The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

When I moved to Sudbury from Toronto a year ago, I knew that, as a Jew, it would take some adjusting to go from being one of nearly 180,000 Toronto Jews to one of just a few hundred. president of Sudbury’s Shaar Hashomayim Synagogue, said.

“It’s very challenging to accommodate all those differences in practice and differences in belief within one tent. It’s got to be a pretty big tent.”

However, I never expected finding fresh bagels would be impossible and inquiring about the existence of matzah (unleavened bread eaten by Jews during Passover each year), would be met by blank stares and “did you mean mozzarella?” It wasn’t always this way.

When Sudbury’s first Jewish settler arrived in the late 1800s, and others followed in the years after, a Jewish presence was quickly established in the downtown area by way of a number of thriving businesses and a bustling social life in the then tight-knit community. Read the rest of this entry »

The following is from the National Film Board of Canada Press Kit

THE FILM

“Don’t know much about mines? Not many people do. Mines don’t talk. Especially about their history.” Richard Desjardins and Robert Monderie explore this history in their latest documentary, The Hole Story. Produced by the National Film Board of Canada, the film continues in the same provocative vein as their earlier Forest Alert.

The history of mining in Canada is the story of astronomical profits made with utter disregard for the environment and human health. It’s also a corrupt and sometimes sinister story. For example, during the First World War, nickel from Sudbury was sold to the German army to make the bullets that ended up killing soldiers from Sudbury in the Battle of Vimy Ridge. In Cobalt, a town in Ontario that once had no garbage collection, people were dying of typhoid.

Meanwhile, the first Canadian mining magnates were growing filthy rich selling silver to England from the 40 mines surrounding the town.

Timmins has its own shameful mining story. In the woods,50 kilometres west of the railroad, prospectors quickly staked their claims before heading to the government office to register their hectares and take ownership of the subsoil. Read the rest of this entry »

The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper. cmulligan@thesudburystar.com

Members of United Steelworkers Local 6500– and working people in Sudbury — owe a debt of gratitude to a man whom many of them have never met.

Gilbert “Gib” Gilchrist, a former senior staff representative for USW Local 6500 and a former president of the Sudbury & District Labour Council, died Monday in Gore Bay at age 89. Longtime friend and fellow labour activist Homer Seguin, 77, was deeply saddened to learn Tuesday about his friend’s death.

Seguin, a former USW staff representative and Local 6500 president, said he first met Gilchrist in 1964 when Seguin was a trustee with the union and Gilchrist arrived in Sudbury from Elliot Lake. Gilchrist was born near Spr ing Bay on Manitoulin Island, the youngest of nine children, on a farm his family homesteaded in 1883. Read the rest of this entry »

The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

The 1960s were a period of tension and turmoil in Sudbury, with huge changes in local labour organizations. It was also a period of massive urban renewal and municipal restructuring.

When the decade opened, the entire mining industry workforce was represented by one union — the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. When the decade ended, the United Steelworkers Union had established itself as bargaining agent for Inco employees in Sudbury.

To mark its presence in the community, the union purchased the former Legion Hall at Frood Road and College Street. The building became the Steelworkers Hall.

It was also a time of increasing demand for nickel products throughout the world, helped in no small part by the war in Vietnam. Both of the community’s mining companies, Inco and Falconbridge, were expanding operations. Read the rest of this entry »

http://thechronicleherald.ca/

Paul W. Bennett is founding director, Schoolhouse Consulting, Halifax, and the author of Vanishing Schools, Threatened Communities: The Contested Schoolhouse in Maritime Canada, 1850-2010.

Dusty old memoirs rarely attract much attention, unless they celebrate the lives of famous figures or capture well the social experience of bygone days. Men and women living ordinary lives rarely write autobiographies and fewer still have the resources to get them published.

The rather obscure Cape Breton-born mining pioneer Aeneas (Angus) McCharles (1844-1906) was an exception to the normal pattern. His personal memoir, Bemocked of Destiny, published posthumously in 1908, achieved some notoriety for its homespun philosophy and has been re-published recently as a centenary project.

McCharles’s fascinating life caught the imagination of Martin McAllister, an amateur historian and former columnist for the Inco Triangle, the official newsletter of the International Nickel Company in Sudbury, Ont. While researching the mining pioneers of Sudbury District some years ago, he stumbled upon McCharles and his long out-of-print memoir. Read the rest of this entry »

The Toronto Star, has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

For the web’s largest database of articles on the Ring of Fire mining camp, please go to: Ontario’s Ring of Fire Mineral Discovery

“The Ring of Fire railroad should be subsidized by
governments as the huge economic impact will benefit
the economy for decades to come, help balance budgets
and alleviate aboriginal poverty in the surrounding
First Nations communities.” (Stan Sudol)

Notwithstanding the recent correction in commodity prices, near-record highs for gold, silver and a host of base metals essential for industry confirm that the commodity “supercycle” is back and with a vengeance.

China, India, Brazil and many other developing economies are continuing their rapid pace of growth. In 2010, China overtook Japan to become the world’s second largest economy and surpassed the United States to become the biggest producer of cars.

In March, Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney remarked: “Commodity markets are in the midst of a supercycle. . . . Rapid urbanization underpins this growth. . . . Even though history teaches that all booms are finite, this one could go on for some time.”

Quebec’s visionary 25-year “Plan Nord” will see billions invested in northern resource development and infrastructure to take advantage of the tsunami in global metal demand and generate much needed revenue for government programs.

In Ontario, the isolated Ring of Fire mining camp in the James Bay lowlands is one of the most exciting and possibly the richest new Canadian mineral discovery in more than a generation. It has been compared with both the Sudbury Basin and the Abitibi Greenstone belt that includes Timmins, Kirkland Lake, Noranda and Val d’Or. Read the rest of this entry »

Sudbury-born Kenneth Hayes currently teaches  architectural history at the University of Toronto.

This essay was commissioned by the Musagetes Foundation on the occasion of the Musagetes Sudbury Cafe. It appears in the book Sudbury: Life in a Northern Town / Sudbury: au nord de notre vie.

Musagetes is a private foundation based in Guelph, Ontario which seeks to transform contemporary life by working with artists, cultural mediators, public intellectuals and other partners to develop new approaches to building community and culture.

Kenneth Hayes – Be Not Afraid of Greatness or Sudbury: A Cosmic Accident (Part 2 of 2)

Sudbury’s development displays some of these features in their later, more advanced forms. The “I” in Inco’s name proclaimed the venture international, but the dominant company in the exploitation of Sudbury’s ore reserves was essentially American. Inco may nominally have been based in Toronto, but Canada’s role in this relationship was at best that of junior partner in a kind of corporate suzerainty.

Falconbridge, the newer and smaller corporation in Sudbury, generally enjoyed a better reputation than Inco, but it was not that different. In fact, the rivalry between Inco and Falconbridge over the course of the twentieth century often had the unreal air of a duopoly — the minimum diversity required to maintain the appearance of open competition while colluding for the same ends. (11)  In the last decade, Inco and Falconbridge were purchased, respectively, by the giant mining corporations Vale, from Brazil, and Xstrata, from Switzerland. This situation is still regarded (not without some degree of xenophobia) as abnormal, but the truth is that Sudbury has never really ruled itself.

Understandably, diversification has been Sudbury’s cultural and economic mandate in recent decades. Fuelled by the North’s long-standing regionalist grievances, the city went through a phase of public investment that resulted in the creation of the Taxation Data Centre, Science North and improved health-care and educational facilities, but there are now signs that vigorous private initiative is rising from the thrall of the mines, and doing so in Sudbury’s own inimitable way. Read the rest of this entry »

Sudbury-born Kenneth Hayes currently teaches  architectural history at the University of Toronto.

This essay was commissioned by the Musagetes Foundation on the occasion of the Musagetes Sudbury Cafe. It appears in the book Sudbury: Life in a Northern Town / Sudbury: au nord de notre vie.

Musagetes is a private foundation based in Guelph, Ontario which seeks to transform contemporary life by working with artists, cultural mediators, public intellectuals and other partners to develop new approaches to building community and culture.

Kenneth Hayes – Be Not Afraid of Greatness or Sudbury: A Cosmic Accident (Part 1 of 2)

Sudbury is not ugly, as the old “moonscape” slur has it, nor is it beautiful, as its boosters claim, pointing to the city’s many lakes. At once awesome and terrible, harsh and majestic, Sudbury lies beyond the register of ugly and beautiful. The place can only be described as sublime, for Sudbury is a phenomenon as much as it is a city.

This status is revealed by the fundamental confusion about its name, which never makes clear what is nominated: the city itself, the larger region, the Sudbury Basin on which the city is perched, the fact of the mines, or even the reputation of the place. Without proper limits, one signifier encompasses all of these identities.

Sudbury is, in the final analysis, the slow unfolding of a cosmic accident. The nickel ore that fuelled the city’s development was deposited in a vast cataclysm, the impact of a meteorite that would have destroyed all life on earth — had there been any. But this occurred so long ago that life did not yet exist on earth. (1)   The shock was so great that seismologists can still detect its faint reverberation — planet Earth literally quivers with the pangs of Sudbury’s birth. Read the rest of this entry »

For a large selection of corporate histories click: International Directory of Company Histories

Company History:

Inco Limited is one of the world’s top producers of nickel. It operates Canada’s largest mining and processing operation in Sudbury, Ontario, and runs other mines in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Indonesia. It has interests in refineries in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, and sales and operations in over 40 countries worldwide. Overall Inco provides about 25 percent of the nickel used globally. The company also produces cobalt, copper, precious metals, and specialty nickel products.

Early Years

Nickel was first isolated as an element in the middle of the 18th century, but not until the following century did it come into demand as a coin metal. Up to around 1890, coining remained the metal’s only use, and most of the world’s nickel was mined by Le Nickel, a Rothschild company, on the island of New Caledonia. At that time, however, it was determined that steel made from an iron-nickel alloy could be rolled into exceptionally hard plates, called armor plate, for warships, tanks, and other military vehicles, and the resulting surge in demand spurred a worldwide search for nickel deposits.

The world’s largest nickel deposit ever discovered was in Ontario’s Sudbury Basin; before long, one of the area’s big copper mining companies, Canadian Copper, began shipping quantities of nickel to a U.S. refinery in Bayonne, New Jersey, the Orford Copper Company. Read the rest of this entry »

The Toronto Star, which is the largest circulation newspaper in the country, has an enormous impact on Canada’s federal and provincial politics as well as shaping public opinion.

Martin Goldfarb is principal at Goldfarb Intelligence Marketing and was official Liberal party pollster from 1972 to 1984.

Inco is an example worth remembering. At one point Inco was
a global leader, dominating a mining category. It was the soul
of the city of Sudbury and added stature to Ontario. It produced
intellectual property in the mining industry that was second to
none and respected globally. It provided work to miners, engineers, lawyers, bankers and others. So much of this was lost. The intellectual property and pride that Inco brought to Canada,
Ontario and Sudbury are all but gone. What happened? Management ceased to lead. In so doing it became vulnerable to takeover. (Martin Goldfarb-April 18, 2011)

Australia said No to Singapore. Australia decided its stock exchange is not for sale. Now we in Canada are thinking about whether or not the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) should be taken over by the London Stock Exchange (LSE).

A country is more than a business. There are totems in our country that define our personality, help create our character and engender pride, independence and a sense of our own charisma. Some arise from our geography (the Rockies, the Arctic), some from our natural resources (oil, water, lumber, maple syrup) and some from government (national health care). All help give us a sense of who we are.

But there are other totems in Canada that are not a function of our geography, our geology or our government. These are institutions created by the citizens of our country in business and academia — our universities and our internationally recognized businesses, such as RIM today, and in the past, Inco and Falconbridge. Inco and Falconbridge have disappeared but should never have been allowed to do so. A dose of economic nationalism is good for our soul. In some circumstances, profit should be second to the national interest. National interests help define who we are. Read the rest of this entry »

Stan Sudol is a Toronto-based communications consultant who writes extensively on mining issues. stan.sudol@republicofmining.com

The Royal Canadian Mint last spring introduced the Victory Anniversary Nickel to commemorate the sacrifices and achievements of our fighting forces in the Second World War. In Sudbury and Port Colborne, Ont., that victory coin has many additional memories, especially for Inco Ltd and its work force. 

During the war years, International Nickel Company 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 our final victory.

In fact, for much of the past century the leading source of this essential metal was the legendary Sudbury Basin; the South Pacific island of New Caledonia came a distant second. Until the mid-seventies, Sudbury supplied up to 90% of world demand during some periods. Read the rest of this entry »

Temiskaming & Northern Ontario Railway at the turn of the last century

This column was published in the March 17, 2011 issue of Northern Life.

Stan Sudol is a Toronto-based communications consultant who writes extensively on mining issues. stan.sudol@republicofmining.com

For an extensive list of articles on this mineral discovery, please go to: Ontario’s Ring of Fire Mineral Discovery

“In the next 25 years, demand for metals could meet or exceed what we have used
since the beginning of the industrial revolution. By way of illustration, China needs to
build three cities larger than Sydney or Toronto every year until 2030 to accommodate
rural to urban growth.” (John McGagh, Rio Tinto – Head of Innovation)

Commodity Super Cycle is Back

The commodity super cycle is back, and with a vengeance. China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and many other developing economies are continuing their rapid pace of industrialization and urbanization. In 2010, China overtook Japan to become the world’s second largest economy and surpassed the United States to become the biggest producer of cars.

During a recent speech in Calgary, Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of Canada remarked, “Commodity markets are in the midst of a supercycle. …Rapid urbanization underpins this growth. Since 1990, the number of people living in cities in China and India has risen by nearly 500 million, the equivalent of housing the entire population of Canada 15 times over. …Even though history teaches that all booms are finite, this one could go on for some time.”

At the annual economics conference in Davos, Switzerland, held last January – where the most respected world leaders in politics, economics and academia gather – the consensus was one of enormous global prosperity predicting that, “For only the third time since the Industrial Revolution, the world may be entering a long-term growth cycle that will lift all economies simultaneously…”

John McGagh, head of innovation, at Rio Tinto – the world’s third largest mining company – has said, “In the next 25 years, demand for metals could meet or exceed what we have used since the beginning of the industrial revolution. By way of illustration, China needs to build three cities larger than Sydney or Toronto every year until 2030 to accommodate rural to urban growth. This equates to the largest migration of population from rural to urban living in the history of mankind.”

The isolated Ring of Fire mining camp, located in the James Bay lowlands of Ontario’s far north, is one of the most exciting and possibly the richest new Canadian mineral discovery made in over a generation. It has been compared to both the Sudbury Basin and the Abitibi Greenstone belt, which includes Timmins, Kirkland Lake, Noranda and Val d’Or.

Read the rest of this entry »

Map Courtsey KWG

Stan Sudol is a Toronto-based communications consultant who writes extensively about the mining industry. stan.sudol@republicofmining.com

For an extensive list of articles on this mineral discovery, please go to: Ontario’s Ring of Fire Mineral Discovery

“In the next 25 years, demand for metals could meet or exceed what we have used
since the beginning of the industrial revolution. By way of illustration, China needs to
build three cities larger than Sydney or Toronto every year until 2030 to accommodate
rural to urban growth. This equates to the largest migration of population from rural to
urban living in the history of mankind.” (John McGagh, Rio Tinto – Head of Innovation)

Mining Watch Reputation 

Mining Watch was established in 1999 in response to the actions of Canadian exploration companies operating in Latin America and other jurisdictions in the developing world.

As stated on their website, “MiningWatch Canada … addresses the urgent need for a co-ordinated public interest response to the threats to public health, water and air quality, fish and wildlife habitat and community interests posed by irresponsible mineral policies and practices in Canada and around the world.”

In contrast to many in the mining sector I find a few of Mining Watch’s criticism’s legitimate and they have worked cooperatively with the industry in Ontario. In 2008, Mining Watch in conjunction with the Ontario Mining Association supported the amendment of the Ontario Mining Act that enabled companies to voluntarly rehabilitation mine sites even thought they had no legal requirments to do so. 

Recently, Mining Watch has issued a report titled, “Economic analysis of the Ring of Fire chromite mining play”. It was written by former Sudbury resident and well-known social activist Joan Kuyek. While the report covers a wide range of topics, I would like to focus on some important issues that have been downplayed or omitted, primarily the current state of mining, geo-politics and a history of enormous wealth creation from the mineral sector due to government infrastructure support.  Read the rest of this entry »

This article was originally published in the New York Times on August 13, 1984.

SUDBURY, Ontario, August 13, 1984 – the Manoir Bar sits on the floor of a valley that was gouged out by a meteor millennia ago. Until two months ago the men drinking in the Manoir worked for two large companies and earned some of the highest industrial salaries in Canada digging and processing the ore churned up by the meteor.

Now, over beers, they tried to explain to themselves and to a visitor how this recently prosperous city had become the place with the highest unemployment in Canada, in the northern hemisphere and, some said, in the industrialized world.

Last month the two giant nickel and copper companies around which ;this city of 135,000 grew, shut down operations and furloughed their workers because their stockpiled supplies far exceeded the demands of industrial users in the United States and Europe.

The 1,250-foot stack at Inco, which in flush times propelled acetic smoke all the way to Nova Scotia, now stands dormant like a stele from a lapsed civilization. The 13,000 miners and mill workers who in recent years have earned salaries averaging from 20,000 to 40,000 Canadian dollars a year, or about $16,000 to $32,000, are either using up the last of their vacation pay or are living on $200 a week in unemployment benefits, so called poky checks. Read the rest of this entry »

John Fera is the president of United Steelworkers Local 6500. He is retiring on August 1, 2010.

While United Steelworkers in Sudbury and Port Colborne are returning to work, it will take considerable time for many in our communities to overcome the pain and hardship of the year-long strike against Vale.

Indeed, over the last couple of weeks there has been consensus from all corners that it is essential for Vale to build respectful and productive relationships with its Canadian workers and their communities.

In this light, it is profoundly disappointing to see Vale’s top executives going out of their way to make public statements that show no interest in fostering trust, goodwill and respect with workers.

Vale’s CEO Roger Agnelli claims the strike was so prolonged because “the United Steelworkers has a long record of conflicts and strikes.” Well, I’m sorry Mr. Agnelli but the USW has been representing the miners in these communities for generations and in Vale’s first negotiations it has managed to extend their strike to more that 100 days longer than the longest ever strike at Inco.

Contracts for good wages, pensions and benefits typically have resulted from hard-nosed negotiations, short strikes and goodwill, until this unprecedented aggressive Vale approach.

Read the rest of this entry »