Engineering a future

Our collective mediocrity has been well-documented. Hewers of wood, drawers of water and all that. The critics charge that we have beavered away for too long, chopping down vast tracts of forest, digging up rocks and so forth, all the while neglecting the development of high-end, value-added products. Worse still, we’ve allowed ourselves to be all but bypassed by the computer revolution. While this is true of the nation’s industrial thrust in general (a failure perhaps on the part offpolicy-makers and politicians), resource-based industries are eagerly seeking technological solutions to their problems. Where labor-intensive extraction methods yielded to mechanization in the late ’50s and the ’60s, mechanization is now being infiltrated by automation.

Unfortunately, mining still gets dumped on, first for being resource-based, definitely a low-class pursuit in this high-tech era. Second, for an erroneous public perception that methods and processes in mining are overwhelmingly archaic. If care is not taken, perception and reality will eventually meet. It is difficult today for mining schools to attract budding engineers. The Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy has warned that if engineering enrolments at universities continue to decline, the country could face a serious shortage later in the decade. CIM’s own figures show that the total number of engineering and technology graduates in minerals-related disciplines dropped 21% from 1987 to 1989. Mining engineering graduates at the bachelor level fell by 31% over the same period.

Obviously, the public impression of mining has filtered down to the high schools. Some of the best and the brightest will not choose mining and its related disciplines. Already viewed with some suspicion because of its cyclicality and postings to remote locations, mining is not aided by negative public perceptions about its worth to the nation. More prudent public utterances by the nation’s leaders would help. For example, in a speech this summer, Ontario Premier David Peterson said the province requires people who use the resources between their ears rather than the resources beneath their feet. Which implies that resource extraction and brain power are mutually exclusive.

What Peterson should have emphasized is the country’s need to exploit the high-tech option, whether it be in new industries or in the old reliables, such as mining. A message in that vein would not exclude mining from the appeal that high-tech has for young, would-be engineers.

Hewing wood and mining rocks, we have been doing successfully for a long time. It will not pay to neglect these industries altogether. In the computer age, they might seem antiquated, but isn’t it a luxury that a nation can gainfully employ thousands of people in collecting rocks and with little effort convince other nations to part with their cold cash in exchange?