The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.
Many years after he passed away, Paul Marcotte helped his daughter, Alicia Woods, get started in the mining industry.
Wood was only 13, a Grade 8 student, when Marcotte, who helped found Marcotte Mining Machinery with his father and brothers in the late 1970s, lost his life unexpectedly in 1992, at just 37 years of age.
“Growing up, I would go to work with him and I wanted to follow in his footsteps,” Woods recalled. “But then he passed away and his company was sold to another company in southern Ontario, so I honestly thought that opportunity would not be there.”
She did take an alternate route initially and pursued a career as a teacher, but eventually found part-time, then full-time work in the mining supply and service sector.
Woods now works as sales director for MacLean Engineering, which designs and builds heavy equipment for the mining industry. She also founded Covergalls, a company specializing in workwear for women.
“You’re a young, 20-something female walking onto a mine site and it’s like, ‘What does she know about mining?'” Woods said. “But when they found out I was Paul Marcotte’s daughter, I had instant credibility. It made it a lot easier to enter that non-traditional role, working with underground equipment, because of the respect for him.”
There was another show of respect last week, when Marcotte and Doug Smith, founder of the Manitoulin Group of Companies, were inducted into the Sudbury Area Mining Supply and Service Association Hall of Fame at SAMSSA’s annual general meeting.
Woods spoke at her father’s induction.
“It’s certainly an honour,” Woods said. “He was a person I have looked up to my whole life, even though I lost him at an early age.”
Born in Barvue, Que., but raised in Sudbury, Marcotte worked with his father at Jarvis Clark, before they founded their own company with his brothers, Pierre and John, in 1979.
Marcotte Mining grew over the years and expanded from repair and rebuild work to new design and manufacture. They designed the side-shift feature on scissor lifts, which became an industry standard.
Smith, a native of Gore Bay, has spent more than 60 years building what was a grocery wholesale business into a major player in the transportation industry. Manitoulin Transport, the core business, services more direct points than any other carrier in Canada through a network of 66 terminals from coast to coast.
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