Twitter

Books, Art, Music and Photography About Mining and Northern Topics

New book chronicles woman at centre of notorious Timmins mining scandal – by Nicole Stoffman (Timmins Daily Press – February 18, 2025)

https://www.timminspress.com/

‘I see her as the flawed hero,’ author Tim Falconer says of Viola MacMillan

A new book about a Timmins mining stock scandal launched Tuesday, Feb. 18. “Windfall, Viola MacMillan and her notorious mining scandal,” by Tim Falconer (ECW Press, 2025), tells the story of the trailblazing woman prospector and mine developer who, in July 1964, stayed quiet for three weeks while shares in her company, Windfall Oil and Mines, took off amid rumours about what the company had found on its claims near Timmins.

The claims were tantalizingly close to what would become the Kidd Creek Mine, one of the world’s largest base metal mines. When she admitted she had nothing, the stock crashed and many small investors lost money. “She out-and-out-lied to us,” investor Murray Pezim said.

Read more

Excerpt from Windfall: Violoa MacMillan and her Notorious Mining Scandal – by Tim Falconer (January 24, 2025)

Click Here to Order Book: https://shorturl.at/dMsqN

Tim Falconer spent three summers on mineral exploration crews, worked in two mines and studied mining engineering at McGill University for two years before switching into English Literature. He is the author of five previous non-fiction books and a veteran magazine writer. His last two books—Bad Singer: The Surprising Science of Tone Deafness and How We Hear Music and Klondikers: Dawson City’s Stanley Cup Challenge and How a Nation Fell in Love with Hockey—made the Globe and Mail’s Top 100. He lives with his wife in Toronto.

Viola MacMillan, who was one of the most facinating women in Canadian business history, was the central character in one of the country’s most famous stock scandals. MacMillan was a prospector who’d gone on to put together big deals, develop lucrative mines and head a major industry association – all at a time when career women were a rarity.  Early in July 1964, shares in her company, Windfall Oil and Mines, took off. In the absence of information about what Windfall had found on its claims near Timmins, rumours and greed pushed share prices to a high of $5.70.  MacMillan stayed quiet. Finally after three weeks of market frenzy, Windfall admitted it had nothing. When the stock crashed, so many small investors lost money that the Ontario government appointed a Royal Commission to examine what had happened. Meaningful changes at the Toronto Stock Exchange and the Ontario Securities Commission followed. Windfall is biographical history at its finest: the unlikely story of the trailblazer who, although convicted and imprisoned, would later receive the Order of Canada.

EXCERPT: PINK PENTHOUSE

Viola MacMillan hadn’t intended to rent a downtown apartment, let alone a penthouse. But in 1954, she realized she needed more room because she and her staff could barely move in her Yonge Street office. She found what she was looking for in the Knight Building, a fancy new brick-and-aluminum tower at 25 Adelaide Street West, which offered her more room and a prestigious new address. After she leased suitable office space, she discovered that there was a penthouse apartment on the thirteenth floor with a fifteen-metre wall of glass that offered a view of Lake Ontario.

Read more

Excerpt from Windfall: Violoa MacMillan and her Notorious Mining Scandal – by Tim Falconer (January 17, 2025)

Click Here to Order Book: https://shorturl.at/dMsqN 

Tim Falconer spent three summers on mineral exploration crews, worked in two mines and studied mining engineering at McGill University for two years before switching into English Literature. He is the author of five previous non-fiction books and a veteran magazine writer. His last two books—Bad Singer: The Surprising Science of Tone Deafness and How We Hear Music and Klondikers: Dawson City’s Stanley Cup Challenge and How a Nation Fell in Love with Hockey—made the Globe and Mail’s Top 100. He lives with his wife in Toronto.

Viola MacMillan, who was one of the most facinating women in Canadian business history, was the central character in one of the country’s most famous stock scandals. MacMillan was a prospector who’d gone on to put together big deals, develop lucrative mines and head a major industry association – all at a time when career women were a rarity.  Early in July 1964, shares in her company, Windfall Oil and Mines, took off. In the absence of information about what Windfall had found on its claims near Timmins, rumours and greed pushed share prices to a high of $5.70.  MacMillan stayed quiet. Finally after three weeks of market frenzy, Windfall admitted it had nothing. When the stock crashed, so many small investors lost money that the Ontario government appointed a Royal Commission to examine what had happened. Meaningful changes at the Toronto Stock Exchange and the Ontario Securities Commission followed. Windfall is biographical history at its finest: the unlikely story of the trailblazer who, although convicted and imprisoned, would later receive the Order of Canada.

EXCERPT: THE QUEEN BEE

Viola MacMillan had been so successful selling houses on the side that she decided to leave her job as a stenographer at Rodd, Wigle & McHugh to start her own real estate agency. The move turned out to be ill-timed. By the end of the 1920s, Windsor was no longer booming, and then the Great Depression followed the stock market crash of October 1929. George hadn’t had a job in a while, so they moved to London, Ontario, where she sold Christmas cards wholesale. They kept the place in Windsor and filled it with boarders while taking in more roomers in the home they rented in London. She also tried to sell houses on the side, but that proved a tough go.

Read more

Gold smuggling the subject of a new book from Timmins, Ont. author Kevin Vincent (CBC News Sudbury – November 5, 2023)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/

‘City of Thieves’ contains 10 stories about gold smuggling in northern Ontario and Quebec

In the late 1940s a mine mill worker named Eddie Clement figured out a way to steal gold from the Delnite Mine in Timmins, Ont. The next decade he orchestrated three major gold heists, and was never caught.

Clement’s early years as a gold thief are the subject of a short story in a new book called City of Thieves, from Timmins author Kevin Vincent.

Read more

Book Excerpt: The Future of Mining Is Deeper, Darker, and Riskier – by Christopher Pollon (Undark.org – October 20, 2023)

Truth, Beauty, Science.

As mining companies delve ever deeper into the Earth, new tools — from AI to metal-eating microbes — will guide the way.

IN THE DECADES TO COME, as the easiest-to-mine metal deposits are tapped out, the quest for metals to supply the clean energy transition will force us ever further afield. To more remote and politically unstable places on land and further underground, to the deepest seabed, and perhaps even beyond the limits of the Earth altogether — to the moon, and near-Earth asteroids and comets.

And unless business as usual can change, our future over the shorter term will be to venture into ever deeper, darker, and riskier places, creating new sacrifice zones in the Global South, where most of the best earthly deposits remain.

Read more

Beware the ‘Zombie’ Mining Companies – by Christopher Pollon (The Tyee – October 10, 2023)

https://www.thetyee.ca/

Vancouver is home to many sketchy outfits hiding among legit global operators. It’s one more mining mess to clean up. Excerpted from ‘Pitfall.’

In a relatively short time, Canada has morphed from backwater resource colony to global mining colonizer. We are the inventors of the modern junior mining company — a small, nimble corporate vehicle designed to raise high-risk capital. At its best, Canadians scour every corner of the earth, drilling exploratory holes in the ground on a quest for minerals the world needs; at its worst, zombie companies loot investors and feed popular cynicism about the mining business.

There is something incongruous, at first glance, about the emergence of Canada — a nation of about 40 million known more for being over-apologetic than for a cutthroat approach to resource capitalism — as a global mining power.

Read more

Kingston author looks back at one of the greatest disasters in Canadian history – by Peter Hendra (Kingston Whig Standard – October 2023)

https://www.thewhig.com/

Sixty-five years ago, in the tiny coal-mining town of Springhill, N.S., a mini-earthquake — what they called a “bump” — in the No. 2 mine took the lives of 75 people, making it one of the worst workplace disasters in Canadian history.

While he was born and lives in Kingston, Ken Cuthbertson, the author of the just-published “Blood on the Coal: The True Story of the Great Springhill Mine Disaster,” has roots in Nova Scotia and remembers his grandparents talking about the Halifax Explosion of 1917 and Springhill, a story that had captured the nation’s attention.

Read more

OPINION: The case for leaving gold in the ground – by Christopher Pollon (Globe and Mail – October 10, 2023)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

We already have plenty of gold for its practical uses, yet we pay a heavy environmental and social price to extract more. Could we agree that enough is enough?

At Barrick Gold Corporation’s 2021 annual general meeting, I was waiting in an online queue with a few other journalists when my turn came to ask a question to chief executive Mark Bristow, who at that moment presided over the second-biggest gold mining company on Earth.

“At a recent mining conference, you were talking about ESG [environment, social and governance issues] and said, ‘Everyone uses metals from mining every day, but it’s an unloved industry, and we’ve got to change that.’ My question is, how is Barrick currently working to change that?”

Read more

The Drift: The ‘picturesque ruins’ of Cobalt make their debut at the McMichael gallery – by Ian Ross (Northern Ontario Business – September 21, 2023)

https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/

Upcoming exhibition will showcase new landscape art from Cobalt’s mining history and how it became a gathering place for women painters

The historic northeastern Ontario mining town of Cobalt will be in the spotlight this fall at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, north of Toronto. The exhibition, which runs at the Kleinburg gallery from Nov. 18 to April 21, will display, for the first time, the wave of art that was produced during the 1920s and 1930s from many leading and up-and-coming artists of the time.

The show, entitled Cobalt: a Mining Town and the Canadian Imagination, will feature pieces by A.Y. Jackson, Franklin Carmichael and Lawren Harris of Group of Seven fame, Bess Harris, Yvonne McKague Housser, Isabel McLaughlin, Dr. Frederick Banting, and earlier visiting artists such as John Wesley Cotton and Lady K.S. Robertson.

Read more

OPINION: The Springhill Mine disaster is a cautionary tale the world would do well to remember – by Ken Cuthbertson (Globe and Mail – September 16, 2023)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Ken Cuthbertson’s latest book is Blood on the Coal: The True Story of the Great Springhill Mine Disaster.

Mark Twain once quipped, “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.” Twain was right about that. The urge to deny inconvenient truths is as widespread as it is timeless. We’ve had yet another vivid reminder of that in our summer of wildfires, droughts and monster storms.

Despite the cacophony of alarm bells warning us that if we continue doing what we’re doing, our addiction to fossil fuels won’t end well for us or for our planet, climate-change skeptics and energy-industry lobbyists insist that, at least for now, there’s no realistic option.

Read more

Front Row Seat: Book explores culture, conflict on Iron Range – by Jay Gabler (Duluth News Tribune – August 17, 2023)

https://www.duluthnewstribune.com/

As a sociological research project, Erik Kojola spent four years talking with people on both sides of the copper-nickel mining debate for “Mining the Heartland.”

DULUTH — Erik Kojola’s paternal grandparents have died, but he thinks the Hibbing couple would have been excited to know their grandchild wrote a book about the Iron Range. At the same time, Kojola believes, they would have been “somewhat dismayed to see some of the conflicts that are going on right now.”

Kojola was speaking via video call last week from the Washington D.C. area, where he lives and works as a researcher for Greenpeace. He was raised out east, but his parents are from the Northland and Kojola got to know the area through family visits.

Read more

Cobalt Red: a regressive, deeply flawed account of Congo’s mining industry – by Sarah Katz-Lavigne and Espérant Mwishamali Lukobo (Open Democracy – July 3, 2023)

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/

Billed as an exposé, Cobalt Red simply rehashes old stereotypes and colonial perceptions of the DRC

Cobalt Red: how the blood of the Congo powers our lives, by Siddharth Kara, has been making waves. Released in April and tailored for a non-specialist audience, it has quickly become a New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller, as well as a bestseller in Amazon’s African Politics category.

The book centres on the mineral cobalt, currently sought after the world over for the production of high-end batteries. More than 70% of the world’s supply originates from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Kara’s project, he says, is to expose the trade’s dirty secrets for all of us to see.

Read more

Records and Roots: Breaking down the “Ring of Fire” – by Tom Netherland (Times News – June 2023)

https://www.timesnews.net/

BRISTOL, Tenn. — Johnny Cash was in a rut. By the spring of 1963, Cash had recorded just one top 10 record, his uninspiring 1962 cover of Jimmie Rodgers’ “In the Jailhouse Now,” since 1960’s “Seasons of My Heart.” Furthermore, Cash had not touched down with a No. 1 single since February 1959 with “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town.”

Johnny Cash needed a hit. Not only that, his marriage to wife Vivian was crumbling, battles with addiction escalating. Well, this month marks an important anniversary for “Ring of Fire” and Johnny Cash.

Read more

Book tour contributes debate around uranium mining – by Clint Fleury (NWO News Watch – May 17, 2023)

https://www.nwonewswatch.com/

Dr. Warren Bernauer will be touring three locations in northwestern Ontario to promote his new book I Will Live for Both of Us: A History of Colonialism, Uranium Mining, and Inuit Resistance.

WINNIPEG – For those living in Dryden, Ignace and Thunder Bay, Dr. Warren Bernauer will be touring Northwestern Ontario to speak about a book he co-authored with Joan Scottie and Jack Hicks, called I Will Live for Both of Us: A History of Colonialism, Uranium Mining, and Inuit Resistance.

Bernauer, who currently working as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Manitoba in the Department of Environment and Geography and the Natural Resources Institute, still calls Northwestern Ontario his home.

Read more

Book excerpt: How the sparks of conflict in Ontario’s Ring of Fire set alight (Northern Miner – April 13, 2023)

https://www.northernminer.com/

Click Here to Order Book: https://amzn.to/3FVk4hK

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 10, “From backrooms to bulldozers,” of Ring of Fire: High Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness, written by Virginia Heffernan and published by ECW Press. This chapter details how a clash between Indigenous rights, Ontario’s Mining Act and hapless politicians sets the stage for conflict in the mineral-rich region.

Dalton McGuinty was Ontario premier in 2007 when the Ring of Fire was discovered. At the time, the courts were starting to consistently side with First Nations across Canada over the right to be consulted about development on their traditional lands. The province was clumsily playing catch-up.

Read more