Mining, conservation and the northern coast

The position

The argument is a matched pair, and it only works as a pair. Protect the places where protection costs almost nothing and preserves something irreplaceable. Develop the places where the geology, the infrastructure, the workforce and the communities already exist. And decide which is which on geological and environmental evidence, with Indigenous consent, rather than by drawing lines on a map in another city.

He came to it from inside the industry. He took a geological engineering degree at the University of Manitoba, specialised in groundwater hydrology, and worked in mining before his 1996 accident. He has told the House more than once that he worked underground and in gold mines, and that the education took him through most of the open-pit and underground operations in Manitoba.

Protect: the Seal River watershed

From November 2017 he argued repeatedly for the permanent protection of the Seal River watershed, roughly 50,000 square kilometres running from near Tadoule Lake to Hudson Bay, almost entirely within Manitoba. His case rested on what the watershed does not contain: no mining claims, no roads, no advanced exploration. Protecting it therefore sterilises nothing, which is precisely what makes it the right place to protect.

He first put it to the House on 9 November 2017 and returned to it at least five times over the following year, in debate on a wetlands resolution, in questions on Bill 7, in his Bill 7 speech and again in a written submission to the Throne Speech debate in November 2018. His proposal was for a canoe park, entered on foot, developed with the Dene at Tadoule Lake, with the water clean enough to drink from the side of a canoe.

Develop: the Thompson Nickel Belt

The other half of the argument was made against a federal proposal for a national park of roughly 4,400 square kilometres in the Manitoba lowlands, which he argued overlapped the southern extension of the Thompson Nickel Belt. His objection was not to parks. It was that this particular park would be placed on prospective ground next to an established mining region with the power, roads, communities and skilled workforce already in place, and that the announcement alone would be enough to drive exploration capital elsewhere.

He set out the trade directly: protect the Seal River instead, where nothing is foreclosed, and leave the nickel belt to be explored. In estimates in April 2018 he reduced it to a line that has followed him since, that there are many places to put a national park and an ore body is not one of them.

The argument reached the industry directly. A week after he made it, The Northern Miner published an edited transcript of the speech under his name, in its print edition of 27 November 2017.

Mindful Mining

In October 2018 he set out the whole position in The Northern Miner, under the headline “Mining industry in Manitoba is near collapse.” He argued that Manitoba’s mining sector had been contracting well beyond what the commodity cycle explained, that unpredictable access to Crown land was deterring exploration, that lost smelters and infrastructure do not come back, and that foregone mining means foregone employment, revenue and opportunity for northern and Indigenous communities. The piece announced a provincial mining strategy under the name Mindful Mining Manitoba.

The constructive half of the argument ran alongside it: Thompson’s Class 1 nickel as a battery mineral, lithium, gold, diamonds and silica sand, skills training through University College of the North and by the operators themselves, and development conditional on environmental licensing and consultation under section 35.

The coast and tidewater

Manitoba’s Hudson Bay coastline runs through the same argument. In a thirty-minute speech on Bill 7 in May 2018 he set out the province’s marine coast as most Manitobans never think of it: the Seal, Churchill, Nelson and Hayes rivers and their estuaries, the beluga whales that gather in them, a saltwater coastline most people do not know the province has.

He also argued the economic case for it. In iPolitics in July 2018 he proposed that the Manitoba marine coast be studied as an alternative route for shipping Alberta bitumen, noting that Churchill already has a railway and a deep-water port, and that the Nelson River watershed offers a natural corridor. He returned to the same idea in the Legislature in April 2019, arguing that Manitoba could help Alberta both by opening the marine coast for access to tidal water and by sending it clean electricity.

Where it stands now

He has not changed the argument, he has updated it. Writing in the Winnipeg Free Press in May 2026, he returned to the Seal River proposal in the age of critical minerals: protect the intact watershed, which has no operating mines, industrial roads or advanced exploration to displace, and develop the established mineral belts, where the case for extraction is strongest and the disruption least.

In Steven Fletcher’s words

These citations are as complete as the record now allows. More will be added as they are found, and these pages change as the facts do. Where a source is a recollection rather than a document, it is identified as such.