Canadian Industry Online
A reference desk for the parts of the Canadian economy that move physical material: what comes out of the ground, what is made from it, what powers the making, and what carries the result to a port. One of those four is covered in depth and the rest are not, which is said plainly on each of their pages rather than papered over. 12 jurisdiction pages, 8 mineral pages and one account of how a mine is permitted are open below.
Mining by jurisdiction
- Ontario
gold, nickel, copper, stone and 2 more. All five fields established
- Quebec
gold, iron ore, nickel, copper and 2 more. All five fields established
- British Columbia
copper, gold, sand and gravel. 1 field not established
- Saskatchewan
potash, salt, sand and gravel. All five fields established
- Alberta
sand and gravel, non-metals, clay. All five fields established
- Manitoba
gold, nickel, copper, zinc, stone and 1 more. All five fields established
- Newfoundland and Labrador
Mining in Newfoundland and Labrador
nickel, copper, stone, sand and gravel. 1 field not established
- New Brunswick
non-metals and 1 more. 1 field not established
- Nova Scotia
aggregates, clay and refractory minerals and 1 more. All five fields established
- Yukon
lead, silver, zinc, sand and gravel. 3 fields not established
- Northwest Territories
Mining in the Northwest Territories
diamonds. 3 fields not established
- Nunavut
gold, silver. 1 field not established
Mineral commodities
The five desks
Jurisdictions, minerals and the permitting route. The built section
Scope only. Where the mineral record stops and nothing resumes
The uranium split, and the fuels that annual table leaves out
Why an annual dollar total cannot answer a freight question
Industrial systems, and how industrial records are served
What is not here
No page names a mine, an operator or an owner. Nothing here counts jobs, reserves or drilling budgets, nothing quotes a price, and no page forecasts anything. Only the mining section has a reference layer beneath it; the other four state their scope and name the records that would have to be retrieved before they carry one.
Those are boundaries of what has been retrieved and read rather than judgments about what matters, and each section page says which document would move its own.
Method
Nothing on this desk is written from memory. A figure reaches a page only through a record that names the document it came from, the year it covers and the quantity it measures, and a page that cites a document nobody retrieved fails to build at all. Statistics Canada publishes a value of shipments and Natural Resources Canada a value of production. Those two are not the same quantity and this desk never presents one as a check on the other. Read the editorial standards for the full method.
The convention that does the most work is the empty field. Where a value could not be established from a primary record the field says so, the record carries the reason, and the page says which document would close it. Those reasons repay reading, because they are not all the same kind of absence: a cell withheld by a federal agency to protect a respondent, a government web estate that would not answer a request, and a quantity nobody has ever published are three different conditions, and all three are on this site.