 million for losses the company incurred.

McGuinty’s Liberals withdrew the disputed lands from staking and reformed the Mining Act to include a new vehicle for dispute resolution.

After the verdict, Vernon Morris, chief of the Oji-Cree Muskrat Dam First Nation, stated: “The government’s view of duty to consult is that there will be basis for discussions to begin for planning and development. Our interpretation of the duty to consult is that we have a right to say ‘No’ when the actions for development will have a harmful effect or no benefit to our First Nation.”

It was a watershed case in Ontario, whose provincial leaders would be wary of shirking their duty to consult in the future.

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But Dalton McGuinty didn’t have much to say about what was happening on the ground in the Ring of Fire until 2010, when Cleveland-based Cliffs Natural Resources started pouring millions of dollars into the area in the hopes of accessing a chromite source to complement its well-established iron ore and steel business. The premier was encouraged by Cliffs’ investment and saw the Ring of Fire as an opportunity for Ontario to recover from the 2008–09 global financial crisis. He leaned on the federal government to help build the infrastructure required to get the mines built as quickly as possible.

Up until then, a lot of the Ring of Fire exploration and infrastructure planning had been proceeding without Indigenous consultation, contrary to the growing tendency for the Supreme Court of Canada to rule on the side of First Nations in battles with provinces over resource development.

Though most Ontarians were oblivious to the transgressions, the exploration activity did not go unnoticed by Indigenous communities.

Predictably enough, in early 2010, band members of Marten Falls, 100 km southeast of the Ring of Fire, erected a blockade to prevent companies from landing their bush planes on frozen airstrips on Koper Lake and McFaulds Lake, within the community’s traditional lands.

Without access to the lakes, Noront, Cliffs, and other companies would be unable to fly in supplies and personnel to conduct what they considered vital winter exploration in the region.

Led by Chief Elias Moonias, Marten Falls established the blockades not necessarily because the community members wanted to prevent further exploration, but because they wanted the companies to use their airstrip and their winter road instead of the frozen lakes. “We are not against mining and want to do business, but we want to do it together,” Chief Moonias told the Canadian Press.

To calm the waters, McGuinty sent Northern Development and Mines Minister Michael Gravelle to Marten Falls to find out how to appease community members. Minister Gravelle met with Chief Moonias, hammered out an agreement, then dined on moose stew with the rest of the community before hopping on a puddle jumper to fly to Webequie, west of the potential mine sites.

Under the agreement, Marten Falls agreed to lift the blockades in exchange for the Ontario government hearing out the demands of Moonias and Webequie Chief Cornelius Wabasse. If the chiefs were not satisfied with the negotiations over demands for a revamped airport, environmental impact reviews, training and job guarantees, an extended road network, and a better memorandum of understanding with the government, they would resume the blockade. But resolving the conflict was never going to be that easy. While Gravelle feasted on stew and exchanged gifts with Moonias, some of the community’s youth stood silently on the fringes of the gathering with placards reading “This land is our land.”

In 2011 the province stepped up its commitment to the process by creating a Ring of Fire Secretariat, essentially a new government department to encourage development of the chromite and other deposits while taking into account environmental impacts and the economic needs of the First Nations communities.

At a Ring of Fire infrastructure conference held in Thunder Bay in mid-2011, Gravelle outlined the extraordinary, once-in-a-century opportunity the Ring of Fire represented. “We need to get it right, that is why we have set up a Ring of Fire coordinator, why we are setting up a Ring of Fire Secretariat, and why we are working so hard with all the partners, the First Nations and the companies, to make sure we move forward together,” he said. “That is crucially important.” But the next year, McGuinty — the first Liberal premier to secure three consecutive terms in office since the nineteenth century — was forced to step down amid indignation over what was considered a scandalous decision to cancel gas-powered electrical plants in NIMBY Liberal ridings at a cost to taxpayers of $1 billion.

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Kathleen Wynne succeeded McGuinty. She too considered the Ring of Fire a unique opportunity to satisfy northern constituents, advance Indigenous reconciliation, and fill government coffers. Her approach was more conciliatory.

She set up a meeting with the Matawa Tribal Council of nine First Nations, the first the council had had with a sitting premier since 1975. By the time they parted ways, Wynne and the council had established the basic pillars of a framework agreement for development of the Ring of Fire: employment and training opportunities; effective land management that respects environmental protection; resource revenue sharing; and infrastructure where there was none.

The new premier moved quickly to set the negotiations in motion. She appointed retired Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci to serve as chief negotiator for the province. Bob Rae stepped in as chief negotiator on behalf of the Matawa Tribal Council. Optimism was in the air.

“My job arose out of the First Nations’ desire to engage with the provincial and federal governments in a more collective way because Cliffs’ proposed mine was a huge development that would have a wide impact,” said Rae. “We did have the attention of the premier and she met openly with us. The chiefs didn’t like everything they heard because she was telling it as she saw it as first minister. But she really paid attention.”

Still, the legacy of distrust established over the decades the Crown had repeatedly failed to meet its treaty obligations to First Nations remained a dark cloud over the negotiations. And Cliffs, beginning to suffer financially, was growing impatient with the endless meetings between government, Indigenous groups, and industry in Toronto and Thunder Bay that never seemed to resolve anything.

“If a company shows up with a bag of money, surely you find a way to help them spend it,” said David Anthony, former VP and senior project director for Cliffs, who quit the project in frustration in 2012. “I think if you go to fifteen different meetings and no progress is made, you come to the conclusion that [development] is never going to happen.”

Exacerbating the dysfunction was an assumption that all nine of the First Nations of the Matawa Tribal Council would speak with a common voice. The council’s slogan is “The Power of Unity. The Dignity of Difference.” While the communities are united in their belief that they have jurisdiction over their traditional lands, the Ring of Fire discussions only served to emphasize their differences. Four of the communities (Aroland, Constance Lake, Ginoogaming, and Long Lake #58) have access to all-season roads; the other five (Eabametoong, Nibinamik, Neskantaga, Marten Falls, and Webequie) are only accessible by air or winter road, so their priorities regarding infrastructure are different.

Marten Falls, Webequie, Neskantaga, and Nibinamik are the closest communities to the proposed development and have the most to gain from jobs and training programs, but Neskantaga also lies on the shores of Attawapiskat Lake, an important and relatively pristine source of fish that could be disrupted by mining activity or road building.

And nothing about the formation and evolution of the nine communities had been organic. “The political structures and how they express themselves are a consequence of the Indian Act,” said Rae. “When people say, ‘Why can’t you just agree?’ they respond, ‘Well, why did you create nine communities to represent a few thousand people?’ The communities are different because a lot of things have happened historically to create different dynamics,” including abuse suffered at the hands of priests visiting the communities to convert their members to Christianity.

The resulting trauma, and disagreements about how to respond to the church, divided clans and families. The Nations found it difficult to reach consensus on all the issues that confronted them.

Meanwhile, shaken by lower commodity prices and an erosion of shareholder confidence, Cliffs was getting cold feet as the negotiations dragged on. Finally, after spending about $550 million in the region over four years, the company announced it was pulling out of the project in late 2013. Its new CEO, Lourenco Goncalves, who was parachuted in to revive the American company’s flagging fortunes, went so far as to say the Ring of Fire was beyond the point of no return.

Cliffs’ departure was unsurprising given the company’s internal turmoil coupled with the uncertainty surrounding the Ring of Fire, and with Cliffs went the urgency to strike a deal with the First Nations. All that was left in the Ring of Fire was a handful of junior companies without the financial resources to achieve much more than a little grassroots exploration. It seemed like a death knell for the ambitious development project.

“I did not once hear the Ontario government say [they were] ready to fund a road. It was always: let’s get together for lunch, we’ll pay a bunch of people to come to the meeting, we’ll go over the same stuff we’ve gone over a hundred times before. And at the end of the meeting, there will not be a single resolution or any indication that we actually plan to do something,”

David Anthony told me. “If [they] had said they would build a road and toll it back to us, or at least start a dialogue about how a road could get built, there might be a whole chromite industry in Canada right now.”

But the province was undeterred. In mid-2014, Premier Wynne announced that her minority government was prepared to contribute $1 billion to build a road to the Ring of Fire. Minister Gravelle implored the federal government to match the infrastructure funds, calling the Ring of Fire a “project of national significance.” He wrote to his counterpart in Ottawa, Greg Rickford, requesting a meeting “at your earliest convenience to discuss the [Ring of Fire] and the importance of a strong federal role in ensuring this development can proceed and its economic benefits for Ontario, First Nations and Canada can be realized.”

But the feds, then led by Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, were mostly silent on the file. They said they would need a detailed plan from Ontario, including fully costed infrastructure proposals, before they would be willing to step into the fray. Part of the challenge was that Indigenous affairs are handled federally, while mining falls under provincial jurisdiction. Rarely do the two levels of government confer on those two areas of interest. It’s a convenient means to dodge the issue.

At a meeting in Timmins in March 2015, federal Treasury Board President Tony Clement reiterated that the Ring of Fire needed two things before the federal government would take a sustained interest: a worthwhile return on investment and a good working relationship between the province and the First Nations. In his opinion, the proposed development lacked both.

The dismissal by the federal government was frustrating not only for the province but also for the First Nations involved. Canada has certain obligations to Indigenous peoples recognized and affirmed in section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, interpreted to include a wide of range of cultural, economic, and political rights. The Matawa Tribal Council rightly expected, at the very least, to have discussions with representatives in Ottawa, not just be left at the mercy of the province.

Eventually, Wynne herself grew impatient with the impasse. She sent a letter to the Council Chiefs in May 2017, demanding that they come together on decisions or she would scrap the regional framework and deal with the communities on an individual basis. In her letter, Wynne told the chiefs they “should not squander” her 2014 commitment to spend $1 billion to help build a road to the deposits in the Ring of Fire.

“We have not achieved much of the progress on road and infrastructure development that we had hoped for under the RFA [regional framework agreement] over the past three years,” Wynne wrote in the letter. “While I continue to hope progress can be made, I am prepared to continue to advance discussions with those First Nations that would like to pursue transportation infrastructure through our bilateral process.”

After many months at the negotiating table, Rae was equally discouraged. “Frustrating is not a strong enough word. There was a moment in time when we had a framework worked out and signed and the provincial government was willing to make some investment in the communities and their well-being,” he said. “But there was not enough trust on the table for [the communities] to move ahead.”

Neskantaga was particularly wary. While Chief Wayne Moonias believed Wynne’s heart was in the right place and she understood the suffering the First Nation had endured under Treaty 9, he said it was “disingenuous” of her to expect Indigenous peoples to cooperate with resource permits on their land while their own jurisdictional claims went unaddressed.

Tensions escalated when the province signed agreements with Webequie and Marten Falls to make them proponents on the environmental assessments to build roads into their communities (from the Ring of Fire in Webequie’s case and from a forestry road that leads to the town of Nakina in Marten Falls’ case).

The neighbouring communities of Neskantaga and Eabametoong viewed the decision as favouritism and accused the Wynne government of acting in bad faith by not adhering to the regional framework agreement.

They considered the agreements an attempt to “divide and conquer” the First Nations within the Matawa Tribal Council.

“The approach the Wynne government is taking to roads in the Ring of Fire is a scandal and could be a nail in the coffin for our Aboriginal rights and way of life,” the two communities said in a joint media release issued in May 2018.

A month later, Wynne was voted out of office and replaced as premier by Conservative Doug Ford. At least Wynne was the devil they knew.

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“If I have to hop on that bulldozer myself with Vic [Nipissing MPP Vic Fedeli] on the other one, we’re going to start building the roads to get to the mining,” Ford announced in the lead-up to the election as he outlined the Conservative Party’s plans for Ontario’s Far North, including the Ring of Fire.

One could almost hear the cries of frustration coming from some of the Matawa chiefs more than 1,000 km to the north. After getting so close to a negotiated agreement with the provincial government to develop the Ring of Fire, it seemed as if their voices would dissipate in the vast swamp. The divide and conquer mentality would prevail.