Fred Stanford, President, Vale Inco Ontario Operations

• Actually it’s been almost a year to the day since Murilo Ferreira, Vale Inco’s President and CEO, first came to Sudbury to speak to this audience. This was shortly after CVRD completed its acquisition of Inco.

• The theme of his speech was “Together, We are Better” – and I’m sure some of you may have been skeptical.

• He also said the acquisition wouldn’t change things much in Sudbury…but I might argue – since then, things have changed…and for the better.

• What an incredible year we just had at our Sudbury operations: Read the rest of this entry »

Fred Stanford is President, Ontario Operations at Vale Inco

Stanford joined Vale Inco’s Industrial Engineering Department in 1981 upon graduation from the Technical University of Nova Scotia. In 1985, he moved into operating supervision roles in various mines, advancing to the position of Creighton Mine Superintendent in 1991. 

In 1996, he moved to Clarabelle Mill as Superintendent before a transfer to the Manitoba Division as Manager of Human Resources, Safety & Environment.  In 2002, he returned to the Ontario Operations as Manager of Maintenance, General Engineering and Support Services. 

Stanford was appointed Vice-President of Business Services in July 2005.  In January 2007, he was appointed President of Vale Inco’s Ontario Operations. He is active in the community and currently sits as a Director on a number of Boards including Cambrian College, NORCAT and the Laurentian University Board of Governors.

The next posting is a speech given by Stanford to the Sudbury Chamber of Commerce on January 31, 2008.

Reminiscences of pioneers are often the more difficult of sources to uncover. In some cases the pioneer was never interviewed. Often people were too busy surviving in what had to have been a trying time. However, Thomas Frood, one of Sudbury’s early history-makers, did have a few of his views committed to paper at the turn of the century. The account is an important one for not only the views expressed but also what they reveal about the author.

Thomas Frood was born in Renfrew in 1843. For the early years of his life, he lived in southern Ontario as a druggist in Southampton, and later as a teacher in Kincardine. Read the rest of this entry »

Gary Peck is a retired school teacher living in Sudbury, Canada. During the late 1970s, he researched and wrote a very popular local column on the history of the Sudbury Basin. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to find his wonderful stories.

To ensure that the digital generation has access to Sudbury’s vibrant and colourful past – the historic heart of the global nickel industry – Peck has given the Republic of Mining permission to post his columns.

When railway contractors found traces or ore along the tracks at mile 101 north of North Bay in 1903, they did not know what they had. Fred LaRose said it was some kind of damn metal. But what? They needed a rock doctor to figure it out.

In modern day Cobalt, just around the corner from the Lang Street hotel, on a dead end, there is a monument to the man who ‘read the story of the rocks’. Few people have heard the story of the moonlighting geologist it remembers, but without him, well, let’s just say Cobalt would have been a lot slower to develop. Read the rest of this entry »

Busy People

Well, if Sam Ritchie will settle for that kind of monument, there it is. It’s the only kind there is at the moment, for the guys who owe their jobs to Sam Ritchie’s stubbornness haven’t got around to anything else. We wondered about this and asked Dan Dunbar, Inco public relations man, why not.

“I guess they just haven’t had time. This is the participatingest community on the face of the earth. Everybody is always up to something, usually three or four things at the same time.”

Actually, instead of one community at Copper Cliff, there are as many communities as there are mines. Each settlement has its community hall and in the winter the lights in the halls are seldom out. The outdoor skating rinks are jammed with small fry. Teams from the district have an excellent record in national competition and each mine has its hockey team, bowling team, badminton team and baseball team. Read the rest of this entry »

Onaping Mine Classroom

The Mining Companies and its stakeholders are moving forward together at unprecedented levels of collaboration in order to address the skilled workforce shortages.  In 2008 we will see national standards start to emerge.  Greater marketing and branding activities for mining as a high tech, dynamic industry will be launched. Read the rest of this entry »

Inco Advertising 1946

Never before have so many automobiles been loaded down so heavily with so much nickel plating. The stores are filling up with nickel-plated tasters and electrical goods, nickel-plated furniture, nickel-plated utensils and fishing rods and gadgets of infinite assortment and complexity. And in tune with the glistening motif of the times, the merchandisers are lifting the faces of their store fronts and prettying them up with nickel plate, aluminum and chromium.

That’s just the first verse. Under the hood of your new car, in the works of your new radio, in the kitchen of your restaurant and under he concrete floor of your cellar, in airplanes and plows, in power plants and in nail files, in skyscrapers and in dental bridgework, there is more nickel hidden away than you can shake a stick at. Read the rest of this entry »

Cambrian Geology Students in the Field

The 2005 report of the Mining Industry Training and Adjustment Council (MITAC) identified the need for over 80,000 workers in the mining industry over the next 20 years.  That number has now risen to 92,000.

The industry doesn’t operate in a human resources vacuum.  Foreign mining companies are aggressively recruiting Canadian workers at a much greater rate than the global recruitment activity of Canadian companies. And in addition there are skills shortages throughout Canada not just in mining, but also in petroleum, electricity, construction, etc. Read the rest of this entry »

Sylvia Barnard - President Cambrian College

Cambrian College offers Mining, Geology, and Civil Engineering diploma programs as well as apprenticeship and skilled trades training, graduating over 1,000 students annually for entry into the mining industry. Cambrian College has also been providing research for the mining industry for about 40 years. There is a very close, cohesive relationship between this institution and the local mining sector. Read the rest of this entry »

Inco Advertising 1939

Considering Northern Ontario’s glittering triangle. At the apex, toward the eastern border of the province, lies Kirkland Lake; one hundred miles west and a little north, timmins; southward, along that invisible boundary that makes Ontario two provinces in one, Sudbury.

No communities in all of Canada are busier, none more prosperous. The same golden light shines on each. Close together geographically, speaking the same language of mines and mining in a score of tongues, with a common tradition of pioneer luck and labor and a common destiny in that their wealth is derived from the rock, it might seem that they would share a common personality. They don’t. They are too vital for that.

Each of the three communities is distinctive in its own right. Read the rest of this entry »

Sudbury is the richest mining district in North America and among the top ten most important globally. The region accounts for roughly half the mining production in the province of Ontario, the largest mineral producer in Canada. This prolific mining camp has been in continuous production for almost 130 years and many industry experts predict up to another century and a half of production.

The principal metal in the Sudbury region is nickel, an extraordinary substance that helped transform industrial society. Today nickel is essential to all facets of industrial manufacturing, primarily through stainless steel which uses about 70% of global production. The metal is found in over 300,000 products ranging from heart stents used in bypass surgery, to hybrid automobile batteries, jet engines and of course the kitchen sink.

Nickel’s unique properties include a combination of strength, hardness, ductility, resistance to corrosion and the ability to maintain strength under high heat. It can transfer these properties to other metals, making nickel absolutely essential for a wide variety of both civilian and military uses.

Yet, it was nickel’s critical role in military uses that thrust the Sudbury Basin mines into the geo-political spotlight, ensuring that the community’s history would be anything but dull.

During the war years (1939-45), International Nickel Co. of Canada, as it was known back then, and its employees in Sudbury and Port Colborne supplied 95% of all Allied demands for nickel–a vital raw material critical for the Allies’ final victory.

In fact, for much of the past century the key location for this essential metal was the legendary Sudbury Basin, with the South Pacific island of New Caledonia coming a distant second. During certain periods up to the mid-1970s, Sudbury supplied up to 90% of world demand.
Beginning this week I will be posting a few historic articles on the Sudbury nickel mines that were published by Macleans – often called the Canadian version of Time magazine. The writing is exceptional, and more importantly they give a great historical snapshot of how highly this community was thought of during those time periods.

In addition, later this week I will be introducing a Sudbury historian who has researched and written many columns on the community’s vibrant and exciting past.

Glenn Nolan - Chief of the Missanabie Cree First Nation

Some of those communities have been participating in the industry through partnerships, joint ventures, and employment contracts in all aspects of mining ranging from early exploration projects to production mining. However, the majority of communities remain on the outside of development projects, some even resisting any aspect of development within their traditional lands. Read the rest of this entry »

Glenn Nolan is the Chief of the Missanabie Cree First Nation, located in northern Ontario. He is a strong advocate for sharing information between the mining industry and First Nation communities.

Nolan is a director at the Prospectors and Developer Association of Canada (PDAC) and has been recently voted to the position of second Vice-President. Nolan is also the co-chair of the Aboriginal Affairs committee, which promotes greater involvement and inclusion in the mining industry for First Nation communities.

He began his career in mining, prospecting for uranium in the NWT and Northern Saskatchewan before moving on to search for base and precious metals throughout Canada with his own geophysical survey company.

Nolan has been a member of the National Orphaned/Abandoned Mines Initiative for the past four years, where he continues to speak on behalf of the First Nation communities who are directly impacted by closed mines on or near their traditional territories.

They speak well of Fred Schumacher in the community which honours his name just outside of Timmins. He was well-to-do before he came to the gold camp and seems to have made money for fun there.

Born in Denmark in 1863, the young immigrant to the United States eventually became a pharmacist but he did not make drug dispensing his occupation. Instead he became a salesman and later married the daughter of the firm’s owner.

He founded his own patent medicine firm and became rich in the process. Then he decided he needed some excitement in his life and investigated the potential of the new gold-fields in Northern Ontario. Read the rest of this entry »