message from the president of the northwestern Ontario Prospectors association, mike Grant

Dr. Rudy Wahl accepts trophy.

As I start this, it is four days since the equinox and spring is slowly creeping into Thunder Bay with temperatures on the plus side and a little rain. While spring heralds the coming field season for many prospectors, there is not a great deal else to celebrate this year as we face pandemic anxiety, the suspension of operations at mines, the curtailing or postponement of many exploration programs and the cancellation of activities including the Ontario Prospectors Exploration Showcase (OPES) and Thunder Bay's Mining Day.

I had expected to be sitting back awaiting an article from our director Pam Coles touting Mining Day but, as the chair of the organizing committee, Pam is run off her feet as her customers re-schedule their exploration programs. The best we can do is to invite you on June 20, the day planned for the celebration, to take a few moments to visit the Mining Day website and relive last year's wonderful event, when more than 2,500 people came out to meet our community and enjoy the perfect summer weather. The photo gallery is at http://www. thunderbayminingday.com/2019-photogallery.html.

The Northwestern Ontario Prospectors Association (NWOPA) has postponed its annual general meeting and elections but of greater impact is the loss of our annual awards ceremony which is also held at the OPES. It is the highlight of the year for NWOPA: an opportunity to gather and celebrate the hard work and successes of the exploration community. The awards committee has reviewed the submissions and was in the process of informing the successful candidates when the bad news arrived. The NWOPA board of directors has not considered how and when we will hold our AGM and elections but will inform the membership when a decision is made (you may already have the information by the time you read this article).

However, we do have an award to celebrate. On March 3, 2020, Rudy Wahl, vice-president of NWOPA, received the Bill Dennis Award from the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC). This award "honours an individual or team of explorationists who have accomplished one or both of the following: made a significant mineral discovery; made an important contribution to the prospecting and/or exploration industry". The specific citation for Rudy recognizes "his enduring perseverance as a prospector and for the discovery of several precious metal, diamond and rare earth occurrences in northwestern Ontario". This is the latest of a series of awards given to Rudy over the past several years and may be almost as close to his heart as the honourary doctorate he received from Lakehead University in 2017. The full citation and a brief video of Rudy are available from the PDAC at https://www.pdac.ca/about-pdac/ awards/2020-award-recipients/2020bill-dennis-award. Our sincerest congratulations go to Dr. Wahl.

I want to extend a personal note of thanks to Newmont Mines and New Gold for their efforts to curtail the spread of COVID-19 into particularly vulnerable populations. In Newmont's case, the potential to introduce the virus into remote First Nation communities was great, given the relatively high rates of employment of First Nations’ members at Musselwhite and Éléonore. New Gold, which also has a high rate of First

Nation members working onsite, announced the closure of its operation in Richardson Township for two weeks in recognition of this, and the fact that many of their staff often cross the border into the U.S.A., which could bring an additional set of complications. The companies' decisions are most commendable.

On the "bureaucracy is not always the prospector's friend” front, some of our members are facing another difficulty in filing assessment work to hold their mining claims in Ontario. The province is demanding receipts for all expenses claimed for work including for personal equipment. A good idea in many circumstances, this has proven to be problematic when a “personal” rather than a “rental” tool — including ATVs, water pumps, hoses or, in one case, a homemade backhoe — is used. I am hopeful that this is an unexpected consequence of changes to the Mining Act regulations, a consequence that the province's Mines and Minerals Division of the Ministry of Energy, Northern Development and Mines (MENDM) will understand needs to be rectified. The province wants to see land worked and, where results are poor, relinquished to new hands and eyes (this desire to limit "sterilization" of land is the reason that issuing patents was ended in favour of leases, more than 30 years ago). Requiring rentals to claim an assessment expense would seem to fly in the face of this broader policy by forcing claim holders to run up greater expenditures than would otherwise be the case and, thus, hold their claims longer. In one example provided to MENDM, the claim for rental equipment was at least three times as high as for equivalent personal tools. Not only does this drive up the value of assessment-work claims, it is an unnecessary impediment to prospectors who are working with extremely limited budgets. We are in support of a schedule of allowable expenditures for personal equipment; that is, an equivalent to the current regulation that provides a fixed dollar-value for sweat equity. We are making this case to the Ministry.

Finally, when pulling up the information on Rudy's award from the PDAC website, I found reminders of past, happy events in the lives of some of our members. It was a delight to replay video celebrations of Peter Moses, winner of the Skookum Jim Award in 2017, and of the Bjorkman family, recipients of a Special Achievement Award in 2016. It was a bit of cheer on an otherwise cheerless day.

On behalf of the directors of NWOPA, have a productive summer of exploration and stay safe, find a mine. l

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