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.

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Imagine a City

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June 17, 2009

Madam President, Mister Chair, Colleagues and Friends

I am pleased and honoured to be here this afternoon to present the 2010 Mayor’s State of the City address.  I want to express my appreciation to the Chamber and its members for providing this forum and I want to thank the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation both for sponsoring this event again this year and for their ongoing contribution to this city.  Since its opening in 1999, the Slots at Sudbury Downs have transferred more than $21 million to their host municipality.

This is my fourth State of the City address and it is an important annual opportunity to take stock of where we have been and where we hope to go as a municipality and as a community.  The past twelve months have been challenging in many ways but have once again demonstrated our community’s resiliency and our unrelenting collective commitment to build for the future.

As I prepared these remarks, I was reminded of a phrase from Michael Ondaatje’s iconic novel about the history of Toronto, In the Skin of a Lion.

‘Before the real city could be seen,” Ondaatje wrote, ‘it had to be imagined.” 

As you came in today, you will have noticed the displays of architectural concepts around the room.  This is where imagination comes to life and a city is born.  Of course imagination and city-building are pursuits not limited to those in the architecture profession, and this community has been truly blessed by those who imagined the city such that we can see it today.  Read the rest of this entry »

Building a Greater Community

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June 23, 2009

Mister Chair-elect, Madame President, Chamber Members and Fellow Citizens,

C’est pour moi un honneur et un privilège d’être ici cet après-midi pour prononcer le discours du maire sur l’état de la Ville de 2009. Je tiens à exprimer ma reconnaissance à la Chambre – à son président élu Steve Irwin et à sa présidente Debbi Nicholson.

I want to also thank our sponsors at OLG – Todd Hilton, Manager of the Slots at Sudbury Downs and Kelly McDougald, CEO of Ontario Lottery and Gaming – for helping to provide this opportunity.  It is a challenge to condense the happenings of this dynamic city into a six hour speech, but I will do my best.

Let me begin by acknowledging the presence of our local MPP and Minister of Community Safety, Rick Bartolucci and his wife Maureen.  Also with us this afternoon is former Mayor David Courtemanche, as well another former Mayor and a personal friend, Jim Gordon and his wife Donna. I am also pleased to welcome back my friend from the City of North Bay, Mayor Vic Fedeli and wife Patty.

Several of my fellow councilors are here today.  Although the Mayor is often seen as the face of Council, I am just one voice amongst 13 and the success we have had has been a result of the willingness of all individual members to work as a team.

Also integral to our city’s accomplishments is our municipal staff, led by our new Chief Administrative Officer, Doug Nadorozny. These people provide dedicated, professional service to Council and to the citizens of Greater Sudbury and I am pleased to publicly thank them for their efforts. Read the rest of this entry »

Claude Gravelle is the Member of Parliament for Nickel Belt and the NDP’s Mining Critic. This column was published in the July 20, 2010 edition of Northern Life 

Earlier this month, we all breathed a sigh of relief as USW members ratified a new five-year agreement with Vale.

These workers deserve to be commended for their efforts. Their families, friends and neighbours also deserve to be commended for supporting them throughout this very difficult time. Having visited the Steel Hall regularly, I can attest to the generosity of community members and business owners who made significant contributions to the workers’ food bank for almost a year.

However, many workers lost their vehicles, homes and savings. Some families even fell apart. We cannot understate the impact this strike has had on so many people. We all know small and independent businesses throughout Greater Sudbury that also paid a price for this strike.

As an Inco employee, I lived through the previous record-holding strike of 1978-1979. It’s hard not to feel that history repeats itself sometimes. But this shouldn’t stop us from trying to move forward in way that prevents such devastating events from happening again.

And while much has been said and written about this strike, more analysis and reflection is both welcome and necessary. We need to look at the conditions that led to the strike, and the conditions that contributed to its longevity.

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Michael Atkins is the president of Laurentian Media Group matkins@laurentianmedia.com This column was published in the July 20, 2010 edition of Northern Life

The column was originally titled “16 Tons and What Do You Get” but was changed for web searches.

“Sixteen Tons” is a song about the life of a coal miner, first recorded in 1946 by American country singer Merle Travis and released on his box set album Folk Songs of the Hills the following year. A 1955 version recorded by Tennessee Ernie Ford reached number one in the Billboard charts, while another version by Frankie Laine was released only in the United Kingdom, where it gave Ford’s version some stiff competition. Travis claimed authorship of the song, but a competing claim was made by George S. Davis.  (wiki)

Long strikes get forgotten everywhere except where they happen. Sometimes they get forgotten before they are over. The United Steelworker/Vale Inco fight to the finish this year had many twists and turns, some of them quite surprising. It will not soon be forgotten.

It became clear by mid-winter it was hopeless to try to introduce common sense. It was a strike over principal and neither party was prepared to give up their principal until they had won or had no choice.

It was an epic battle. To think that, after a year off work, and with tens of millions of dollars lost by the company, and the union suffering indignity after indignity (particularly the settlement of a sister union whose workers, in part, were doing the work of strikers), it took an eleventh-hour nudge (or was it an ultimatum) by the provincial Minister of Labour to get an agreement from both parties to refer their last issue (nine fired workers) to the Ontario Labour Relations Board for a decision.

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The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous impact and influence on Canada’s political and business elite as well as the rest of the country’s print, radio and television media.

This article was the cover story of the Saturday, November 25, 2006 edition of the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business Section. Jacquie McNish’s 16,000-word article on the failed Inco/Falconbridge merger has become the definitive account of this Canadian business tragedy.

THE GREAT CANADIAN MINING DISASTER

Scott Hand had a dream, to keep Inco Ltd. in Canadian hands. But he didn’t count on corporate betrayal, political apathy, a new bread of shareholders, and a lack of boardroom bravado

Introduction

The horizon clears

Inco sees its future

After days of murky weather, a wool fog lifted off central Labrador, revealing the bald rugged terrain explorer Jacques Cartier dismissed as “the land God gave to Cain.” The momentary clearing allowed a clutch of travellers to dash to two turbo props marooned at Happy Valley Goose Bay airport.

These were no ordinary tourists. Leading the parka-clad pack was Scott Hand, patrician chief executive officer of the world’s second-largest nickel producer, Inco Ltd. Behind him, eager to explore Cain, were an elite corps of international executives. Rick Waugh, CEO of Bank of Nova Scotia, a man who is gobbling up more Latin American banks than Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, was here. So was David O’Brien, chairman of EnCana Corp. and Royal Bank of Canada. Joining them were Glen Barton, retired chief of Illinois’ Caterpillar Inc.; John Mayberry, onetime CEO of Hamilton steel maker Dofasco Inc.; and Francis Mer, retired boss of European steel maker Arcelor SA and a former finance minister of France. Inco directors one and all, they scrambled to the Dash 8s under an uncertain sky to see for themselves the 21st century’s first great mining startup: Voisey’s Bay.

Mr. Hand, however, wanted his directors to see more than a prosperous mine on the afternoon of Sept. 20, 2005. Although Inco was still digesting the $4-billion, 1996 purchase of Voisey’s Bay, he believed it was time to deal again. Rival Falconbridge Ltd. was in play, presenting Inco with an opportunity to forge a global powerhouse by bringing some of the world’s richest copper and nickel deposits under one corporate entity. Read the rest of this entry »

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous impact and influence on Canada’s political and business elite as well as the rest of the country’s print, radio and television media.

This article was the cover story of the March 26, 2010 edition of the Globe and Mail’s monthly Report on Business magazine.

Down the road from the Copper Cliff smelter, where the Inco Superstack reaches 380 metres into a clear winter sky, striking Steelworkers stamp their heavy boots and feed a smoking fire pit with scrap wood. Massive ore trucks, engines growling, wait for permission to drive through the picket line. It is a familiar ritual; after 10 or 15 minutes, the picket captain signals the drivers to proceed and go about their business at the smelter—their business being strikebreaking.

When Local 6500 of the United Steelworkers walked off the job at the Vale Inco nickel mines, it was mid-July. The progression from agreeable summer weather to minus 20 C has been brutal. The best to be said about minus 20 is that it’s better than minus 30, just like strike pay of $200 a week is better than no pay at all. It’s hardly surprising that there’s little of the bravado that usually sustains picket lines.

The downbeat atmosphere may also reflect a sense among the strikers that the world has changed and that their strike has not been noticed by Canadians. There have been many strikes in Inco’s history—but every other one was decided in Canada. Now Inco is a subsidiary of a company based far away.

If the long stalemate in Sudbury had a sound, it might be that of the other shoe falling. When the takeover binge of the mid-2000s saw many of Canada’s pre-eminent companies disappear into foreign hands, the debate over the “hollowing out” of the domestic economy was muted. After all, Vale, like other acquisitors, made undertakings to preserve jobs and, in fact, to carry on much like before.

Now, it appears, things look very different to Vale.

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Linda Diebel is a National Affairs Writer for the Toronto Star, which has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on Canada’s federal and provincial politics as well as shaping public opinion. Linda Diebel is originally from Sudbury. This article was published on Sunday, June 6, 2010.

COPPER CLIFF, ONT.—My grandmother, Lillian Rose, was the sweetest person I’ve ever known. She gave up more than youth and beauty to leave England and come with her husband to the nickel mines of Canada’s Precambrian Shield. The Sudbury region, some 400 kilometres north of Toronto, is an unforgiving place for a fragile English rose.

During the last 40 years of her life, she had a disease that turned her once-pale skin red and left it blistered and scabbed. The constant flaking embarrassed her and, on bad days, the pain sent her to bed. My earliest memory — and I was no more than 18 months — was of being on her bed on Jones Lane in Copper Cliff, understanding even then I had to be gentle.

Doctors couldn’t help because they believed her allergic to the air she breathed, a soup of industrial pollutants. Sometimes the sulphur was so thick it seared the throat.

Move away, they said, and your skin will clear up. But they didn’t talk about that publicly. My grandfather Reg was an electrician at the Copper Cliff smelter and his job, and the livelihoods of the physicians themselves, depended on what was then King Inco, the world’s biggest producer of nickel.

Lately, Lillian Rose has been on my mind. Last Sunday, I was preparing to fly north to write about the 11-month-long strike against Inco, now called Vale, by 3,000 members of the United Steelworkers Local 6500. The pending trip evoked memories, and I found myself staring at a faded photo of my grandmother and me.

Still, I had no intention of writing about her.

My story would be about the culture of a company town from the perspective of generations of men who went down the mines, or worked in the smelter or refinery, at what used to be Inco. That seemed the best place to start, given that Inco’s owner since 2006 — Companhia Vale do Rio Doce — insists the working culture of its new operations must change.

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This article is from a special publication call Fabulous Northern Ontario which celebrated the 25th  anniversary of Northern Ontario Business. Adelle Larmour has written a book about John Gagnon’s valiant struggles for the health and safety of his fellow worker called Until the End. Contact the author to purchase a copy of Until the End: untiltheend.larmour@gmail.com

He was a man ahead of his time. An ordinary person who had a vision and an unyielding drive to see justice done in his workplace.

Jean Gagnon, retired Inco employee and activist for sinter plant workers in Copper Cliff, spent his entire life fighting for the recognition of industrial disease and compensation claims for 250 men and their families, whom he affectionately refers to as “my boys.”

Sitting casually in the living room of his Sturgeon Falls home in a quiet neighbourhood near the shore of Lake Nipissing, he talks about the asbestos recently found in his lungs, as well as the half-inch thick lesion of nickel oxide sitting in the bottom of his left lung.

His own battle is about to begin, but he won’t fight it himself: “The lawyer who handles his own claim has a fool for a client,” said Gagnon.

For the past five years, Gagnon has battled colon and prostate cancer.

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Adelle Larmour is a journalist at Northern Ontario Business and Sudbury Mining Solutions Journal. Contact her at  untiltheend.larmour@gmail.com  to order a copy of Until the End.

Chapter 1 – John Gagnon Introduction

Millions of tiny crystal particles hung in the bitter northern Ontario air, daring the adventurous traveller to make his or her way through them on that frigid Monday morning, February 9, 1951. John (Jean) Gagnon, son of a farmer from Fabre, Quebec in a family of eight siblings, walked a mile through that minus 49-degree Fahrenheit cold. His eyes carefully followed the sidewalk as he walked from the flour-mill area to downtown Sudbury, listening to the cars drive by, wondering how they could see where to go.

He left the Park Hotel where he was staying, eager to catch the bus and arrive on time for his first day of work at the mining giant Inco Ltd., the largest nickel mine in Ontario, and at that time, the world.

The 24-year-old John was no stranger to colder climates, but this bone-chilling frost caused even him to hasten his pace while every suspended frozen droplet felt like a burning pinprick on his numbing cheeks.

Steady employment was John’s goal. If he spent a few months working at Inco, he could scrape up enough cash to pay back money owed to his friends and buy a ticket to Vancouver. He’d already pawned his guns and rifles to get to Sudbury. A full-time job supporting this westward trip was definitely the order of the day. 

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This article originally appeared in Northern Life, Greater Sudbury’s community newspaper on April 8, 2010 www.northernlife.ca

To order a copy of the book, contact Northern Ontario Business journalist Adelle Larmour at untiltheend.larmour@gmail.com

BBRADLEY@NORTHERNLIFE.CA

The ups and downs of working in the Inco Sinter Plant have been documented in a new book, Until The End, written by local author and Northern Ontario Business journalist Adelle Larmour.

In Larmour’s first book, she tells the story of Jean Gagnon, a Sinter Plant veteran of more than 11 years. The plant, which separated sulphur from the nickel rich ore, operated from 1947 to 1963 in Copper Cliff.

Gagnon, who was originally from Quebec, had been working at the paper mill in Espanola for five years, before he decided to come to Sudbury for higher wages. Twenty-three years old at the time, Gagnon said his first day on the job in 1951, made him realize the working conditions at the Sinter Plant left a lot to be desired.

“You could be talking to someone 20 feet away (in the plant) and you could not see them for the dust,” Gagnon said. He noticed the other workers tended to cough a lot, which prompted him to wear a dust mask from day one, and to refrain from smoking for fear of driving nickel-laden dust deeper into his lungs with the inhalation of tobacco smoke.

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With 35 years of institutional investing and money management experience in the United States and Canada, Donald Coxe has a unique background in North American and global capital markets  http://www.coxeadvisors.com  This was originally written in May, 2007.

We have been asked by several Canadian clients for clarification about our strong opposition to some of the takeovers of Canadian resource companies. This is our detailed response. (The opinions contained herein are those of Donald Coxe and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BMO Capital Markets.) The material is primarily for Canadian clients, but others who were forced to tender their Inco or Falconbridge shares, or who fear being forced to sell their oil sands holdings, should find the analysis of interest.

We opposed the takeovers of Inco and Falconbridge, and have for two years expressed strong concern that Big Oil’s Reserve Life Index problems would lead to takeovers of publicly-traded oil sands companies at unrealistically low prices—because they tend to trade in line with spot oil prices.

Last September, we gave a speech to the 30th Annual Meeting of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (whose membership includes the CEOs of Canada’s biggest companies) in which we ridiculed the prices at which Inco and Falconbridge were sold and warned that takeovers of oil sands companies would probably be next. (We had a polite exchange of views with the Brazilian Ambassador about his government’s holding in CVRD during the question period.

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Claire Pilon is a Sudbury-based journalist, researcher and translator.  She has given Republic of Mining.com permission to post her column on Sudbury’s francophone history. She can be reached at: cpilon@cyberbeach.net or visit her website: www.clairepilon.com This column was originally published in the Sudbury Star.

In order to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the City of Sudbury, this column will demonstrate how francophones have left and still play an important role in the creation and development of our city.

It will demonstrate how francophones helped shape the city, whether it be in the religious, educational, health, economical or social sectors.

In the following columns readers will be made aware of the many contributions of francophones to making this city what it is today, 125 years after its beginnings.

It was 125 years ago when the first settlers, a great number of them French-speaking arrived in our fait city.

Sudbury was a lumbering town before it became a mining one. It has developed over the years and has seen many changes, some for the best.

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Maclean’s Magazine – August 15, 1951

Lindsley is a rare combination of the four “musts” of mine-making success.

The first “must,” and Lindsley’s greatest asset, is his phenomenal insight into problems of geology and vein structure.

Second, he has an uncanny sense of economics and financing.

Third, Lindsley, though self-effacing in his personal life, is a striking contrast as a businessmen. He is willing to gamble hard and boldly with million-dollar stakes and long odds.

And fourth, he can work hard, physically and mentally, with a power of concentration so keen that he is amusingly absent-minded at times regarding matters outside his business affairs in which he has no interest.

Knack for Rock Jigsaws

Lindsley’s ability to work out complex problems of geological structure and decide whether a property is a potential mine or just another “teaser” has become a legend in Canadian mining circles. But he has made mistakes. For example, he pulled out of Red Lake, Ontario, in its early days because he was convinced the area had no promise, then had to watch with embarrassment as it developed into one of Canada’s richest gold camps.

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A shy, elderly and virtually anonymous man named Thayer Lindsley personally controls a fabulous international kingdom of gold, silver, copper, zinc and iron. With a genius for geology and finance he has made millions but he has never got around to buying a car.

Maclean’s Magazine – August 15, 1951

The financial pages of Canadian newspapers in the past few months have heralded the discovery of new high-grade ore at Giant Yellowknife, Canada’s lusty gold-producing youngster of the Northwest Territories; they have announced that United Keno, the Yukon’s big silver-lead-zinc producer, chalked up a two-and-a-half-million-dollar profit in 1950; that Falconbridge Nickel of Sudbury and its expanding overseas refinery in Norway will spend millions of dollars to boost output for defense; the “big two” of Canadian mining exploration, Ventures Ltd. and Frobisher Ltd. are pushing the search for titanium in Quebec, uranium in northern Saskatchewan, iron in British Columbia.

Mining editors have headlined a proposed thirty-three-million-dollar project to develop a fabulous copper-cobalt property in Uganda; they have announced that an American firm will reopen ancient silver mines in Greece; that Latin America’s biggest gold mine, the La Luz of Nicaragua, has acquired substantial interests in a Californian tungsten mine, and in promising mining properties of the Philippines, Costa Rica, Honduras and the state of Nevada.

There have been reports too of an exciting iron discovery in the western Sahara, of a Venezuelan move to expropriate the Guyana gold mine, and of mounting production from Southern Rhodesia’s Connemara gold mine.

It is almost inconceivable, yet every one of these enterprises is directed and financially controlled by one person, a reclusive mystery man whose genius for evading the limelight is exceeded only by his genius for geology and mining finance. He is Thayer Lindsley, undisputed No. 1 figure in Canadian mining, who carved out Canada’s biggest mineral empire and then went on to create another international empire just as great.

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