Editorial: The treasure, and her map

What do we have to do to get that damn woman off our backs? — Attributed to a Mines Minister headed to a meeting with the late Mary-Claire Ward.

We will confess that one of our first reactions on hearing of the death of Mary-Claire Ward was to wonder just who will take over the heavy lifting. Most of us find our day jobs enough of a challenge without adding in the kind and sheer volume of work she put in for the mining industry and her profession. We can pay tribute first to her term as president of the Geological Association of Canada, at a difficult time for the profession’s leading national scientific society; and also to her involvement with the Canadian Geological Foundation.

But what the industry may best remember her for — apart from some very admirable personal virtues — is her untiring advocacy for funding the country’s government geological surveys. To the passing parade of mines ministers, and to their more enduring staffs of deputy and assistant deputy ministers, Mary-Claire Ward may have been “that damn woman,” but she was the face of this industry when it came to geological research. And hers was a face that stayed persistently in their faces, to their discomfort and embarrassment sometimes, and always to their edification.

Through the belt-tightening 1990s, government scientific research, whether in the resource industries, manufacturing, or basic research through the universities, was an easy target for government cost-cutting. The provinces, whose geological surveys did most of the country’s basic mapping work, found it hard to cut in places where cutting could make a big difference to provincial finances: health care, though frequently out of control, was a political sacred cow, and cutting funding to primary and secondary education was guaranteed to bring teachers, parents, and assorted busybodies down on any government that tried it. Fiscal responsibility, in that atmosphere, meant “saving” money for the twin money pits of provincial budgets, and chopping anywhere else, no matter its utility and no matter the return.

At a time like that, when provinces were busy playing with their Alternative Service Delivery models and seeking ways to squeeze Peter to fund Paul, Ward needled ministers and senior civil servants to put money into geological mapping. To the cost-cutters she always made the same argument: that a little money put into mapping always paid itself back in economic activity, in the form of exploration, development, and finally mining. Ward didn’t always win; but no mines minister ever forgot that he had a geological survey to fund and manage, or that it was a demonstrably good use of public money.

While the industry may never win the survey-funding argument for good and ever, it can make a useful and material contribution to promoting the mapping that our industry needs — and our economy, environment, and society need too.

An endowment for the Mary-Claire Ward Geoscience Award is being raised, with income to go to an annual award to a graduate student whose research includes a significant amount of geological mapping. Basic geology has not been a trendy field of study in the science in recent years, and new geologists that are good at it should not go unrewarded. In our science, the highest-technology equipment is installed between our ears.

Well-placed awards can help keep it there.