CMKX: This find by alfomny:
Lunchbreak here, so wanted to post this before heading back out.
I copied an excerpt of this new article from Globe and Mail (globeandmail.com) as posted by alfromny.
I am not sure how old the article is. I couldn't locate it on current news. It is even more relevant now if this article is 6 months to 2 years old. On the Debeers Canada website I viewed early this morning, they certainly have an interest in the area.
I'll post more from that later today tomorrow.
For now, I found this to be a great insight in what Debeer's thinks about the future of Canadian mining in Fort a La Carne. Be well. Bo
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Excerpt from Globe and Mail's story on Debeers:
In an office in De Beers's sleek, black-windowed building in Toronto, I spent an hour and a half one
afternoon talking about Fort à la Corne with Joe Joyce, De Beers's chief of exploration in Canada, and
Richard Molyneux, president and CEO of De Beers Canada Corp. Molyneux is South African and Joyce
is British, but both are really citizens of De Beers. They behave like imperial generals who regard with
interest, but not fear, the strutting of the provincials. Joyce and Molyneux were clearly uneasy with
important Kensington assertions about the Saskatchewan deposit-ease of stripping, throughput of mill,
life of mine. Yet as Molyneux himself said, the FalC 140-141 pipe "is the biggest kimberlite body within
the Fort à la Corne area, which is the largest kimberlite province in the world."
De Beers cannot afford to turn its back on such a target. There is a long string of "ifs" between this
moment and that point in the future when the venture might decide it had a mine, but the possible payoff
is too big to ignore. Said Joyce: "It's why we're there."
It seems incredible today to recall that when Zimmerman began his travels in what was still the old
diamond empire, the question was whether a new supply of rough could be marketed outside the De
Beers cartel. In not much more than a year from now, the Canadian diamond stream will have swelled
to a million carats a month, all of it rushing out of the Barrens and into an eager trade. If De Beers
succeeds, as it probably will, in ironing out its difficulties at the Victor pipe, and if other targets such as
Fort à la Corne prove out, the tide of Canadian production will increase still more.
I pressed Zimmerman for his opinion on the place Canada might some day occupy in the diamond
world. It's something that is always being asked at diamond conferences, as industry watchers
exchange the usual speculations about the rise or fall of Russia and the scene in the formerly war-torn
parts of Africa that happen to be diamond-rich. "When we were asking ourselves at BHP the question,
'How big?'" he said, "we always gave Botswana first place. As to who would be the second-biggest
producer down the road, you have to be looking at Russia and Angola. But there are problems in both
places. So could Canada be the world's second-biggest producer? You bet."
AI
