This article (original title – Hacks, Flacks and Superstacks) was first published in the August 1976 issue of Content magazine. Mick Lowe is a well-known retired Sudbury journalist with a keen insight on labour issues. From 1975 to 1988 he worked as a freelance journalist, becoming a frequent contributor to the Globe and Mail.

In 1977 he became a staff reporter for CBC Radio News where he helped to open the network’s Northeastern Ontario News Bureau. From 1995 – 2002 Mick Lowe was a regular columnist for Northern Life.

I make a point of watching both local TV newscasts tonight. CKSO has Steelworker president Mickey Maguire on first. Shot in his office with available light, Maguire appears angry and concerned for the safety of his members at Frood. Convincing. Hoskins follows, reading the same statement I heard earlier at CHNO, relying heavily on Harvey Judges to back him up.
With his heavy beard, bad studio lighting, and rehearsed delivery, Mr. Inco presents a haggard image, remindful of the Nixon-Agnew talking heads staring hypnotically into the cameras during the 1972 U.S. presidential campaign.

On CKNC, Hoskins appears again in the studio, though with better lighting, reading the same statement. The Steelworkers have declined an opportunity to reply, but the reporter has located sources willing to give “the other side” of the story.

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This article (original title – Hacks, Flacks and Superstacks) was first published in the August 1976 issue of Content magazine. Mick Lowe is a well-known retired Sudbury journalist with a keen insight on labour issues. From 1975 to 1988 he worked as a freelance journalist, becoming a frequent contributor to the Globe and Mail.

In 1977 he became a staff reporter for CBC Radio News where he helped to open the network’s Northeastern Ontario News Bureau. From 1995 – 2002 Mick Lowe was a regular columnist for Northern Life.

Dropped into the safety office at the Steel Hall this afternoon. Tempers thee were high and rising over the death of James Cullen. I talked with John Higgison and Tom Gunn, the co-chairmen of the Local 6500 inquest committee. Both men really feel the rising fatality rate because theirs is the grim responsibility of investigating the accident scene, interviewing eyewitnesses, and doing what they can for the widows. (Cullen had a wife and four children.)

They show me colour Polaroid snaps of the accident. About all I can make out is the tram, a squat mining vehicle with the wheel-base of a five-ton truck, nearly buried under muck. Higgison tells me that Cullen was not crushed by the ore. He died of asphyxiation when the muck covered the back of his neck, forcing his chin against his chest and cutting off his wind. He died at the wheel of the scoop, pinned into the driver’s seat.

Higgison is shaken because a witness that he interviewed told him that Cullen was still alive after the cave-in. The witness came running when he heard the roof come down and he called out to Cullen in the darkness and the dust. Cullen revved the scoop’s engine three times to show that he was still alive. It took 10 minutes for the rescue party to clear a way into the tram. Cullen was dead when they got to him.

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This article (original title – Hacks, Flacks and Superstacks) was first published in the August 1976 issue of Content magazine. Mick Lowe is a well-known retired Sudbury journalist with a keen insight on labour issues. From 1975 to 1988 he worked as a freelance journalist, becoming a frequent contributor to the Globe and Mail.

In 1977 he became a staff reporter for CBC Radio News where he helped to open the network’s Northeastern Ontario News Bureau. From 1995 – 2002 Mick Lowe was a regular columnist for Northern Life.

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus; and we petty men walk under his huge legs, and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves. Men at some time are masters of their fates; the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,but in ourselves, that we are underlings.
-Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 11

Sudbury, Ontario – Early on Good Friday morning, April 16, 1976, James D. Cullen was killed while working the graveyard shift at Sudbury’s Frood Mine. In itself, there was nothing unusual about Cullen’s death. He was, after all, the fifth worker to die on the job at Inco since the first of the year. But the cave-in that killed James Cullen triggered a chain of events that few could have foreseen.

The Good Friday accident, an angry union, and an alarming injury rate (3,000 reported accidents in the first half of the year) combined to touch a raw nerve somewhere in the upper regions of management at Inco, a company that is acutely sensitive to its public image, especially in Sudbury. The result was a bitter, behind-the-scenes battle for the hearts and minds of the people in this city.

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Mick Lowe’s column – On The Rock – was originally published December 6, 2000 in Northern Life, Greater Sudbury’s community newspaper.

What are the environmental and health effects of living near one of the world’s largest laterite nickel mining and smelting complexes, specifically Inco’s operation on the Island of Sulawesi in eastern Indonesia?

That was the big question on Evan Edinger’s mind when he went to visit the village of Soroako earlier this fall. Edinger is a post-doctorate fellow in geology at Laurentian University, and the first scientifically trained, independent observer from Sudbury to visit Inco’s Indonesian operations.

What Edinger found was a lush, mountainous tropical setting which, superficially, at least, has suffered little of the environmental devestation so sommon around Inco’s activities here On the Rock.

Much of the contrast, Edinger believes, is due to the difference in the chemical makeup of sulphide nickel ores, which is what we mine here in Sudbury, and laterite nickel ores, which is the type of nickel mined throughout the tropics.

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Most of your readers will have sensed that they were being given a fevered caricature of Inco and the international mineral market in Mick Lowe’s Podium piece “Why Inco Must Be Nationalized”, in the July 19, 1982, issue of Maclean’s. Mr. Lowe is a Sudbury-based freelance journalist, well-known to us for his numerous Inco-related articles of the past, and we question his qualifications as a commentator on the international marketplace.

For example, a key statement in Mr. Lowe’s article is that Inco was debt-free in 1972 and now owes $1.1 billion. He also charges that “Inco’s profits in recent years have been invested everywhere but in Canada.” In fact, Inco’s debt in 1972 exceeded $500 million. This money, as well as profits, was used to finance an investment program of more than $1 billion undertaken in Ontario and Manitoba from 1967 to 1972. Inco has continued to invest in Canada, but did indeed invest outside Canada for two reasons: because Canadian nickel supplies were seen to be inadequate to meet market demand; and to diversity the company’s revenue sources so as to be less dependent on the world metal cycle.

Regrettably, there is no basis for any assumption that Inco’s shareholders have realized more from Inco’s Canadian operations than others. For example, from 1970 to 1980 the tax take from Inco by Canadian governments increased from $54 million to $260 million, or by 382 per cent, and our Canadian unionized workers’ hourly wage rates and related fringe benefits increased from $5 million to $15 million, or by some 200 per cent. Read the rest of this entry »

Inco must be nationalized, and the sooner the better. The need is pressing not because the firm’s management has squandered the immense Canadian wealth of the Sudbury, Ontario, and Thompson, Manitoba, ore bodies in ill-advised adventures in Guatemala, Indonesia and the United States. Nor is it because Inco’s management has exercised almost legendary arrogance and callousness with regard tot eh Canadian environment and in dealing with its Canadian work force (this summer’s strike at the company’s Sudbury operation was the third in seven years).

Inco must be nationalized for strictly economic reasons: it may be necessary in order to save the Canadian nickel industry, for never before has it been threatened at it is today. As stated in World Mineral Markets Stage II, a report recently released by the Ontario ministry of natural resources, North American nickel production will actually decrease over the next 10 years, even though total world nickel demand should increase moderately.

The projections on world nickel production made in the report should be disquieting  to all Canadians, and a truly national debate over its pat management and future development is long overdue. The sad truth is that, despite the projected increase in demand for nickel during the next decade, Inco’s share of the market will continue to decline because of the nature of its competitors: most of the newer nickel-producing companies tend to be in the Third World and state-owned. Read the rest of this entry »

Sudbury’s labour movement had its official birth on March 10, 1944, with the certification of Mine Mill Local 598, after a tumultuous gestation that was not without bloodshed. According to local labour lore, the triumph of union organizers after decades of failure stemmed directly from an equally historic and bitter defeat only a few years earlier: the crushing of the Mine Mill certification strike in the Kirkland Lake gold camp during the winter of 1941-42.

Several of the union’s key organizers headed south to Sudbury following the failure of the four month strike at the fabled Golden Mile in the hopes of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, and, in the event, they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

The 11,000 hardrock miners, mill, smelter and refinery workers who became trade unionists that March were the newest members of a union with a long and storied history in the hardrock mining camps of North America. Founded originally as the Western Federation of miners in 1893, the union was renamed the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (IUMMSW) in 1916, but it was known to friend and foe alike as simply “The Mine Mill”.

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 This article orginally appeared in the Christmas 2004 edition of Highgrader Magazine - a Northern Ontario publication that brings the issues, concerns and culture of Ontario’s vast forestry and mineral rich north to the world.

In the latter half of 2003, in the wake of yet another failed marriage, I was forced to indulge in one of the most dreaded of all male pastimes, an activity ranking somewhere between visiting the dentist and plumbing: I had to go shopping.  In the act of replacing the myriad of consumer goods that are forfeited when a household is split asunder, I made several discoveries.  Ever the nosy parker, (and hoping to support Canadian industry) I made a point of determining the country of origin of almost every purchase: from patio furniture to kitchen utensils, from an inexpensive stereo to a weed-whacker. 

The results were astonishing: virtually everything had come from, or at least been assembled in, the People’s Republic of China.  Also amazing was how cheap most things were, and that the quality nevertheless appeared relatively high.  The world was awash in cheap electronics.  It appeared that, at a conservative estimate, 90 per cent of the merchandise in the local Dollarama store was from China.  Multiplying the inventory in all the dollar stores in Sudbury times all the dollar stores in Canada conjured up a mental image of a chain of container ships crossing the Pacific from west to east, disgorging an unending stream of consumer goods produced by a nearly infinite supply of cheap labour in a nation of 1.3 billion souls.

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Mick Lowe was born in 1947 in Omaha, Nebraska.  He is a 1965 graduate of Lincoln Southeast High School.He emigrated to Canada in 1970, after attending the University of Nebraska- Lincoln for four years,majoring in history, English literature, and philosophy.  He also attended the University of Calgary from 1973 to 1974, before moving to Sudbury in 1974 where he became News Editor of Northern Life, Sudbury’s community news weekly.       

From 1975 to 1988 he worked as a freelance journalist, becoming a frequent contributor to the Globe and   Mail. In1977 he became a staff reporter for CBC Radio News. when he helped to open the network’s Northeastern OntarioNews Bureau

In 1978 Mick was the Founding Producer of the CBC’s first radio morning show from Sudbury, Morning North. Shortly afterward he moved to Lisbon, Portugal where he resumed his freelance career for the Globe and Mail from Madrid and Lisbon. 

After publishing his first book, Conspiracy of Brothers: A True Story of Bikers, Murder and the Law Lowe became a Professor in the Print Journalism program at Cambrian College in Sudbury.  Mick published his second book One Woman Army: The Life and Times of Claire Culhane in 1992.

Three years later he became a regujar columnist for Northern Life, a time during which he published his third book, Premature Bonanza: Stand- off at Voisey’s Bay, and he would continue making weekly contributions until 2002, when he became a communications consultant for the Northern Ontario School of Medicine. His column, On the Rock, won awards for “Best Column” in Ontario and North America. A father of two, he resides on the banks of the Vermilion River north of Sudbury.

Over the next few months, Republic of Mining.com will be posting many of Mick Lowe’s previous columns due to their historical relevancy to Sudbury’s mining history.