Canadian Mining Hall of Fame looks to the future with newest inductees (Northern Miner – May 29, 2023)

https://www.northernminer.com/

The Canadian Mining Hall of Fame (CMHF) held its 35th annual induction ceremony on May 24 at the Carlu in Toronto, welcoming three new honourees, and bringing total membership up to 203.

The celebration, attended by around 530 people, was hosted by The Northern Miner Group’s president, Anthony Vaccaro, and president and CEO of the Mining Association of Canada, Pierre Gratton. Full bios of all the inductees are available here.

Jim Cooney: A non-miner no longer

Read more

Reporter’s notebook: Covering the 1980 Val d’Or mine tragedy – by Len Gillis (Sudbury.com – May 24, 2023)

https://www.sudbury.com/

The Belmoral gold mine in Val d’Or experienced a collapse that sent more than a million gallons of water, sediment and slime rushing into the underground workings — and claimed the life of eight miners. Sudbury.com reporter Len Gillis was a CFCL TV reporter in Timmins at the time and he recalls the day

I didn’t know what the urgency was at the time but CFCL news director Jim Prince said to grab as much camera gear as I could carry and to bring half a dozen new video tapes. I was just coming in to work at the news office at CFCL TV in Timmins. Jim was busy on the phone trying to charter a plane. That raised my eyebrows real fast.

Camera, video recorder, tripod and tapes. That’s a lot of equipment to carry on a plane. When Jim got off the phone, he said I had to get over to the Northern Quebec mining city of Val d’Or. It was May 21, 1980, the morning after the first ever Quebec separation referendum.

Read more

‘It’s still standing today’: B.C.’s iconic Mill No. 3 celebrates 100 years of history – by Melanie Nagy (CTV News – May 2023)

https://www.ctvnews.ca/

Off British Columbia’s busy Sea-to-Sky Highway just north of Vancouver, is the Britannia Mine Museum, which is now commemorating 100 years of Mill No.3. The towering structure, built from concrete and steel in 1923, sits on a mountainside slope next to Howe Sound. Britannia Mine Museum curator Laura Minta Holland says it is not only a provincial landmark, but a place steeped in history.

“It’s just so impressive when you walk in and it just prompts you to try to imagine what it would have been like when it was a working and operational mill building.” Minta Holland told CTV News. “I really feel it has that sense of a cathedral almost, and sometimes we refer to it as a kind of cathedral of engineering.”

Read more

Reflections on the Inco Superstack – by Jonathan Migneault (CBC News Sudbury – March 14, 2023)

Stan Sudol PhotoStan Sudol Photo

https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/

Built in 1972 to clean up Sudbury’s environment and decommissioned in 2020, Canada’s onetime tallest freestanding structure is still standing

For Matteo Campagnaro, working on the Inco Superstack — Canada’s tallest structure for a brief time — was a pleasure. Campagnaro, who immigrated to Canada from Italy in 1965, said his time on the Superstack, from 1969 to 1972, made him fall in love with northern Ontario.

“The hunting, the lakes, the fish, the atmosphere, the outdoors, the friendly people — this is the best place in the world,” he said. Thanks to his job as a welder, he met his wife in Sudbury. They have two children and a grandson, and still live in Sudbury’s south end.

Read more

The Year That Made and Broke BC – by Crawford Kilian (The Tyee – March 15, 2023)

https://thetyee.ca/

The 1858 gold rush brought sweeping change, and sealed a grim future for Indigenous people.

Gold, Grit, Guns is an extraordinary book that focuses on the lives of four prospectors and their mixed fortunes in the B.C. gold rush of 1858. Their diaries vividly describe the expense and hard work it took just to reach an unclaimed gravel bar, and then to find the flakes and nuggets of gold it might contain. In the process of getting rich, or more likely going broke, they also began the breaking of an ecosystem and an economy thousands of years old.

The year 1858 was a pivotal one for the western regions of British North America: it saw the transformation of “New Caledonia” into the Crown colony of British Columbia (soon to merge with the colony of Vancouver Island).

Read more

Canada’s First Quantum close to securing new deal for Panama copper mine – by Naimul Karim (Financial Post – January 11, 2023)

https://financialpost.com/

Not ‘very far away’ from striking a deal with the Panama government, company says

Canadian miner First Quantum Minerals Ltd. said it isn’t “very far away” from striking a deal with the Panama government to ensure that it can keep its flagship copper mine alive.

The company has been negotiating a new contract for the rights of the Cobre Panama mine, situated about 120 kilometres west of Panama City, for about a year, stopping briefly on Dec. 16 after the Panama government halted discussions and announced plans to suspend Quantum’s operations.

Read more

[Yellowknife] A city divided – by Rachel Zelniker (CBC News Interactives – September 14, 2022)

https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/

In 1992, a labour dispute that would last 18 months tore Yellowknife apart, culminating in an explosion that killed nine miners. The fallout of one of Canada’s largest mass murders still lingers in this northern city.

Today, Yellowknife only tangentially resembles its history as a gold mining town. The city sits atop the Canadian Shield, a large expanse of ancient bedrock, one of the world’s richest areas in terms of its mineral ores.

But a dilapidated mining headframe is one of the last vestiges of the area’s days as a gold mining capital. The city’s biggest gold mine has been closed for decades.

Read more

Historic Canadian Mining Hall of Fame ceremony aims to widen the mining industry’s tent – by Alisha Hiyate (Northern Miner – August 24, 2022)

Global mining news

The Canadian Mining Hall of Fame held its 34th annual induction ceremony on Aug. 18 at the Palais Royale in Toronto, welcoming five new honourees. This year’s event was historic.

Not only did the CMHF induct its 200th member, but the slate of inductees was the most diverse in the history of the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame dating back to its origins in 1989. Three of the five that would be considered diverse include the first Black man to be inducted, the first openly gay person, and the sixth woman.

Read more

Early Chinese Canadian gold miners remembered for their contribution to B.C.’s Cariboo communities – by Winston Szeto (CBC News British Columbia – May 20, 2022)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/

Many places in the Cariboo, Prince George named after early Chinese Canadian miners Ah Bau and Chew Nam Sing

For May’s Asian Heritage Month in Canada, two historians in B.C.’s Interior are remembering the legacies of two early Chinese Canadian miners.

For more than a decade, Lorna Townsend in Quesnel and Richard Wright in Kamloops have both studied the history of Ah Bau and Chew Nam Sing, two of the most well-known pioneers among an estimated 5,000 people who came from China to B.C.’s Cariboo region in the late 19th century to prospect for gold.

Read more

A Point in Time – by Jane Werniuk, P.Geo. (Canadian Mining Journal – May 5, 2022)

https://www.canadianminingjournal.com/

Celebrating Canada’s mining history and the 140th anniversary of Canadian Mining Journal – one of Canada’s oldest continuously published magazines

When this publication was born in 1882 (no, Marilyn Scales and I were not around then!), it was a very slim newsletter named The Canadian Mining Review. Within five years it had taken on a hot-headed and bold young Scottish cricketer/editor, B.T.A. Bell.

He not only transformed The Review into a national must-read monthly, but organized and energized the fledgeling mining groups across the country. He tried his best to rout out the scoundrels, while cajoling the country’s politicians and associations to get together.

Read more

‘Wild card’ Yukon prospector will be 1st Black person in Canadian Mining Hall of Fame – by Paul Tukker (CBC Canada North – March 12, 2022)

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

The late Yukon legend Peter Risby ‘just had so many unbelievable experiences’

Growing up, Tara Risby heard plenty of stories from her dad, the late Yukon prospector Peter Risby. She heard about how Peter, injured in the Korean War, once spent a few months in a Japanese hospital. Then there was the time he went over a cliff in a truck and came away uninjured. Oh, and there was also that helicopter crash that almost killed him and left him with a permanent scar on his cheek.

“We dubbed him ‘the cat with nine lives’ because he just had so many unbelievable experiences,” Tara recalled. “Yeah, he had quite a storied life.” When Peter Risby finally succumbed to cancer a decade ago, he was a local legend among Northern prospectors. Later this year he’ll be entered into the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame — becoming the first Black person to be inducted.

Read more

Northern Ontario’s mining memorials tell a tale of hard-fought labour protections – by Bill Steer (Bay Today – January 19, 2022)

 

https://www.baytoday.ca/

Back Roads Bill Steer is the founder and remains the GM of the Canadian Ecology Centre. He teaches part-time at Nipissing University (Schulich School of Education) and Canadore College. His features can be found across Village Media’s Northern Ontario sites.

With the help of the region’s scholars, Back Roads Bill recounts the struggles and horrific working conditions endured by early miners and the reason we should all remember them

It is part of a history lesson we know little about, so perhaps we need a little schooling. Envision hard rock miners, once toiling far underground in dark, cramped and dangerous conditions; it was arduous and risky work.

They emerged tired and dirty at the end of their shifts, walking back to small wood-sided homes and their immigrant families. Mining, along with forestry, created what was then called ‘New Ontario,’ — what we know as Northern Ontario.

Indigenous mining in the north began after the last period of glaciations, people of the Plano culture moved into the area and began quarrying quartzite at Sheguiandah on Manitoulin Island. Mining is an important economic activity in Northern Ontario. It has been since the first copper mines at Bruce Mines in 1846 and Silver Islet in 1868.

Read more

Book Review–Cobalt: Cradle of the Demon Metals, Birth of a Mining Superpower – by Daniel Sekulich (Northern Miner – February 17, 2022)

Global mining news

As work continues to create a greener, cleaner future for the planet, the rush to find critical minerals that will spearhead the transition away from fossil-fueled energy has taken on a greater urgency. Explorers and developers are actively seeking out new sources of nickel, copper and lithium throughout the globe.

And then there’s cobalt, a metal whose ability to store energy has already made it crucial for everything from laptops to smartphones, and gives it an even more important role in the green revolution. This has led to a renewed interest in securing sources of the metal across Canada, including around the namesake community of Cobalt, in northern Ontario.

Read more

Charlie Angus’s novel Cobalt reveals reality of mining – by Jamie Portman (Canada.com – February 2022)

https://o.canada.com/

“There’s something absolutely beguiling about these great mineral rushes,” Angus says.

There were the cockroach races that saw miners betting as much as a $1,000 on the outcome. There was the day vaudeville performer Daisy Primrose walked down the street in Harem pants, a new form of female apparel so scandalous that it had been condemned by the Pope. There’s even an appearance by a dog named Bobbie Burns who may well have been the inspiration for Hollywood’s most celebrated canine star.

So if Charlie Angus had wanted, he could easily have confined himself to delivering a robust history of Cobalt, the fabled Northern Ontario mining town in which the New Democrat MP has long lived. But although he is a born storyteller with a passion for popular history that matches the best of Pierre Berton and James H. Gray, Angus had a lot more on his mind when he set out to write his latest book, Cobalt.

Read more

Charlie Angus’ new book a reflection on rough, complex history of Cobalt, Ont. (CBC News Sudbury – February 6, 2022)

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

Town was ‘somewhere between a squatter’s camp and elegant cosmopolitan power’ Angus says

The rich, colourful history of Cobalt, Ontario is the subject of Charlie Angus’ new book Cobalt: Cradle of the Demon Metals, Birth of a Mining Superpower. In it, Angus traces Cobalt’s history– the community was one of Canada’s first boomtowns– and the eccentric characters who dotted its landscape .

“There was a great description of Cobalt in 1909,” Angus said. “It looked somewhat like a cross between a wild west town and a medieval slum.” The town had its own banks, theatres and bordellos, Angus said, and even had a stock exchange long before Vancouver or Toronto.

Read more