Books, Art, Music and Photography About Mining and Northern Topics – Page 8

Excerpt from Potash: An Inside Account of Saskatchewan’s Pink Gold – by John Burton

June 18, 2014

To order a copy of Potash: An Inside Account of Saskatchewan’s Pink Gold, click here: http://www.uofrpress.ca/publications/Potash

John Burton grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan, studied at the University of Saskatchewan and the London School of Economics, was elected to Parliament, and played a major role in Saskatchewan’s 1975 decision to acquire potash-producing facilities. He was a member of the Board of Directors of the Crown-owned Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan from 1975 to 1982.

Chapter 1 – Introduction

“Potash! What’s that?” would have been the likely response of most Saskatchewan residents upon hearing the word any time before 1950. That would certainly not be the case now. Virtually everyone in the province knows what potash is today and recognizes the vital role it plays in the provincial economy as well as in the Canadian economy.

Potash1 is a naturally occurring mineral created during the evaporation of ancient seabeds. Ninety-five percent of commercial potash production is used for fertilizer, while the remainder is utilized in industrial production. Potash is vital for plant and crop growth, but there is a wide variation in the natural occurrence of potassium in soils throughout the world. For example, an adequate amount of the mineral occurs naturally in most Saskatchewan soils, but in the US Midwest it is very much needed to promote greater yields of corn.

When potash was first found in the province in 1942, there were only a limited number of potash mines in operation around the world. Major producers were in New Mexico, Spain, France, East and West Germany, and Russia. The Europeans had formed a cartel long before 1940, but during and after the war, US influence and control increased and helped to keep prices high. Potash became increasingly important following World War II, as the need to increase world food supply in order to meet the demands of a growing world population was recognized.

Hard rock mining: The battles for hearts and minds – Editorial (Thompson Citizen – June 11, 2014)

June 11, 2014

The Thompson Citizen, which was established in June 1960, covers the City of Thompson and Nickel Belt Region of Northern Manitoba. The city has a population of about 13,500 residents while the regional population is more than 40,000. editor@thompsoncitizen.net

Hard rock miners extracting nickel, gold, copper, zinc, diamonds and other minerals in the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Northern Ontario or Northern Manitoba, as well as many other places in Canada and around the world, along with those working in milling, smelting and refining, know something about stoicism and steadfastness amidst the battles for hearts and minds.

Jeff Mcinnes puts it his way in his “Thompson Talk” column today in the space adjacent to this at left: “Thompson people are a certain sort of folk. We come from all walks of life here. Some were born here and always knew what this town was to them: a place to live, to work and to raise a family. You worked at the mine, day-in and day-out, trying to make a living to support your family. Early, dark mornings drinking coffee while your truck warmed up under a blanket of snow, trying to wake up for a dozen-hour workday that seemed insurmountable, a mountain of mining to be climbed every day.”

Two historic hard rock mining events back in the news – one connected to Sudbury, the other to Yellowknife – have their own connections to and resonance right here in Thompson.

Excerpt From: The Raids: The Nickel Range Trilogy, Volume 1 (Jake, Ascending) – by Mick Lowe

April 30, 2015May 29, 2014

To order The Raids, click here: http://www.barakabooks.com/catalogue/raids/

Excerpt From: The Raids: The Nickel Range Trilogy, Volume 1 (Jake, Ascending)

Dayshift, Garson Mine – Sudbury, Ontario, Canada – Monday, May 6, 1963 – 6 AM

What they neglected to tell him before that first shift was that you weren’t lowered into the mine; you were dropped.
The only inkling of the bullet-like descent of the cage, packed with its human cargo, plummeting down the greased shaft guides, was the build-up of pressure on Jake’s eardrums. The miners were packed so tightly, in fact, that there was no room for Jake and his forty-five or so compatriots to carry their lunch boxes. Instead, each man simply placed his lunch box between his boots on the splintered wooden floor of the cage.

The air was redolent of excessive aftershave and explosive Cold War tension. When the cage was between levels it was deceptively quiet, with little indication of the colossal forces at play around their peaceful, gently rocking world: the cage rocketing downward toward the molten centre of the earth at a hundred feet per second, suspended from a tightly wound, heavily greased wire rope thousands of feet long unspooling with unimaginable rapidity. Only when the cage passed a level—its bright lights and promise of life appearing and disappearing in the blink of an eye—was there a sense of the speed of their descent.

“He’s a fuckin’ Commie,” Jake heard from someone standing in front of him. “Câlice!” The French invective was hurled from the back of the cage. “Oh, and Thibault’s Red, too.” “Tabernac!” again from the rear.

THE RAIDS [Sudbury mining history] Launch in Sudbury Draws a Great Crowd, Media Too – by Baraka Books (May 27, 2014)

April 30, 2015May 27, 2014

To order The Raids, click here: http://www.barakabooks.com/catalogue/raids/

The Raids by Mick Lowe was launched before a crowd of some sixty friends and supporters at the Steelworkers’ Hall in Sudbury on Sunday, May 25.

Mick Lowe told guests about the importance and the challenges of making this story known, first to the people of the Nickel Range, but also to Canada and the world. “It’s still a taboo and there are still scars,” he insisted. He also pointed out the advantages of using fiction to make it known to the younger generation.

The crowd included miners and former miners who were all impressed by how well Mick Lowe grasped the work, the conditions, and the lives of miners. Peter Miner, a retired hardrock miner, helped Mick Lowe with technical points.

Also in attendance was Dave Patterson, a former hard-rock miner, former president of Local 6500 in Sudbury and director of District 6 of The Steelworkers. Patterson describes The Raids as “a compelling story of political power, love and hatred all rolled into a gritty, hard-hitting novel of the Nickel Range.” He predicts that the book will be a national bestseller in the Sudbury area alone.

Oryst Sawchuk, whose illustration Hardrock graces the book cover, spoke about how proud he was to be part of the project. Oryst contributed six other original illustrations of places and events that are key to the plot of The Raids, including one of the siege of the Mine Mill Local 598 Hall on Regent Street.

Excerpt from Boardroom Games: You’re Fired! – Mining Boards: Local and Foreign Adventures – by Peter Crossgrove

April 8, 2014

To order a copy of From Boardroom Games: You’re Fired, click here: http://amzn.to/1pA7i7q or here: http://bit.ly/OYexer

For a three part BNN interview with Peter Crossgrove, click here:

http://watch.bnn.ca/#clip1071973

http://watch.bnn.ca/#clip1071974

http://watch.bnn.ca/#clip1071978

Excerpt from “Boardroom Games: You’re Fired!” – Mining Boards: Local and Foreign Adventures

Sudbury-born Peter A. Crossgrove and another partner invested in Interior Door, a private company that became Masonite, a public company sold to KKR for $3.2 billion in 2004. Peter’s mining and boardroom experiences are indelibly etched real-life scenarios—humorous and thought provoking. Having served on close to seventy mining, corporate, and not-for-profit boards, armed with a sense of humour, dignity, dogged determination, and humility, Peter has challenged boardroom antics and relationship intricacies with the skill-sets and values he was raised with.

Early Barrick Days

In the early Barrick days, Barrick Gold was originally called American Barrick so it would be listed higher in the newspaper stock pages and easier to find by investors. The original company was United Sysco and the CEO was Bob Fasken. Bob’s COO was Bob Smith. I knew them both well. I used to fly up with them in the company’s Turbo Beaver to Griffith Island, an island off Wiarton in Georgian Bay, to shoot pheasant and chucker partridge. We were members of the Griffith Island Club in Georgian Bay.

Excerpt From: Boardroom Games: You’re Fired! – Mining and Country Risk – by Peter Crossgrove

April 8, 2014April 2, 2014

To order a copy of From Boardroom Games: You’re Fired, click here: http://amzn.to/1pA7i7q or here: http://bit.ly/OYexer

For a three part BNN interview with Peter Crossgrove, click here:

http://watch.bnn.ca/#clip1071973

http://watch.bnn.ca/#clip1071974

http://watch.bnn.ca/#clip1071978

Excerpt from “Boardroom Games: You’re Fired!” – Mining and Country Risk

Investing in Canadian Mines

There is very little country risk in investing in mines in Canada. I am co-Chairman of Detour Gold, which is in pre-commissioning at the moment. Detour is being built on time, will open on time, and is on budget. It will be Canada’s largest gold mine. Every senior employee from the CEO down is an ex-Barrick employee. The mine is located north of Cochrane and south of James Bay—not an easy environment. Since they have 720 square kilometers of land that the mine sits on, I am sure the output and mine life will grow. This is the same mine that I was on the board of when it was a small fly-in-fly-out underground mine, and that was about thirty years ago. This is the same mine they wanted to close when I was running Placer Dome. I insisted they send in exploration geologists and they found more ore. About ten years later they did shut it down.

REVIEW: Bre-X – Dead Man’s Story – by Marilyn Scales (Canadian Mining Journal – April 1, 2014)

April 1, 2014

Marilyn Scales is a field editor for the Canadian Mining Journal, Canada’s first mining publication. She is one of Canada’s most senior mining commentators.

You don’t have to be an industry insider to remember the story of Bre-X – the 200 million oz of gold in the jungles of Borneo that disappeared overnight. The story of the company’s rollercoaster ride – propelled by enormous greed – made headlines all over the world and severely damaging the reputation of Canada’s stock exchanges and mining community.

The facts should be familiar. A junior explorer sets out in a remote part of Indonesia to make a gold mine. They drilled, and released promising results. Investors invested, driving up the Bre-X stock price, and the company suddenly had no shortage of investors. More drilling was done, and even better results were released. The analysts loved the project. Bre-X management made higher and higher contained gold estimates – 20 million, 30 million, 100 million, and finally 200 million oz of gold just waiting to make everyone rich.

Of course, promises of huge riches attracts huge appetites. Bigger companies considered buying out Bre-X and gaining control of the Busang gold. The head of the Indonesian government, Suharto, wanted the pot of gold enough to usurp Bre-X’s claim to the property and asked an American miner to develop the project.

Excerpt From: Boardroom Games: You’re Fired! – University Choices and Practical Mining – by Peter Crossgrove

April 8, 2014March 27, 2014

To order a copy of From Boardroom Games: You’re Fired, click here: http://amzn.to/1pA7i7q or here: http://bit.ly/OYexer

For a three part BNN interview with Peter Crossgrove, click here:

http://watch.bnn.ca/#clip1071973

http://watch.bnn.ca/#clip1071974

http://watch.bnn.ca/#clip1071978

Excerpt from “Boardroom Games: You’re Fired!” – University Choices and Practical Mining

I loved accounting, I loved commerce, and I loved those business courses. At the end of the second going into my third year, my father was pushing me hard to return home, and in doing so to work in the purchasing department at Inco. I had worked a couple summers in the warehouse and Mac Forsythe, the purchasing agent who quite liked me, thought I should work under him and perhaps inherit his job that was a big job at Inco in those days.

Engineer mines industry experience for first book – by Morgan Ian Adams (Enterprise-Bulletin – March 13, 2014)

March 13, 2014

http://www.theenterprisebulletin.com/

COLLINGWOOD — Engineer Tom McCavour has tapped into a lifetime of experiences in the mining industry to craft his first book. McCavour launched his book, Bloody Diamonds, in the third floor community room of the municipal building at Ste. Marie and Simcoe in November.

Bloody Diamonds follows the stories of Sarah and and Sam from childhood through to adulthood, and their experiences with the diamond mining industry in Africa and Canada’s north.

Sam escapes the civil war in Sierra Leone and is employed as a geologist by a South African diamond mining company, while Sarah is an Inuit and an environmentalist; while they meet as adversaries in the Northwest Territories, the two fall in love.

McCavour is a retired engineer whose career took him to Canada’s northern territories and to Africa. His work up north led to the development of the Diavik diamond mine in the North Slave Region of the Northwest Territories.

The mining aspect of his book “came naturally,” said McCavour, 83. “But it took a lot of (work) to make it chronologically and geographically correct.”

NEWS RELEASE: New York Times Best-Selling Author Launches Campaign Surrounding the Anniversary of Tragic Event That Killed 65 Men

February 19, 2014

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA–(Marketwired – Feb. 19, 2014) – Local New York Times Best Selling Author Napoleon Gomez, today launches a campaign across Canada to bring attention to a tragic event that happened eight years ago, taking the lives of 65 innocent workers, whose bodies remain unrecovered.

Retold in his acclaimed book Collapse of Dignity, Gomez recounts the explosion deep in a Mexican mine and the ensuing half-hearted rescue attempts and government cover-up. Inspired by examples of public solidarity for social justice both in Canada and around the globe, Gomez was compelled to launch a bold campaign to mark the anniversary this year.

The campaign kicks off in Gomez’ home-base of Vancouver on key transit routes, supplemented and rolled out across Canada in newspapers, social media campaigns and a personal call to Napoleon’s peers and colleagues within Canada’s most reputable and largest labour unions. His message is clear: there are bodies still buried underground today and the lost miners deserve justice. Their families have never received support and their plight has never been resolved.

Frustrating for Gomez is the stark contrast to the Chilean mine tragedy in 2010, which was highly publicized and celebrated when the 33 miners were safely rescued. A Hollywood film about the 33 miners is currently in production. The Chilean accident took place just four years after the Mexican mining tragedy that saw little media support.

‘Unlikely Radicals’ exposes the toxic Adams Mine Dump War – by Meg Borthwick (Rabble.ca – February 6, 2014)

February 7, 2014

http://rabble.ca/

Everyone loves a good David vs. Goliath story and Unlikely Radicals: The Story of the Adams Mine Dump War by Charlie Angus is as good as it gets. Centred on the campaign to keep Toronto’s garbage from being dumped in a decommissioned Northern Ontario mine, Unlikely Radicals isn’t just a story about the rural north vs. the urban south, it’s a story about the politicization of ordinary people — including Angus himself.

In the late 1990s Charlie Angus, NDP Member of Parliament for Timmins-James Bay (and current Official Opposition Critic for Ethics), “believed that organized politics was the domain of stuffy old men.” The former Toronto activist and punk rock musician was living in Cobalt, a town of fewer than 1,500 people in the heart of Northern Ontario’s historic Mining District. It was also part of the Timiskaming District, “ground zero” for the Adams Mine dump war, the fight to keep Toronto’s garbage from being dumped in the environmentally sensitive region.

Backgrounder: How Toronto reached critical load

In 1989 Dofasco, a steel company based in Hamilton, announced the closure of the 8000 acre Adams Mine site. For the mining-dependant local population, the closure spelled economic disaster and as a community facing massive job loss they were tremendously vulnerable.

Gold: A History, a Hunt, a Fever – An easy read, but fails to address obvious problems – by Douglas Bell (Globe and Mail – January 10, 2014)

January 13, 2014

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

The currency of journalism is impartiality. Ideally, it is practiced without fear or favour. When conducted at the behest of an a priori agenda, it is impotent (hardcore journalists are forever sneering at those who practice “advocacy”).

As a practical matter the difference is obvious. State owned and operated media in Russia don’t afford the same species of product as the BBC. An authoritarian oligarchy rigs its “journalism” to filter out inconvenient facts. The BBC enjoys credibility precisely because the broadcaster and its news service engineers a relationship at arm’s length from the state. In this sense, it’s not a stretch to suggest that Matthew Hart’s approach in reporting the global gold rush is, in spirit, nearer Moscow than London.

Formally Hart – himself a former producer at CBC news and an esteemed print journalist – is a fluent stylist and an adventurous reporter. In South Africa, he plummets into the earth more than a mile and a half (“My stomach sailed into my ribs. My ears blocked. Air whistled through the wire mesh”) aiming to investigate what it takes to dig the stuff out.

MUST READ: Gold – the race for the world’s most seductive metal – by Frik Els (Mining.com – December 10, 2013)

December 10, 2013

http://www.mining.com/

When it comes to putting together a book on a storied subject like gold, the hardest task for the writer is not gathering the material.

It is which tales to leave out. Matthew Hart, author of Gold: The Race for the World’s Most Seductive Metal, does a splendid job of transporting readers from one defining moment in the history of gold to the next. Hart, author of seven books including Diamond and a veteran journalist who has appeared on CNN and 60 Minutes and contributed to Vanity Fair, Globe & Mail and others, had to pick his targets carefully to fit into Gold’s brisk 233-page narrative.

Hart does not find the space to chronicle India’s ongoing love affair with gold, the Bre-X scam of the late Nineties, or today’s headline-making dispute over Europe’s largest gold project in Romania, but the omissions provide Gold with admirable pacing and cohesion.

He often jumps back and forth hundreds or even thousands of years to create an arc that spans from the first gold jewellery created more than 6,000 years ago through vivid descriptions of how Inca gold transformed the European financial system, the “Nixon shock”, the game-changing creation of gold-backed ETFs and right up to how the centre of the gold universe has shifted to China.

Gold parallels ‘most dramatic stages of human development’, says author Matthew Hart – by Peter Koven (National Post – November 30, 2013)

December 4, 2013

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Gold has captivated humanity for roughly 6,000 years. Whether it be Egyptian pharaohs, British royalty or those excitable folks on the goldismoney.com message forum, the collective fascination with the yellow metal is clearly here to stay. It’s a topic Canadian author Matthew Hart digs into in his new book Gold: The Race for the World’s Most Seductive Metal, which will be released Tuesday. He sat down with the Financial Post’s Peter Koven to discuss the colourful and turbulent business of gold mining.

Financial Post: When you look at the gold mining industry from thousands of years ago to modern times, what themes keeps repeating themselves?

Matthew Hart: Gold rushes, first of all. They have always been one of the great drivers of the gold world. Periodically, the world either makes a great discovery or develops an overwhelming desire for gold. The first great gold rush was the discovery of the New World. If you go back to the year 1400, Europe is running out of the gold, so they go looking for it. When the Spanish discovered the New World in their search, their cover story is that they were seeking souls for God. Christopher Columbus mentions God in his journals 26 times. Well, gold is mentioned 116 times. So what were they really looking for?