By IAN ROSS
Sudbury’s Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation (CEMI) fell short in their competition to be selected one of 11 national centres of excellence in science and technology.
CEMI was one of 110 national applicants eligible to tap into $165 million pool of federal funding to create Centres of Excellence in Commercialization and Research.
No big deal, says CEMI spokesperson Shannon Katary, it’s a case of “move up and on,” although they are still actively pursuing other federal funding through FedNor.
“We’ll move forward and try for what is available. They’ll be other rounds.”
Their proposal dubbed the Canadian Resources for Life Network never made it past the initial letter of intent phase of the competition.
Twenty-five groups advance to the second stage.
Last summer, CEMI executive director and CEO Peter Kaiser assessed his fledgling institute’s chances as “one in three” to make it to the final proposal stage in October.
Among the research groups being shortlisted for the second round include applicants from Vancouver, Ottawa, Saskatoon, Toronto and Montreal specializing in communications, medical and life sciences research, drug development, applied physics, wind energy technology, animal genomics and green building innovation.
Despite Canada’s mining industry expenditures being on an historic highs, none of the applicants moving onto the second round specialize in mining technologies.
Nevertheless at a Vancouver mines minister’s conference in September, federal Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn called the performance of Canada’s $40 billion mining sector “impressive” and called on governments and industry to work together and improve the industry’s competitiveness and sustained growth.
The provincial mines ministers agreed to develop a pan-Canadian mining research and innovation strategy to present at next year’s conference in Saskatoon.
Katary says there are other funding avenues to explore provincially and through industry-led centre of excellences.
Based on the campus at Laurentian University, CEMI is an integral part of Sudbury’s plan to grow its mining research and development cluster.
The CEMI plan is to create a national network of industry suppliers and providers, create an institute for entrepreneurial leadership development, and drive innovation in areas of deep mining technologies, environmental stewardship, automation and tele-robotics and mine process engineering.
Their proposal for a mining cluster embodies a wide ranging of academia, business, industry groups and government.
Some Laurentian-led research projects in Sudbury are underway, but are just in the preliminary stage.
“It’s good to know there are projects on the go and a lot of things in the pipeline,” says Katary.
To help establish the $30 million institute, Sudbury’s two major miners, CVRD Inco and Xstrata Nickel, each contributed $5 million out of the total investment of $18 million raised publicly and privately since 2005.
Katary says there’s much talk about more private interests getting into the mix, but securing government support adds credibility to move past the letter-of-intent stage.
