Canadian Mining Hall Of Fame Welcomes Four More

Bone-chilling temperatures of -17C weren’t enough to keep the crowd away from the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame’s 21st annual awards dinner at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel in Toronto.

“We are delighted that so many of you could brave the cold to be here tonight,” the evening’s master of ceremonies, David Harquail, told the 580-strong gathering on Jan. 15.

Claiming it was so cold that the asset-backed commercial paper market had frozen over yet again, the president and chief executive of Franco-Nevada also joked that “for the sake of digestion,” he wouldn’t “review 2008 numbers.”

This year the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame inducted into its ranks a professor, two engineers and a geologist. But before the speeches began in earnest, Ted Yates, chairman of the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame, paid tribute to two of the industry’s leading men: the legendary Mort Brown, a former editor and publisher of The Northern Miner and a founder of The Canadian Mining Hall of Fame, and John S. Cooke, also a former publisher of the mining newspaper who devoted much of his time to assisting the Mining Hall of Fame, including 16 years as its treasurer. Both men passed away in 2008.

The first inductee of the night was Professor Donald H. Gorman — affectionately known as “Digger” — who was hired in 1951 to teach geology at the University of Toronto, where he influenced what were later to become some of the most distinguished men and women in the industry.

Professor Gorman “served our industry with distinction for more than half a century,” Harquail, one of Gorman’s former students, told the audience.

“His mastery of the mineral kingdom was the foundation of his teaching success,” he continued. “This rare ability — combined with his engaging personality — cultivated generations of students that had a better grounding in mineral recognition than anywhere else in Canada.”

Born and raised in New Brunswick, where he earned a bachelor of science degree after wartime service in the Canadian Navy, Gorman spent two years at the Royal School of Mines in London, followed by graduate studies at the U of T.

Now 86, Gorman became a full professor in 1977 and received the Ontario Faculty Association’s award for outstanding teaching the following year.

“Prof. Gorman consistently received the award for best classroom professor while I was at U of T because he was such a great communicator,” Keith Barron, a former student and one of the co-founders of Aurelian Resources, later told The Northern Miner.

“It was due to his encouragement to persist looking for work and knocking on doors back in the 1983- 85 downturn when I graduated, that I eventually made my career in geology,” reminisced Barron, now a director at U3O8 Corp. “Every so often I would stop in to visit him in his office on the second floor of the mining building and he’d tell me to hang in there. I owe him a vote of thanks.”

Barron took Gorman’s introductory mineralogy class in 1981 and his mineral identification course in 1982 and remembers the professor’s dreaded “White Minerals Test” like it was yesterday.

“We passed around little trays of minerals and studied them for 30 seconds max before passing them to the next person,” he recalls. “There was one mineral that was super frustrating and I tried everything to figure out what it was. It looked like gypsum and was soft but the crystal structure was wrong. About a half hour into the test, all became clear when fellow student Lillian uttered a loud ‘Eeewwwww!’ when the ‘mineral’ stuck to her hand after being handled by so many sweaty palms. . . It was a piece of candy!”

But true to form, the extremely talented, lifelong educator modestly downplayed his own achievements.

“I stand before you a humble man in the knowledge that my name will be inextricably associated with the truly great members of the Hall of Fame,” Gorman said, accepting his award. “During my long career, I’ve known 32 of those greats — some of them better than others. If I had four hours instead of four minutes I’d be able to tell you long stories about some of them.”

Saying he preferred the term “teacher” to “lecturer,” Gorman said a teacher’s success is always measured by the success of his students. “Lucky for me, I’ve had a great number of successful students — and many of them are here tonight.”

In closing, Gorman pointed out that half a century ago he had given a talk at the Royal York Hotel entitled: “Let us not forget the mineral.”

“Tonight,” he said, “the Canadian Hall of Fame says: ‘Let us not forget the mineralogist.”

The second inductee of the evening was French engineer Bernard M. Michel, who succeeded in shaping the Canadian uranium business and transforming Saskatchewan’s economy in the process.

Michel began his engineering career in 1962 after a stint in the French Navy. He emigrated to Saskatchewan in 1967 to help design and start up a potash mine. His second project was the Cluff Lake uranium mine in the Athabasca basin. In 1988, Michel was recruited by Cameco (CCO-T, CCJ-N), where he quickly scaled the ranks to president in 1990, chief executive the following year and chairman in 1993.

Michel’s rapid promotion and “visionary leadership” transformed Cameco from a debt-ridden crown corporation 20 years ago to a consistently profitable company with a global footprint. “By overseeing its privatization, Bernard was able to restructure the company, create a more dynamic corporate environment, and expand Cameco’s global reach,” Harquail said in his introductory remarks.

By 1998, Cameco was producing one-third of the world’s uranium and had become a leading refiner and owner of the metal. Today, Cameco is the world’s largest publicly traded uranium company.

During his career, Michel also purchased a partnership interest in Bruce Power, North America’s largest nuclear generating plant. Among his other achievements, the Frenchman helped turn Cameco into one of the biggest employers of First Nations in the country. Michel also oversaw Cameco’s participation in the 1999 multilateral agreement designed to dismantle Russian nuclear warheads.

Presenting the award, Jerry Grandey, Cameco’s current president and chief executive, said he first met Michel at a job interview in 1992 and his respect has only “deepened over the years.” Describing Michel as unflappable, he added there was only one time that he saw him lose his composure and that was at an Air Canada check-in counter when the pair was flying to Japan for meetings.

“Bernard presented his passport and surprisingly, it looked much more like his lovely wife Susan than it looked like him,” Grandey said. “That was the only time that I saw a little bit of flustering, if you will.”

In his acceptance remarks, Michel joked that during the evening’s slideshow of minerals on display at the Royal Ontario Museum he had not seen a single picture of the very substances that had defined his career: uranium and potash.

“These two minerals are minerals of which Canada is by far the world leader,” he said. “As an inductee, I believe these two minerals deserve more respect from your organization.”

On a more serious note, Michel reserved his greatest thanks for his wife Susie, who “spent many lonely days and lonely nights in Saskatoon when I was either working late days and long weekends or travelling with Jerry around the world advancing the interests of our company.”

The night’s third inductee, Roman Shklanka, became famous for his ability to find projects in far-flung lands and turn them into world-class mines.

Shklanka entered the University of Saskatchewan at the age of 15 and received degrees in arts and commerce, followed by a master’s degree in geology, after which he earned a doctorate at Stanford University.

His career includes a stint working for the Ontario Department of Mines, and later at Placer Development, where he he
aded up exploration in Eastern Canada. In 1978, the company transferred the hardworking geologist to Australia, where he helped secure the Kidstone mine, in addition to the Porgera and Misima deposits in Papua New Guinea. (All three became impressive gold producers.)

Following the merger of Placer Development and Dome Mines, Shklanka was promoted to vice-president of foreign exploration, in which capacity he was involved in the acquisition of the Omai gold project in Guyana, the Bulyanhulu project in Tanzania, and the Granny Smith and Osborne mines in Australia.

Shklanka left Placer Dome in 1990 after the company dropped the Bulyanhulu gold property, and he merged his own company with Sutton Resources. During that time, he acquired Bulyanhulu and the Kabanga nickel project from the Tanzanian government.

Barrick Gold bought Sutton nine years later for US$525 million. Today, Kabanga is a joint venture between Barrick Gold and Xstrata and has been described as the world’s largest high-grade nickel sulphide deposit.

In 2003, Canico Resources enlisted Shklanka as its chairman. It was at Canico that Shklanka advanced the Onca Puma nickel deposit in Brazil. (In 2005, Vale bought Canico for US$941 million.)

“His geological prowess, economics training and ability to analyze huge amounts of data have helped many Canadian-based companies secure deposits and mines ahead of the competition,” Harquail said in his introductory remarks, joking that he’d love to have him on the board at Franco- Nevada.

Michael Kenyon, a colleague of Shklanka’s for nearly 20 years and an associate in his Tanzania and Brazil projects, noted that the new inductee truly does have a “nose for ore deposits” and has been involved in the discovery or development of tens of millions of ounces of gold and many billions of pounds of base metals.

Kenyon praised Shklanka’s facility for negotiating appropriate agreements in the countries where he worked — particularly in Tanzania — where he spent the better part of two years in patient discussions designed to educate the government about the industry.

The Tanzanians apparently were so impressed with Shklanka’s knowledge that they created a memo describing what could be expected from mineral companies in the future and circulated it to all government departments. Kenyon remarked that on a recent trip to the African nation, he met with the president who had asked after Shklanka, referring to him as “one of the finest Canadians we ever met.”

As an exploration geologist, Shklanka certainly had his share of close calls. In his acceptance speech, Shklanka recalled flying into Ecuador to check some newly noted gold occurrences in an area that had been invaded by thousands of artisanal miners.

“As soon as our helicopter departed, the artisanals built a fire on the helicopter pad so that the chopper could not return,” Shklanka recalled. “They told us we had to leave the mountain as they had arrived — that is by foot. . . To encourage our quick departure, they started pelting us with stones and spears.”

Joking that he used to look at that as the scariest experience of his career, he said that he had been wrong. “Standing here is worse,” he quipped.

“This highlight of my career experiences came completely unexpectedly,” he said. “To be recognized by your peers in this manner — for doing what has been an enjoyable journey. . . is for me, the icing on the cake.”

That journey included trips to more than 70 countries. In his thanks, Shklanka recognized his wife of 47 years, Patricia, “who helped make all this happen.”

The night’s fourth and last inductee was Grenville Thomas, who entered the profession as a teenager in the harsh coal mines of Wales. After emigrating to Canada in the mid-1960s, Thomas began working for Falconbridge, which led to a posting at the Giant gold mine in Yellowknife. In 1975, he left Giant to set up his own company, Highwood Resource, which later was to discover the Thor Lake rare metals deposit in the Northwest Territories.

In 1980, Thomas set up his flagship company, Aber Resources, which later discovered the Sunrise Lake VMS deposit in the Northwest Territories.

But his biggest career success — the Diavik diamond mine — was to come later. “In 1991, Gren heard reports of a diamond discovery in the Lac de Gras region that others were discounting as a geological curiosity,” Harquail outlined in his introduction. “Aber moved quickly to stake a large group of claims there and Gren enlisted daughter Eira, a geologist, to help manage the exploration.”

Aber announced the first diamond discovery on the Diavik property in 1992 and by 1995 the company had identified four economic deposits. Today, the mine is designed to produce more than 10 million carats per year worth roughly US$800 million. Aber changed its name to Harry Winston Diamond (HW-T, HWD-N) in 2007.

Presenting the award to Thomas, Bob Gannicott, Harry Winston’s chairman and chief executive, noted that Thomas’s first years in Yellowknife were very formative ones and instilled in the young mining engineer a profound love of both prospecting and the North.

In accepting his award, Thomas described himself as a prospector who also partially qualified as a miner, noting his start in the industry at the age of 16, working in a Welsh coal mine where conditions “were still fairly Victorian” in 1957.

“I worked in a two-foot seam at a time when there were no showers at the mine and we used horses for transportation,” he said, adding that one of his jobs had been to take care of the mine’s stable of 80 horses.

“Most things in our business have changed greatly since those days and luckily — except the sense of camaraderie, which I’m happy to say is still very much part of mining,” Thomas said. “Fortunately for me, when I got into exploration I found the same sense of comradeship and I made many lifelong friends among geologists, drillers, bush pilots and the people that make exploration work.”

Thomas noted that the discovery of diamonds in Canada’s Northwest Territories came at “an opportune time” as the gold mines were “closing all too quickly.

“I often say that the city of Yellowknife should erect a monument to Chuck Fipke and Stu Blusson for being the salvation of that town,” Thomas said, referring to the multimillionaire diamond magnates who discovered the Ekati diamond mine.

Thomas also noted that the mines have been important in enabling First Nations “to enter the wage economy” and develop valuable skills.

Thomas also thanked the “long-suffering shareholders and financiers,” who “have often to wait for many years to see returns on our efforts.”

With the addition of Gorman, Michel, Shklanka and Thomas, the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame expands to 140 members, whose biographies can be found at www.HallofFame.mining.ca

Three other members of the Hall of Fame were also present at the dinner: William G. “Bill” Brissenden, Gerald G. “Gerry” Hatch, and Marsh A. Cooper.