Mining News: Big brains and why mining needs them

With six major mines poised to come on line, British Columbia’s industry is ready to challenge the best and the brightest thinkers

Pierre Gratton

Special to Mining News

The first thing that makes mining a complex business is the science of finding a mine. We have over 12,000 mineral occurrences in BC and less than 20 major mines. It takes years just to locate, evaluate, permit and construct a mine. To succeed requires not only a certain temperament, but also use of the very best in technology and scientific analysis and the curiosity, intelligence and training of geologists to look and look again. All of this activity is highly regulated, which requires an in-depth understanding of government, its laws, policies and regulations and thus the best legal minds and policy experts a country has to offer.

A mine is where you find it, and today, this typically means that it’ll be in the few remaining parts of the world that have not been exhaustively explored. This means you’ll be interacting with communities that have had little to no prior experience with mining, and the task of earning one’s social license becomes a complex business involving the best minds in sociology, anthropology, archeology and related disciplines. While training in theology may not seem like a core competency for a mining company, at times it proved invaluable for the former Placer Dome when engaging with faith-based NGOs critical of the company’s projects. And sometimes, I guess, our sector needs all the help it can get, including a little divine intervention.

It can mean you’ll be looking to build in a pristine, untouched ecosystem with high conservation values that have to be understood and safeguarded, demanding scholars in biology and ecology.

It can be in a jurisdiction like British Columbia, with evolving aboriginal law and policy that adds new complexities to our business that few sectors of the economy ever experience.

Building a mine is a huge capital investment, often in the hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. Major capital of this kind is not raised easily, and again some of the best legal, financial thinkers and accountants are required.

The construction of a mine is itself no small engineering feat that has to take into account site-specific geography and chemistry so that environmental impacts are managed and properly mitigated. Terrane Metal’s 9,000-page environmental assessment report for its Mt. Milligan project gives you a pretty good indication of the complexity of mine design and the seriousness of the undertaking, to say nothing of the additional need for skilled writers. If the mine is in a remote location, as is often the case, new infrastructure may have to be built, adding more engineering complexity to this massive undertaking.

A tailings facility must be built, managed and maintained to the highest engineering standards because it must not fail. Canada’s mining industry has led the world in the design, construction and management of tailings facilities, our best brains working at major engineering firms.

New mines are high-tech operations, using the very latest in remote technology to maximize extraction at the lowest cost and risk to human safety. The capital equipment is expensive and not always easy to replace, so needs to be handled with expertise. Labour is thus highly skilled, demanding investments in training and in (human resources) personnel. This is one of the reasons why mining pays an average wage of over $110,000 per year, the highest of any industry in British Columbia. These are also reasons why we are very supportive of and applaud the B.C. government’s efforts over the past number of years to make the province the most tax competitive environment for skilled workers in Canada. And why our sector strongly supports the HST (Harmonized Sales Tax), which will make ours a more competitive industry by reducing costs and paperwork.

Running a mine is no simple task. The years of experience and training behind your average mine manager is considerable. One former Teck Cominco mine manager, during a downturn, went on to run one of Vancouver’s port terminals – no prior experience in ports or transportation, but he had the skills to run a complex operation where every minute of activity – indeed every second – has an impact on the bottom line.

And running a mining company – dealing with international markets, international politics and all the other brains you have to rely upon or interact with – requires smarts and intestinal fortitude, though maybe not in that order.

In short, we need a lot of talent to succeed.

Our province benefits from this in more ways than we can think. First, it has made Vancouver a global mining center, with around 800 mining companies and home to some of the best and brightest minds in mining law, mine financing and exploration anywhere in the world.

Supporting these minds are world-class mining educational and training institutions at the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, and the British Columbia Institute of Technology.

All this cerebral capacity is needed to enable the industry to operate in a highly complex work environment that thrusts us into multiple areas of public policy. We have a huge stake in the decisions our province and our country make, whether it has to do with infrastructure, environmental protection, climate change, health and safety, First Nations, tax policy or transportation.

When you touch on or are exposed to so many issues, you care deeply about the decisions others may make about them. It is not uncommon to hear the term “whining miners,” partly because it’s an easy rebuke, but also because there are few things we don’t care about.

But we are not whiners. We are immensely practical. We have to be. In our business, as complex as it is, we have to be problem solvers, doers, pragmatic and not at all dogmatic. If a new idea will help us build and operate a mine, it doesn’t matter how novel or far-fetched, we will consider it. We may champion it. We will find a way to make it happen.

What brains can do

As Robert Prescott-Allen wrote in “The Well-being of Nations,” mining provides the highest and best use of land on the basis of the prosperity that can be created and the social utility and wellness that can be generated as a result.

Mining is a good use of the land. Sure, the land you use is altered, but the value derived relative to the amount of land affected is enormous. When done right – and we now know much better how to do it right – the land, once used, returns to useful, productive land – different, but productive. A mine is very unlike a shopping mall, condo, parking lot or some other urban development that a) takes place without an environmental assessment and b) remains a permanent, ecologically sterile part of the planet – but I digress.

To make it more real, I’d like to turn to some very current examples.

Over the next two-to-four years, six major mining projects can be built in B.C. Two of them, Copper Mountain outside Princeton and New Afton near Kamloops, are both in construction and awaiting final permits. Add to this the Prosperity mine near Williams Lake, Mt. Milligan near Fort St. James, Red Chris near Iskut and South Central near Tumbler Ridge and you have six projects worth almost C$4 billion in new capital investment and hundreds of millions of dollars in annual operating expenditures.

Together, these projects will create about 10,000 direct and indirect jobs, supporting our communities and stimulating significant opportunities for mining supply businesses all across B.C.

At a time when BC is in dire financial circumstances, our industry is offering hope and opportunity.

Mines are big business: a good business and a responsible business. The fact that there are under 20 major mines operating in B.C. right now underscores the fact that mines are scarce. They don’t come along every day. But when they do, their contribution is substantial, as is all the work along the way to get you there. You need a lot of brains, both in number and quality, to bring one from discovery to operation and then to closure and reclamation. Mining produces much more than copper, gold, coal or zinc: It produces people.

Pierre Gratton is president and CEO of the Mining Association of B.C. These remarks are excerpted from a speech that he delivered to a gathering of Minerals South organized by the East Kootenay Chamber of Mines Oct. 27.