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MONTREAL – In a small office in downtown Montreal, a band of Armenian-raised gem cutters is chomping at the bit to get their hands on Quebec-made diamonds.
Whether they get their way depends on how hard the Parti Québécois government pushes for a Quebec-based secondary sector spun off from mining — and how much the miners push back. It’s a situation that highlights a familiar predicament in Canada: We’re really good at pulling commodities from the ground. But processing them here is often a complex negotiation that ends in failure.
Melisende Diamonds Ltd. is a six-person diamond polishing crew operating on Montreal’s precious-metal row on Cathcart Street. They were part of a group of about 60 Armenians who settled in Yellowknife when the government of the NorthWest Territories hatched the territory’s diamond processing industry by mandating the two diamond producers active there to set aside 10% of their output for local cutting and polishing.
The effort fizzled out. Of four diamond processing plants started in Yellowknife, only one is still operating. And so the Melisende workers came to Montreal.
Right now, the Montreal operation buys most of its rough diamonds from Africa, which it then polishes here for resale. But it hopes Quebec will negotiate a deal with Stornoway Diamond Corp. that would force the Montreal-based company to save a portion of its planned output for local industry.
Reserving just 10% of Stornoway’s production volume would create 100 jobs for cutters and polishers alone, said Melisende president Harry Ohanessian. He said Melisende is willing to teach Quebecers how to cut diamonds to create a local cutting base.
“We’re all waiting for this,” Mr. Ohanessian said in an interview Tuesday, adding the key element of any agreement is asking Stornoway to provide bigger and higher-grade diamonds, not just lower-quality smaller stones. He argues the NWT’s processing effort was crippled by the lower-calibre of diamonds being provided to the cutters by the mines, which wasn’t good enough to make up for higher operating costs in Yellowknife.
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