A map of the future.

• Author: Robinson, David
• Position: ECONOMICALLY SPEAKING

As minister of northern development and mines, Rick Bartolucci has published the most important development map of Northern Ontario. It isn't a map of what he is doing, or even what he plans to do-this map shows what others have stopped doing. But with a bit of imagination the map also shows Northern Ontario's future.

Strange to say, the map didn't get into the Northern Growth Plan. Maybe the team that wrote the plan didn't realize what they had. After all, why do we care where all the abandoned mines in Northern Ontario happen to be? It's just one of the many neat maps available on the Ministry Northern Development and of Mines website.

It is the unsurprising information in this map that matters. The map shows that there are a lot of abandoned mines. We all knew that, although we probably didn't know just how many. The map shows that mines tend to be found close to railroad lines and major highways. That isn't very surprising either. The third, not very surprising but important fact, is there are only four abandoned mines in the northwest quarter of the province.

So why is all this unsurprising information important? Because the northwest will eventually have as many abandoned mines as the rest of the province. And before they can be abandoned, they will have to be developed. The map really tells us that several hundred mines will be developed in the northwest over the next 100 years.

There are already 15 mines that will probably be developed in a 25-kilometre-long strip near McFauld's Lake. It makes sense to expect there will eventually be 50 or 100 in that area alone. There are more than 100 in the Timmins area, and similar numbers in the Sudbury area.

Can we be sure that these other mines will develop? You'd have to be crazy to bet against it. Over the next 50 years the world will demand more ore than has been extracted in the history of mankind. Metal prices will keep rising. Transportation in the region will improve. The rate of development will probably accelerate over the next century. Eventually there will be abandoned mines everywhere.

And this means that Rick Bartolucci has a very big job ahead. As minister of northern development and mines, he has to lay the foundation for the development of a region larger than...