Alex Perron

Kirkland Lake prospector and mining entrepreneur Alex Perron has died from complications resulting from cancer. He was 65.

Perron, who revived the Kerr Addison mine in Larder Lake after it was closed by its original owners, was also well known for his advocacy on behalf of the exploration industry in northeastern Ontario.

He was named after his father, who discovered the Perron mine in Pascalis Twp., Quebec. That mine, one of the first on the Bourlamaque batholith, produced almost 390,000 oz. gold between 1933 and 1951.

The elder Perron moved to the Kirkland Lake area and was one of the builders of the Upper Canada mine. Two sons, Alex and John, took up prospecting, largely in the Kirkland Lake camp, where Alex spent most of his working life.

A stroke in the early 1990s curtailed Perron’s field work, but he continued to manage exploration work on a large land holding in northeastern Ontario. His largest single interest was the ownership of the Kerr Addison gold mine in Virginiatown, Ont.

Kerr closed in 1982 but was reopened by Golden Shield Resources a few years later. Golden Shield went bankrupt, but in 1989 the Kerr assets were bought out of bankruptcy by another company, Deak Resources, which operated a central mill on the Kerr site that processed ore from a number of mines.

Deak ran into financial trouble in the early 1990s, and the Perron brothers bought the controlling shareholding in the company in 1993 to maintain the operation at Kerr. The mine continued to produce, and the Kerr mill also did custom-smelting business for other local operations. Deak was renamed AJ Perron Gold in 1994.

Other Perron-owned companies developed small-scale mines on properties in the Abitibi region, including the Buffonta mine in Ontario and the Astoria mine in Quebec.

The local municipality, McGarry Twp., seized the Kerr mine and surface assets in October, 1996, claiming it was owed about $2 million in property and business taxes by AJ Perron Gold. The company disputed the township’s claim but did not have the financial resources to fight the township in court; it was delisted in 1998.

A colorful and always plain-spoken prospector, Perron was also a leading advocate of flow-through tax benefits for the holders of shares in exploration companies, and was influential in having the program reinstated after it had been cut back by the national government in the late 1980s. He was instrumental in persuading the Ontario government to build a highway between Kirkland Lake and the Harker-Holloway gold camp to the north, which made the town the major centre for operations in the Harker-Holloway area.