Builders and monuments

Two deaths in the months just past show that the Canadian mining industry is gradually passing out of the hands of a generation that made it great.

In losing Douglas Hume and James Harquail, two well-known, widely liked and respected mining executives, we lose another link with the era that saw Canadian mining (and especially Canadian mineral exploration) rise to become the envy of the world.

In the years following the Second World War, a whole flock of ducks lined up for Canadian mining. We were heavily industrialized, thanks to the war effort, but we had escaped the destruction that had been visited on Europe. Europe itself needed to be rebuilt, and raw materials had to be found to do it. Our young men were coming home, to subsidized education, and many (or perhaps most) chose technical and scientific careers. And much of the science the West had turned to to defeat the dictatorships had industrial and civilian uses.

So it was that Canadian mines had ready markets, and Canadian exploration had its new servants in geophysics and geochemistry to find the new resources the world needed. There was no better chance to become a world leader.

The Canadian mining industry did that, with great success. But it wouldn’t have done that without its people — and the postwar generation, used to perseverance and adaptability, was perhaps the best body of people for the job. As they fade from the scene, we should be conscious of just how much they accomplished.

Douglas Hume may have been the quintessential junior-exploration man of the 1960s and 1970s. His company, Nuinsco Resources, had a foot on the ground in most of the major land plays of those decades, and hit two of the discoveries — Cameron Lake and Lac Rocher — that sparked two of the more exciting staking rushes of the two succeeding decades.

Always the “money guy” but (unlike some money guys) always willing and mentally disciplined enough to think along with the technical guys, Hume did much to show that Canadian projects could still breathe life into a junior market when trendier foreign destinations caught others’ attention.

James Harquail was probably best known for his work as right-hand man to the eminent minefinder Thayer Lindsley; describing Lindsley as “an authentic genius,” Harquail said working with him had been “like being a painter studying under Michelangelo.” But it wasn’t just to Lindsley that Harquail owed his place in the mining industry — he had earned his spurs in exploration in the Yellowknife camp and as a geologist at the Giant gold mine in the late 1940s, another of the great successes of Canadian exploration.

And in an age when our industry so often looks to the Pacific Rim for markets, for financing, and lately for new ground to explore, we can admire Harquail’s foresight in recognizing, back in the 1950s, the importance of developing mineral resources in Western Canada as a way of gaining entry to Far Eastern markets. This country is lucky to have had his eyes on the horizon — we are a supplier of choice for the East today partly because he saw the Asian Tigers from a long way off.

It’s a measure of their ability and success that both remained active as mining men as they passed into their 70s. Creativity and enthusiasm never deserted them.

It is also a tribute to Hume and Harquail that both had children that followed them into the mining industry and mining finance; nobody whose success in business came at the expense of his family would see his sons and daughters taking up the same vocation. If there is a modern-day preoccupation in the developed world, it is balancing work and family; for men like these, that balancing act was simply what you did.

The generation of mining men now leaving us had its giants, but all generations have them. That generation’s distinction was in having turned out so many ordinary men of more than ordinary stature, whose record of quiet accomplishment shows the rest of us just how much we can achieve. Hume and Harquail were just two of them. We’re lucky to have shoulders like theirs to stand on.