NEW SCHOOL
HOW TECHNOLOGY HAS DRIVEN A STAKE THROUGH TRADITION OF MINING CLAIMS.
About two decades ago, Glenn McBride found himself in one of the most remote parts of northern Quebec. Surrounded by forests and marsh near the Davoust River, there were zero roads, zero towns and exactly zero development.
A fleet of 12 helicopters had dropped McBride and about 80 other men into the bush to whack a path through the thicket and swamps in one of the last great staking rushes in Quebec.
Staking a claim is what it sounds like: gaining the exclusive right to explore for minerals on a defined plot of land. All Crown land, as well as some private land, can be staked for a fee.
For most of the past century, the staking process stayed pretty much unchanged. A person could stake land by driving fourfoot-high squared-off posts into the ground at each corner of the desired plot, and then cutting a path through the trees to mark the claim’s boundaries.
Not long after McBride’s trip into Northern Quebec around the turn of the century, the province switched to a digital system, eliminating the need for the physical bushwhacking that he and others performed.
One by one, other provinces followed. This spring, Ontario joined most of the rest of Canada in completely switching to an online system that allows anyone with a credit card and internet connection to stake a claim.
Like any policy change, there are winners and losers, and McBride — who earned much of his livelihood for the past four decades from staking — knows which side he falls on.
“It’s a bad thing for guys like myself and older prospectors,” said McBride who lives in New Liskeard, Ont.
The change is part of an ongoing process to bring Ontario’s Mining Act, which has its origins in the 19th century, into the modern era, according to the province. The stated goals of the modernization include creating greater recognition for Aboriginal rights and treaties, minimizing the impact of mining on the environment and creating processes that are less likely to create conflicts with private landowners.
But it has also quietly heralded the end of the long-standing profession of staking, around which a community of sorts had formed. Now, mining companies can stake claims themselves from the comfort of an office, but the resulting loss of income for McBride and other stakers isn’t all they have to grumble about.
McBride is the first to say there are ways to make up the lost income: For example, they can build camps for mining companies or survey land.
He liked staking, though, because it afforded a rare degree of independence. “It was excellent work, you’d be out there and doing your own thing,” McBride said. “We’d be out in the bush (for) three or four months per year. Winter is one of the better times, because all the swamps are frozen.”
Out trekking, sometimes for days on end, the stakers would inevitably come across unusual looking rocks. Over time, they developed their knowledge about mineralization and geology, and many started staking their own claims in addition to those for their clients. In other words, staking allowed them to start prospecting for themselves.
“You don’t have to have a geology degree to be a successful prospector,” said Eric Marion of Kirkland Lake, Ont. “You just need to be able to recognize some of the basic things and have an eye for what’s different.”
Being able to spot that peculiar trait in a rock, such as veining pyrite, to indicate unusual mineralization is enough, he added.
Marion has been buying properties, prospectively, and occasionally selling them for at least two decades. That’s not to say prospecting has provided him with a liveable income. On the contrary, he described it more as a passion that consumed much of his time, energy and savings with occasional payoffs over the years.
“There’s been a lot of prospectors who come through here and die broke,” he said, acknowledging that’s just part of the deal.
Marion met other stakers who prospected through a local prospectors association, but the community of stakers often came together in the remote corners of the province.
It was not uncommon to cross paths with other stakers when, say, someone discovered an interesting mineralization, spurring a rush of exploration by mining companies in that area. That’s when stakers would cut deals with each other to save them from competing to drive wooden posts into the same piece of land.
“Some guys wanted to be secretive and grab the whole thing, but it’s pretty well impossible if there’s 20 guys there,” McBride said. “So you’d say, ‘This is what I want.’ It turns out better than trying to rush around.”
In mid-April, Michael Gravelle, who until May 8 was Minister of Northern Development and Mines, said in a statement that one of the benefits of the new system is that it “will greatly reduce the amount of disputes associated with ground staking.”
He declined to be interviewed, but in a statement provided through a spokesperson, he described the changes as a way to make Ontario more efficient, and a premiere mining destination.
The result of the change, so far, has been a virtual deluge of digital claims. In the first week, more than 17,000 claims were staked. To put that in perspective, around 42,000 claims were staked during all of 2017, according to a spokesman for Gravelle.
Part of that deluge may have been the backlog from a threemonth staking moratorium, between January and April, while the province created its new digital system. As of May 22, there were 21,800 claims staked, about the same pace as 2017.
McBride said a lot of his colleagues don’t use computers; some even detest them.
“I know several fellows that don’t understand the computer game so they’re right out of the ball game,” he said. “Every time they touch a computer, they worry they’re going to break it.”
McBride is still expecting to prospect, but only on behalf of mining companies that will send him and others into the bush to haul out soil and rock samples. It’s hard work that you have to enjoy, he said.
Today, there aren’t many young people who want to do it, according to the Mining Human Resources Council. Since 2008, it found the percentage of the industry’s workforce above 55 years old has grown to 15 per cent from 11 per cent, while the number of workers under 24 has shrunk to five per cent from 11 per cent.
“I belong to the Northern Prospectors Association of Ontario,” said Marion, 59, “You go there, and it looks like a geriatrics’ club.”
Many stakers, of course, had been anticipating the digital switch for years, as smartphones proliferated and the number of devices connected to the internet, from cameras to hand tools, grew.
Mining itself has also been changing. Whereas at the beginning of his 1980s, McBride would disappear into the bush on jobs for months at a time, he said it is now rare that he takes trips longer than three weeks.
“There’s lots of guys that relied on it,” he said. “We’ll survive. I have to change, too. I have to go with the flow.”