LETTERS TO THE EDITOR — National standard urged for qualified persons

Per your editorial “Anyone listening?” (T.N.M., Aug. 17-23/98), we are listening from the trenches and the diamond drill sites. We do need some reasonable qualification that can be policed in order to find a substantial base of qualified persons. We also need to have that as a national qualification.

I am registered in British Columbia but today cannot look at a Newfoundland rock sideways without being accused of improper conduct by the Newfoundland Professional Engineers Association. By the same token, my fellow Canadian from Newfoundland cannot take a sample of common dirt in British Columbia without being qualified in the province that made mining an endangered species.

The professional engineers and geoscientists of the various provinces are making this country more disparate than need be just to support their bureaucracies, which see growth of revenue as an objective more important than getting on with the job. This, of course, poses a great risk in external or foreign jurisdictions in that they too could require professional registration before working there.

It is one thing to be registered for the purposes of reporting to the regulatory authorities; it is quite another to be able to perform the normal procedures of mineral exploration and development with a little experience, a good curriculum vitae and a reputation that can be referred to.

After 10 years of experience in mineral exploration and having graduated with an honors degree in geology from Oxford, I was required to write seven exams in order to qualify for the British Columbia Association of Professional Engineers. In addition, to support my application I had to have several references who had not been too severely offended by my practice of rock breaking and data reporting.

Today in B.C., we have a substantial number of geologists, well-versed in exploration, who have been grandfathered into the updated form of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists by virtue of references from colleagues and friends. I do not wish to suggest this is any less of a selection process for entry into professional status than the procedure to which I was subjected. I do wish to suggest that I used to be able to practice anywhere in Canada with that qualification, and now some separatist will not allow me to work in his province.

Of the 10 provinces and two territories, I believe only Ontario provides the courtesy of letting me break rock for my own account, without expensive re-registration, because that province has not taken the retentive step of licensing geoscientists and excluding the rest of Canada. The concept of the qualified person is not new. It has been a requirement for the regulatory bodies for many years and did not require special qualification, even by the super-bureaucracy in British Columbia during the 1970s and early 1980s; common sense was used more than grandfathered certificates. The rate of faulty reporting to the regulatory bodies did not appear to be greater under that system — the regulators were qualified persons who could sort the ore from the waste.

Regulators do not seem to want to talk about risk, but rather wish to find some poor mark called a qualified person on whom they can offload the responsibility of a failed stock play. Mineral exploration, as we in the business all know well, is a high-risk, high-reward business, with a rate of return for the player that is far superior to those in Vegas or Reno.

If the analysts and regulators are not as well-qualified as the qualified person, how can they perform with any integrity? How can they criticize a report when they are without sufficient knowledge?

The reaction to the South Sea bubble of 1997 has been reasonably traditional, but not constructive. The stock exchanges are still run by their members for their members, and not their shareholders. The securities commissions are set up as seen-to-be-doing-something organizations to maintain a tight rein on the horse after it has left the stable. They are underfunded and do not have access to appropriate records that would allow them to see and report insider trading as it happens. In this age of computers, the direct monitoring of insider trading is so easy to do that, when it is not done, it raises the question, “Who is actually the watchdog?”

The lawyers and those with MBAs want to shuffle the “responsibility” of mining scams on to the qualified person. To some extent, our honorable panels of venerable technical experts, who have been trying to address the post-Bre-X era, were sucked in by all the talk of “improving our reporting.” My old classmate, John Willson of Placer Dome, says it right: If a crook really wants to commit a fraud with a gold property, it is impossible to stop him in the short term.

Since 1988, the so-called scam city of Vancouver actually was the birthplace, through junior mining companies, of 14 metal mining operations. Murray Pezim, Morris Black and others flamboyant in the risk game caused billions of dollars to flow back through our economy (and other economies) because of the mines they started. This risk-taking has been one of the mainstays of the Canadian economy for decades. It has not always been Canadian money risked, either. We have the credibility to attract European money as well as our own.

We must be very careful not to stifle this system in a jealous fit of over-righteous reaction to a situation in which everyone is trying to discharge responsibility to someone else. The geologist or engineer is going to be the mark if the theme being developed is cast more certainly in regulations.

If lotteries and other forms of public gambling are condoned by society and government, I am certainly not ashamed to support the risk-takers who might generate real new wealth and jobs for the country by placing their bets on a mining venture.

Ben Ainsworth

Vancouver, B.C.