The Origins of Public Enterprise in the Canadian Mineral Sector: Three Provincial Case Studies

Aluin Gilchrist is a Vancouver-based Canadian government civil
litigation lawyer.

This is a brief history of the origins of the North East Coal Development Office in B.C., of Mining Development Corporation in Saskatchewan and of Novaco in Nova Scotia. Each of these three provincial government enterprises arose as a response to a very complex situation.

Prince and Doern give a beautifully concise conceptual analysis, then they present the facts so that the three stories really are interesting.

The analysis is in terms of ideas used in policy choice. That host of ideas is expounded in Doern and Richard W. Phidd’s Canadian Public Policy: Ideas, Structure, Process (Toronto: Methuen, 1983), but it is here simply presented in a one-page table ( p.5) with a list of some extensions of or surrogates for those ideas, such as “regional development,” “reorganization of a declining industry,” or “capture and socialization of resource rents.”

As the authors say (p.91) these three “case studies allow us to understand a broad range of policy subtleties and historical forces that have influenced creation of public enterprises in the mineral field.” Social Democratic or Tory, governments may find sufficient reasons to go mining.