Ontario is one of the great gold countries on Earth and the Canadian Shield is why. The Porcupine camp at Timmins, the Mile of Gold at Kirkland Lake and the Red Lake camp gave up some of the richest ore ever mined; Cobalt had a silver rush so wild that the ore lay in the streets; Sudbury is a nickel district inside a meteorite crater; Bancroft is the mineral capital of the country and Thunder Bay runs amethyst. The province lets hobbyists onto that ground, but by an unusual route: not a permit, an enforcement policy with limits attached.
| Layer | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Legends and real places | 7 mapped for Ontario |
| Show caves | 3 in Ontario · see them all |
| Gem sites | 3 in Ontario · see them all |
| Haunted places | 4 in Ontario · see them all |
| World features | Caves, springs, waterfalls, old mines and historic sites, live from OpenStreetMap |
Ontario does not sell you a hobby permit, and it does not need to. Every rock and mineral in the province is originally owned by the Crown, and the Mining Act says that only somebody holding a prospector’s licence may explore for minerals. What the Ministry of Energy and Mines then does is apply ENFORCEMENT DISCRETION: it will generally not enforce those requirements against a hobby collector who stays inside its policy, on land where collecting is allowed. The policy’s limits are the whole deal. What you take must be minerals as the Mining Act defines them, collected for your own pleasure and your own collection, using HAND TOOLS ONLY (crowbar, pick, shovel, pan, sledgehammer, geological hammer, chisel), and no more than one person can excavate and carry unassisted from one site at one time. The ministry also advises varying your locations across a year rather than working one spot. Mechanized equipment, or anything commercial, gets none of that discretion and is straight back under the Act.
Collect on land where the MINING RIGHTS are open for mining claim registration, and it is your job to confirm that, not anyone else’s: the ministry’s Mining Lands Administration System map viewer and the local Land Registry Office through ONland are the two places to look. Where somebody else holds an interest you need their consent, and surface rights and mining rights can be held separately: with a private interest in the surface you need the surface holder’s consent, with a private interest in the mining rights you have no right to take samples without the mining rights holder’s consent, and where both are privately held you need both. Collecting cannot be done where the mining rights are not open, which takes in provincial parks, conservation reserves and other protected areas under the Provincial Parks and Conservation Reserves Act 2006 or the Far North Act 2010, national parks, reserves under the Indian Act, and any land withdrawn from prospecting or claim registration. The policy says nothing whatever about FOSSILS, so do not read it as covering them. It also carries a notice that it is in transition while the ministry updates for the online claim system, so read the current version before a trip rather than trusting anybody’s summary of it, this one included.
A marker is a public record, not permission. Check who owns the ground and what the local rules are first. Mining claims and land status on the map are United States records and stop at the border, so in Alberta that check is yours to make.
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