Canadian Mineral Policy, Past and Present: The Ambiguous Legacy

John Marston was a federal civil servant in Ottawa.

Minerals have been, and still are, of crucial importance to Canada. The Centre for Resource Studies was established in 1973 under the sponsorship of Queen’s University, the federal Department of Energy, Mines and Resources, and the Mining Association of Canada to carry out a program of research and publication on mineral policy issues.

David Yudelman, the author of this in-depth study, has produced both a short selective history of Canadian mineral policy and an analysis of contemporary mineral policy. It is not a history of Canadian mining but rather an attempt to pull together scattered and published material on the early history of Canadian mineral policy. Also, it examines this historical policy in the light of that of the 1970s and 1980s and analyses contemporary policy and its relationship with the overall economic development plans. The objective of the study is to provide some guidelines for solving the present and future problems of the mining industry in Canada.

In the preface, David Anderson, Executive Director of the Centre for Resource Studies, states, “we are pleased to offer this study, in the hopes that it will provide useful insights drawn from past experience that can be applied in the process of developing effective mineral policies for Canada in the future.”