Bill Mercer, president of the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC), is ecstatic about the federal government’s 2003 budget announcement that the temporary Investment Tax Credit for Exploration in Canada (ITCE) will be fine tuned and extended by at least one year. The buy period will now close Dec. 31, 2004 and the expenditure period Dec. 31, 2005. “The PDAC estimates the program has helped raise almost $400 million for grassroots mineral exploration in Canada to the end of December 2002,” says Mercer.
Flow-through has resulted in an average of one discovery per month since ITCE was introduced. Canada has wrestled the title of No. 1 country in the world for mineral exploration spending from Australia for the first time in eight years as a result of flow-through shares.
