George Pirie wants to create a legacy of consultations and cooperation with First Nations communities across the North
George Pirie, Ontario’s new minister of Mines, comes from a Northern Ontario family that has been part of the Porcupine mining camp for more than 100 years.
Although Pirie is a newbie at Queen’s Park as the newly elected MPP for Timmins, and a man with more than 35 years experience in the mining industry, he said he spent the past month learning the ropes of his ministry since his cabinet appointment on June 24. “I guess the learning curve has been like drinking from a firehose,” Pirie joked. “We’ll get there.”
Pirie was born and raised in South Porcupine. He grew up in a mining family where his dad was employed at the Dome gold mine for more than 47 years. Talk around the kitchen table was always about mining and things like whether enough skips had been hoisted to meet bonus for the miners.
Pirie said he remembered skating at the outdoor rink at the Dome property, which was close enough to the main shaft they could hear the hoist bringing the skips to surface. “It would be all afternoon shift. That’s when they hoisted the ore,” Pirie recalled.
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