Adjustments for an even more efficient mining regime

Jocelyn Boucher
Direction du développement minéral

The nature of recent changes to the Mining Act (R.S.Q., c. M-13.1) requires modifications to the present Regulation respecting mineral substances other than petroleum, natural gas and brine (R.S.Q., c. M-13.1, r.2). The Act to amend the Mining Act, sanctioned December 18, 2003, aims mainly to reduce, in a progressive manner, staking parks in Québec. Staking parks are areas in which a claim is acquired by ground staking. Henceforth, a person will be able to acquire a claim in a staking park by map designation if that person possesses a declaration signed by neighbouring title holders establishing that no possibility of conflict exists. The progressive elimination of staking parks will in the end reduce the cost to the mining industry of mining title acquisition. Moreover, another modification will permit a holder to request the amalgamation of designated claims located within the same cell in order to facilitate the management of mining titles in the new system of map designation. In a different context, municipalities and intermunicipal boards will henceforth be able to obtain an exclusive mining lease (notably for sand and gravel) for the construction and maintenance of their streets and road networks.

Furthermore, other measures in the present regulation have to be revised in order to simplify the requirements imposed on the mining industry. Finally, new statutory powers aimed at specifying the technical details of claim amalgamation or replacement have been introduced.

The new statutory measures that should be in force on March 3, 2005 concern:

• the documents and information that must accompany a notice of map designation within a staking park;
• the documents and information that the request for claim amalgamation or replacement must contain in order to ensure the security of the various titles, as well as the technical rules allowing adjustments to be made concerning, among other things, the periods of validity and the amount of work to be accomplished following amalgamation or replacement;
• measures favoring the conversion of staked claims located north of latitude 52° as well as a measure requiring an agreement between the holders of staked claims located less than 400 metres from the mining right to be converted into map-designated claims;
• the addition, as a condition of concluding or renewing a mining lease for surface mineral substances, that the applicant not be in default in the production of his declarations or in the payment of royalties for each of the leases he holds;
• the filing of a five-year plan for the construction, repairing, and maintenance of streets and the road network by a municipality or an intermunicipal board for the acquisition of an exclusive mining lease for surface mineral substances;
• the replacement of the requirement to survey by the possibility of locating the site of a tailings park using the UTM coordinate system, much less costly, when this site is located on land covered by an exclusive mining lease for surface mineral substances;
• various modifications to harmonize with the Mining Act, the Geologists Act, and the Forest Act.

These new statutory measures will permit us to maintain and increase Québec’s attractiveness relative to mining regimes elsewhere, in particular by improving the method of obtaining a map-designated claim.