TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – Canada has no intention to shift policy to allow foreign companies, including diversified giant Rio Tinto and Australia's Paladin Energy, to own uranium production in the country, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver said on Monday.

“The specific policy is that production can only be done by companies with at least a 51% Canadian ownership, and there is no current plan to change that,” he told reporters in Toronto at the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) 2012 convention, the global mining industry’s biggest gathering.

Rio Tinto bought Hathor Exploration, which owns the Roughrider uranium deposit in Saskatchewan, for $654-million last year, having beaten Canada’s Cameco in a bidding war, while Paladin Energy, listed on the TSX and ASX, acquired the Aurora uranium project in Quebec through a C$260-million all-scrip deal with Fronteer Gold in early 2011.

The ownership restrictions in Canada’s uranium sector surfaced most recently when Conservative MP for Saskatoon-Humboldt Brad Trost introduced Private Members’ Bill C-385 on December 14, which seeks to allow foreign companies to completely own Canadian uranium production.

At the time, he flagged potential increased investments in the sector as well as job creation as likely outcomes if Parliament were to pass the Bill.

“Lifting foreign ownership limits on uranium mines will not pose a national security threat nor risk Canada’s nonproliferation commitments,” Trost said.

Oliver, also a member of the Conservative Party, told Reuters in December that the government had been considering changes to the so-called Non-Resident Ownership Policy, but had reached no decisions on the matter.

REGULATORY RATIONALISATION

In an earlier speech to delegates at the PDAC 2012 convention, Oliver retold the story of how the government aims to streamline the regulatory approval process for large resource extraction projects.

While the government had managed to cut timelines by half to an average of two years, more needed to be done to address overlaps and inefficiencies, he said.

The goal is to draft a regulatory process that he sums up as thus: “one project, one review, in a clearly defined time period”.