In addition to the $17 million in public cash announced in 2011, the provincial government has given an additional undisclosed amount of public money from several departments to a company trying to re- open a fluorspar mine on the Burin Peninsula.
Justice minister Darin King made that apparently unwitting disclosure in answer to questions in the House of Assembly from Liberal leader Dwight Ball. King was answering a follow-up question from Ball on the $17 million. He’d originally posed questions that fisheries minister Keith Hutchings answered. Hutchings said the company had drawn down $300,000 of the public money. When Ball asked King to clear up the obvious discrepancy, King said emphatically:
I said zero of the $17 million has been drawn down because it is targeted toward the wharf project. There are other sources of funding from Natural Resources and other departments where the company has availed of to move the project forward. The $17 million was targeted specifically to that particular project. [Emphasis added]
