Mineral Commodities

Eight minerals have a page in this section. The eight were not picked for size and the set is not a league table. They are the minerals for which a federal statistical agency publishes a separate line, a federal department publishes something about Canada's standing, or both, so that a page about one of them can be written without borrowing a quantity from a trade association, an aggregator or a company announcement.

Read the middle column as a property of the source rather than of the ground. It counts the provinces and territories for which the annual table prints a figure in the stated year, and a jurisdiction whose cell is withheld under the confidentiality provisions of the statistics legislation drops out of that count while continuing to mine the thing. Three of the eight pages exist largely to explain a cell that was withheld, which is why the shortest lists here belong to minerals nobody would call minor.

Two federal publishers, and a quantity absent from the table

Every page in this section keeps two federal numbers apart, and the reason is structural rather than a matter of caution. The annual Statistics Canada series these pages draw on offers a short menu of measures: two of them count physical output, one counts what was sitting in store at the year end, and exactly one is expressed in money. That single money measure is the value of shipments. The value of production, which Natural Resources Canada publishes and which is the figure most often quoted as the size of Canadian mining, is not on that menu anywhere.

What follows for a reader is short and unforgiving. Two federal figures covering one mineral in one year can differ by a wide margin with nothing wrong anywhere, and averaging them, reconciling them or treating the larger as a correction of the smaller produces a number that no government has published and that nobody can check. Each field on the pages below names the publisher and the quantity in the label rather than in a footnote, so that the distinction is visible to somebody skimming the value column, which is how a five row block is actually read.

What a blank field is admitting

A dozen fields across these eight records carry no value, and the right column of the table above says which records they fall in. The blanks are not evenly spread and they are not random. Seven of them are the value of production, because the department that publishes that quantity gives a separate dollar figure for one mineral only and gives the rest as group totals or as percentage shares. Four are the global standing. The last is a value of shipments withheld for two consecutive years in both the value variable and the quantity variable.

A blank on this desk is a statement about the documents that were retrieved and read, never a statement that the quantity is unknown to the world. Somebody with a trade publication subscription, a provincial statistics release or a company filing opened in a browser can fill several of these in within an afternoon. Each page says which document would do it. Holding a field open until that document is in hand is the only method the front page commits to, and it costs a page a sentence rather than a reader an error.

Rankings, and four minerals without one

Four of the eight records show no global position. The federal pages read for this build name the minerals for which they give a world ranking, and copper, iron ore, zinc and lithium are not among the names on that list. That is worth stating precisely, because the obvious misreading is the damaging one: not appearing on a published ranking list is not a low rank. It is the absence of a rank in the documents consulted, and Canadian copper output in particular is large enough that a reader who inferred otherwise would be badly wrong.

Rankings also age differently from the tables beneath them. A world standing depends on what every other producing country did in the same year, so it is revised by events far outside Canada and can move without a single Canadian mine changing output. Where a ranking is given here it is reproduced as the department worded it, with its year attached, and it is never turned into a share, a tonnage or a trend. The jurisdiction pages under the mining section take the same figures apart by province instead.