Mining Communities: Hard Lessons for the Future

K.J. Charles was Professor of Economics, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay.

The Centre for Resource Studies organized a seminar on Canada’s mining communities in Kingston on September 27-29, 1983. This seminar brought together individuals from industry, government, labour, universities, and other organizations to exchange views on policy issues related to Canada’s mining communities. Mining communities are mostly located in remote and isolated regions and are solely dependent on mining. Closures and temporary shut-downs have a crippling impact on these communities. Alleviating their hardships, and preventing the future occurrence of such crises, is a task that deserves urgent and imaginative attention.

The book under review brings together the views of the seminar participants on this important topic. The diversity of their backgrounds precluded unanimity of opinion on all issues, but a remarkable harmony of views seems to have prevailed. Members of mining communities over the years become attached to them and want their communities to survive mine closures. This spirit was well expressed by one of the speakers, who quoted from The Atikokan Story: “Atikokan is a town that wants to stay alive. The people of Atikokan like living there and they want to continue to live there. They are willing to work hard to keep the town going” (p.41).

A government task force in 1982 made several recommendations to deal effectively with the economic and social problems of mining communities. The participants of this seminar seem to have felt that government policy so far has been “reactive and ad hoc.” They identified a need for “more systematic approaches to the planning, location, and design of mining communities, and to anticipation of potential problems, particularly relating to mine closure, and to methods of dealing with such eventualities” (p. 172). There seems to have been general agreement that mining communities reflect Canada’s pioneering spirit and frontier development and that systematic efforts should be taken to deal effectively with their difficult and unique problems. The document deserves to be read both by the public and by the policy-makers.