Mining and the Macdonald Commission: The State of the Industry in the Mid-1980s

Kenneth M. Glazier was Chief Librarian Emeritus at the University of Calgary, Alberta.

The Royal Commission on Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada, commonly known as the Macdonald Commission, published their report in the fall of 1983. The Commission gathered an enormous amount of material, including 1516 submissions from various groups and 19, 791 transcript pages of hearings. This study was written and submitted to the Commission and was published before the Macdonald Commission report was released.

The study deals in detail with two rounds of submissions to the Commission in 1983-84 related to mining. While it comments on the process of collecting and using submissions to the Commission generally, its objective is to analyze specifically how the mining industry sees itself and its future, and what it wants the government to do about it. It also analyzes how effective these submissions appear to have been and how effective the Commission was in eliciting from the assembled expertise of the mining industry the kind of data it needed to suggest intelligent long-term economic strategies for the industry. Mining and resources were seen by some as a potential engine for growth for the Canadian economy; by others, as an outdated, smokestack industry. The resolution of this issue of mining’s role in the Canadian economy was clearly central both to the industry and to the Commission.

This scholarly publication includes extensive bibliographies for all who are interested in the mining industry.