 So we're about to begin an interview with Susan Joyce. It's September 2nd 2015. We are in Vancouver and the interviewer as usual will be William McRae. So to begin, could you please state your full name? My full name is Susan Anderson Joyce. And would you mind stating your age? I am 55 currently. Okay, so yes one of the young ones of the project. And where were you born? I was born in Des Moines, Iowa in the United States. Okay. And when you were a child, what did your parents do for a living? My father transitioned from business. He was in the food industry. He worked for General Mills, which is a large multinational. Then he went to work for a small university as VP of development and then switched back into the food sector. But he developed a position in what he called an emerging field at that time, which was called Corporate Social Responsibility in the 1980s when very few people had heard about it. So he went back to work. His third major career change in CSR in the corporate world in the US. Okay. And your mom was a stay home mom for quite a while. And then she became a when we were in high school, she became she studied for and passed the securities and exchange test and became a stockbroker in very full time professional. Yeah. And you as a child, what did you do for past time? Or what was your go to activity or interests? Horses. Horses. Okay. I had a passion. I had a horse on and off and I rode, spent some summers working on cattle and sheep branches and animals. Animals but primarily horses. Horses, yeah. And at school, did you have specific interests or strengths from a young age? History, social studies, that sort of thing. Okay. Yeah. And yeah, because compared to most of the people I've interviewed in this project, more closer to like me, more the social sciences and humanities. Yeah, not a metallurgist, not a geologist. So talk to me a bit about your interest and what you decided to go into in school later on. So I was passionate about sociology, anthropology, I did a double major at university in those two topics. And it was really, it's what I was drawn to and what I was passionate about. It was not a difficult decision. What was difficult at that time was trying to figure out how to make a living doing it. And what happened is it sort of combined actually the passion for livestock, rural communities and sociology, anthropology, and I ended up working in rural community development. And I got into that via a somewhat strange route, which is that I lived in New Zealand for three years. And I trained as a wool classer. So I'm actually, I have a technical skill. And I wanted, I wanted to do rural development work with a technical angle, so to bring a specific technical skill. So I trained as a wool sheep and wool specialist in New Zealand, and was working in the rural US. And then I went back to graduate school in sociology. And that took me to Peru, sorry, Bolivia. I won a fellowship after my master's degree to go to Bolivia and spend a year there doing research prior to doing a PhD. And at the time, I guess I thought I probably would end up doing research or teaching. And I went to Bolivia and I fell in with, very literally, a group of exploration geologists who were friends of, we had friends in common. And I literally stumbled into work of working on conflict that these exploration companies were having with rural communities. So I, as a sociologist, I was working with rural communities. They asked me, oh, we don't understand why these communities don't welcome us with open arms. We're bringing opportunity and development. All we want to do is drill holes in their land. And you really don't understand why they have a problem with this. And that's kind of where my professional career developed. And it was unanticipated and it was absolutely fascinating from day one. And what was your thesis when you went to Bolivia? The research project was to look at how rural fiber producing communities were inserting into the global economy. Okay, thanks for your sheep and wool. So they were producing alpaca, they were producing sheep's wool. What were the mechanisms, market drivers, what were their linkages to the global economy through the textile industry and that sort of thing. And what when you literally fell into the natural resource industry, the mining industry, what was the current situation with the mine and the locals in Bolivia? So Bolivia, like much of South America, had a pretty complete wave of nationalization of the resources in the 60s. And the 90s, late 80s and 90s, saw a reversal of that. So there was a privatization of these state-owned assets. And it was really opening up of these economies, these mineral economies for the first time in a long time and the World Bank was involved and things like that. But I was in Bolivia and Bolivia was privatizing some major tin assets. Bolivia is a pretty significant tin producer, always has been historically. And there were three major operations, two mines and a smelter that were going to be privatized. And the communities at these mining, and these mines had been operating for decades already. And the communities were opposing privatization and the mostly foreign companies that were considering bidding on the privatization, one of them an Australian company that had operations in Indonesia were quite aware of the risk that that could represent to their operation or cost. And they asked me as a sociologist if I would be able to go in and look at why the communities were opposing privatization. And I of course said, of course I can do that. And it sort of started there. And Bolivia, within a year of opening up the sector to private exploration companies, they experienced a real boom and they had I think something like 150 companies registered and operating in country within a year. But they probably really weren't ready for that. Well, not only were they not ready for it, but it was a new generation of geologists who also were not ready for it. You know, Canadian, American, Australians, Australians to some extent had experience in other developing economies. But there were a lot of young geologists who had never worked overseas and they didn't have skill sets to do it. So neither were the communities prepared nor were the companies prepared. And it was a pretty steep learning curve. And it was an emerging period for what would later be known as sustainable development. It was. That was really, I guess, more or less the beginning of it. It was prior to the launching, for example, of the Global Mining Initiative, which was, so we're talking about the early 90s, and nobody was talking about mining and sustainable development at that point. You know, that hadn't even surfaced as an issue. The very first articulation of the social issues was a conference that the World Bank held in Ecuador called Large Mines and Communities, and the premise being that by the time, if you have a large mine, there was a necessity to think about a better return to local communities. You know, and it was an iteration of the NIMBY syndrome, which is that, you know, not in my backyard, people were reacting. You couldn't do mineral development anymore for a national good. You had to be delivering opportunity and benefits to the local community. And that was just the very beginning of what, you know, I think in reaction to the reprivatization of the resources. And this was taking place across a lot of different jurisdictions. Communities, organizations starting to react, tensions and conflicts starting to build expectations, demands. I mean, it was also a process of re-democratization. So you had civil society groups and communities finding the chance to have a voice and say something about their future for the first time in decades, right? So a lot of things came together, and mineral development was one and remains one of the key areas in which a lot of these things are in fact still being played out. So take us through the beginning of your career in that, in sustainable development, in your association with mining companies. Initially, and I was living in Bolivia, it was absolutely firefighting. Very little, a little bit of proactive work, a little bit of thinking about it from a bigger picture, but almost all of it was, we've run into conflict, the community's reacting, we don't know what to do, we don't know why there's a problem. I remember, one of my funniest stories in about 1997 or 1998, I went to my very first mining conference and it was in Argentina. And Argentina was like many other countries just opening up to foreign exploration and development. And so it was one of the first geology conferences in Argentina with a lot of foreign exploration companies. And I remember people saying to me, what is a sociologist doing at an exploration conference? They couldn't get it. And within three or four years, exploration conferences were having social and community themes. So the transformation in people's understanding and the significance of the issue was phenomenally quick. But in 97, nobody understood why I would be going to a mining conference. And while living in Bolivia, because I was speaking with Ian Thompson, he said that's where he met you. Yes, we did. And he said they were having issues with their mine, or when they were, if it was the actual mine or when they were surveying, and eventually there were actually, there was violence between the community and this company. And he said, shortly after that, that's when he met you. So could you tell me a bit about that? Well, the project that Ian's company had that conflict on, and they were actually run off the property for something like 18 months, I never did any work on that project. But he and I met when Orvana was bringing forward a project called Don Mario. And I was hired as part of the environmental consulting team, but being a sociologist and on site in Bolivia, they picked me up to do the social side. And I did a social impact assessment, social baseline and impact assessment at the pre feasibility stage. So just doing it that early in the project was a bit forward thinking. But that really started my association with Ian. And we got to know each other. And we had an absolute meeting in the mines in terms of the issues. And he had the industry connection. And I had the social training, the sociological expertise, and it was a pretty fruitful combination, in particular in the early years when industry was quite reticent to look at a lot of those issues. But the first work that I did for Orvana was this pre-feasibility socioeconomic impact assessment. And we were able to proactively identify indigenous issues that were going to be a problem. And it's one of those things that you can anticipate and you never know quite when it's going to become. You can see it often something that is emerging internationally. It's a growing trend internationally. It might not yet have been picked up or become an issue locally. You can identify that it will at some point. If it's not currently an issue, companies often won't address it. But we got a little bit off track there. But indigenous issues were just starting to emerge in Bolivia. It was very interesting to identify it. And then about five years later to have it become a critical issue when the company didn't think it would be. And at the time, the community did not self-identify as indigenous. But they were indigenous. That was one of the really interesting things to see happen and to see the way that the social transformations have continued to push the social field and the need for companies to to change and continue to evolve their practice. International standards change, but it's really also the groundswell of change at the social level. And when you really started working in that field, what kind of resistance or adversity did you encounter? Not necessarily because you were sociologist in a mining world, but really because of the sustainable development that was new. I mean, there must have been some almost backlash here and there. Oh, there was. Because it's new, right? And it's not the priority. There are, I have a number of different stories and specific challenges that I remember. And mining and exploration is one of those fields that people say you have to be able to talk the language and get inside the mindset of mining because people, it's a very strong culture and the culture and identity in the mining sector is very important. I think that I did a pretty good job. There were definitely some clients that I didn't see eye to eye with. And I remember one client in particular early on who was actually being audited by an international organization on social issues considered that I was way too much of a community advocate that I wasn't sort of balanced. I wasn't balanced. I wasn't working on behalf of the company. And you know, that's probably been the biggest challenge in our work has been to to find the right language. And often it's around risk management that in the work that we do and I think on common ground is certainly always taken to position this in this way is that we will work and do the right thing based on what we consider to be the ethics and the standards underlying the work. We don't deliver projects for companies. We don't deliver permits at any cost. That's not what we're there to do. So we work from a certain standards base, a certain ethical base or you would say normative base. And I think it's set us set us apart in some ways because it's allowed us to develop a reputation as as really being committed to finding those win-win scenarios that it has to it has to be true to those principles and it has to work for both parties. You know, it doesn't mean that you always get to do things the way that you want to, but it's been one of the key drivers in in the way on common ground is operating. Could you tell me a bit about common ground and how that started and on common ground? Well, initially Ian created it as a shell with and we have three partners and it was an opportunity for us. We were all working in different different companies, institutions, teaching, things like that. And it was an opportunity, was sort of the shell we used to to teach or to do consultancies. And then at different times from the late 1990s into sort of the early part of this millennium. At one time Ian was ready to start his own company and I was at Golder Associates and I was still doing that and then I was ready and Ian was doing something else. But finally in 2004 we both made the decision and we came together, we took on common ground from being sort of a relatively inactive shell and we made it the active company. And we had both just come out of the MMSD process where we were both doing work, doing research on it, involved in the multi-stakeholder processes and felt very focused and very grounded I think in what came out of that study. So it was a very rich time, it was a very productive time and there was a very strong support in the industry for finding a way that that mining could contribute to sustainable development and that was a very positive time. So around 2003 we started moving forward with on common ground, we opened an office in Peru because I moved to Lima in 2004 and we had that until very recently. I moved back in 2008 to Canada but we maintained the business down there for a while. When and why did you come to Canada? I came in 2008, I'd already moved to Canada in 1998. I was after Ian and I had begun to work together and we'd written our first sort of major piece of work together which was about why community, at that time community relations and thinking about the impact on communities had to be addressed at exploration and then I was hired, I was still living in Bolivia at the time and I was hired by Golder Associates to be part of their social team in Calgary. So I moved to Canada then and the only really the reason that I moved to Canada was because many companies in Canada were recognizing the importance of these issues. My experience is that Australia and Canada led the way in terms of identifying and beginning to embrace these issues and then you had the major companies which were located wherever they were located and certainly Australia and Canada represent the bulk of the junior sector anyway. So because we were working in that sector and that was where the opportunity and jobs were and Golder, my boss at Golder recognized the opportunity that this work offered as well and so I was offered my very first salaried job in my entire life. I had always been self-employed and an independent consultant until that point and then I got hired by Golder and I moved to Calgary. And what was your position? A social specialist within the environmental group at Golder. And then I moved, so I was in Calgary for five years and then I moved to Peru. Once we formed Oncoming Ground, I moved to Peru, opened an office for Oncoming Ground in Peru. After five years in Peru, I moved back to Vancouver because my daughter was reaching high school age and I had promised her that we could move back to Canada for high school. Oh yeah? Did she grow up in Canada? Well, five years in Calgary. So she very strongly identifies as Canadian. Right on, right on. She can even sing the national anthem in French, so. Good, excellent, très bien. Fun question I guess. You've traveled a lot, you've lived in a lot of places. What place have you enjoyed the most or found the most fun? Oh, most fun. What's your favorite spot? I loved the Galapagos, did a tour in the Galapagos, but you know it's always fun to be on vacation, which doesn't happen very often. That was great and I've loved the times that I've worked in and around Cusco in the Peruvian Highlands. That's pretty fantastic. I loved my five years in Bolivia. Challenging, but also some fantastic locations. An adventure. Absolutely. You know, in terms of one of the more interesting mindsites, Menero San Cristobal in Bolivia, it's been a pretty interesting journey. The very first job I ever did for mining I did at Menero San Cristobal in 1996 and we are still working with them almost 20 years later. That's been, and I actually find this is quite common in the mineral industry that either you, because it hasn't been continuous, we've come back in different embodiments as the project, first the project moved through different hands and then it was in development and then in operations. And I'm also finding I'm doing due diligence or community assessments for the third time at a given prospect that hasn't come been developed yet. So people say that's quite common in the mineral industry. Do you ever have any projects or where you have to go and work on a specific mine where it's not the beginning of the mine, where it's not exploration or starting the operations, which is what you usually hear about, but rather the closure of a mine. Because I mean, a mine can impact greatly a community and if it closes how it's dealt with and how it affects that community. Yeah, I'm doing closure work right now with, I believe it's not confidential, with New Gold is closing their Menera San Javier Mine in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. They bought that mine when it was already in operation. They ran it for a number of years and then when they were realizing they were getting close to closure they wanted to do a sustainable community strategy for the closure program. So yeah, so I was brought in very much for the closure process and that's an ongoing support work. And we expect there to be a lot more closure over the next few years with the change in the mineral prices. A lot of things had stayed open that we're supposed to have closed a while ago. So I think that closure is an important but yet not yet really developed part of our work as for the sustainability side. I think it's really interesting. What are, do you have concrete examples of specific issues that you have to deal with with the mine closure? Mine closure, depending on how the company wants to deal with it. One of the first things you have to look at is whether there are legacy issues that haven't been addressed. Closure is a change in the status quo. A massive one, a finite one as well. If there's anything under the surface, these things that have been ignored or just sort of left alone during operations when people were receiving benefits working at the mine, 100% guaranteed they're going to surface at closure. So there's a question of legacy issues that need to be closed out. And a lot of times benefit programs haven't been developed with a closure strategy. So there weren't clear agreements about when or how the benefit stream would end. And a lot of companies picked up obligations that were state obligations like health services or something like that and have to figure out how to transition those back to either the state or some other non-public entity, whether they put a foundation. That can't be easy all the time. It can't be. No, it's not. And if the state hasn't got the resources, you know, if you've been delivering this level of social services of some kind, especially healthcare and the state's only able to pick it up at that level, that's a real challenge about how you transition the communities that way or do you set up an interim structure or a foundation to carry to fill that gap? That's interesting. Speaking of difficulties, what would you consider to be one of your most difficult or challenging jobs or projects? I would say that the Human Rights Impact Assessment for the Marlin Mine was the one that aged me the most. It was really challenging because a very few human rights impact assessments had been done. This was going to be published. There was a commitment to full transparency. So it wasn't the few human rights impact assessments that had been semi-transparent. There was maybe a summary of issues. But we were faced with a challenge of identifying, writing up, arguing in a defensible way our position and showing the evidence for every one of the claims or findings that we had. And the assessment was done after the fact. So many of the allegations and things that were being raised as the key issues had taken place earlier. And it was amazing how capable humans are of rewriting history. We just don't remember things the same way as other people and we don't remember necessarily why we had opinions. Things change over time. So because that was going to be public and because it was heavily criticized by a couple of NGO groups as being biased, it was very challenging to write that document and to find a balanced and adequately supported judgment on every one of those, on every one of the recommendations. Common ground. Exactly. We did it. I think we were successful at it. The company accepted something like 63 out of 66 or 67 of the recommendations. But it was very challenging. And it was also because of the level of conflict around the project and also the generic level of violence in Guatemala. There were some difficult and tense times during the fieldwork as well. Can you tell me a bit about your work with Indigenous rights? Because you've done a bit of work. Yeah. Well, I mean, not as an advocacy group, but it's one of the key issues today in Latin America and it's different in every country. The most significant or sort of the hook right now that the Indigenous groups have for increased pressure on governments and access to decision making is ILO 169, the requirement for free prior informed consent. And that is being interpreted and put into law very differently in different countries. Indigenous people have a different level of organizational capacity, resources, and histories in different countries. So trying to work with that in different environments and get companies to understand the importance of going beyond national requirements, especially not and it's not just for FPEC, but it's for other issues as well, human rights in particular. And that's where we're, I would say if we're working to the extent that we're working in Indigenous rights, we're working at the forefront of that issue with companies who are looking to implement international practice, but they may be working in a jurisdiction where national law is actually quite a bit less progressive than what we do. So that's a challenge. And in other cases, getting national staff, even of big companies, to understand why the corporate office is taking a certain position around issues such as free prior informed consent or community agreements or something like that. And if it's not required nationally in the regulatory process, nobody's doing it, it's often a challenge to bring local staff along and help them understand why it's important, but how to do it without putting their project at risk, their sense that they'll put the project at risk with that. Okay, we'll switch the topic up a bit. One I like to ask in most of my interviews and that's the question of women. So first of all, I mean, it doesn't apply as much at the beginning because you weren't in a mining or natural resource background per se, but once you got into that realm, I guess, first of all, how absent or present were women in that field? Well, you have to take into consideration that I was coming from the sheep industry, where women weren't very common either. Okay. I didn't know that. Except on the fiber art side, there were a lot of women. Coming into it on the social side, there's always been a strong presence of women working in community relations in, you know, a lot of the people that we work with are trained either as social communicators, social workers and that sort of thing. So I've always had the opportunity to work with a lot of women. The environmental field has also had a fairly reasonable representation of women and social is almost always matched with environmental. But it has been across the board in the industry on the mining side or the exploration side, it's been pretty predominantly almost, you know, seriously heavily weighted toward men. And there have been some environments in which I found that pretty problematic. I remember events that I've been at where people assume that I was there because I was somebody's lover, you know, there was no way that I would be at that meeting at that level of seniority. Having something to contribute. As a professional, you know, so, you know, who's she sleeping with? I'm serious, you know, and that happened to me at a senior management meeting in a of a major, you know, one of today's major mining companies. I only found it afterward, thank goodness, because I would have, I don't know if I would have been mortified or furious, but probably furious. And there that was a case in which somebody very progressive, very forward looking had brought me in to meet all these senior managers to talk about what I was doing. And it was just interpreted otherwise. I haven't, you know, in general, I haven't, other than that, that's more of an anomaly than it has been an ongoing problem. I've had very few experiences professionally that were problematic. But there's been the odd one like that. And then, you know, there are times when I have felt the client simply uncomfortable working with a woman. Just because they're not used to it? Yeah, don't quite, don't quite get the language, don't quite trust the basis, you know, it's just a discomfort, you know, and given that as a, you know, as a people working in the social field that's got its own sort of challenge for many people to take on board, it's always hard to say whether that discomfort is a gender issue or is it a, you know, it's, or is it the substantive the substantive topic? You know, but there were there've been times when when I was in business with Ian, it was clear to both of us, it would be better if Ian took this client, you know, and, and that was an advantage of being in partnership with, with a guy, you know, and then there were, you know, most of the cases where it wasn't the issue. It wasn't an issue. And it's been interesting for me because I, I'm not a gender specialist and it's never been a particularly passionate issue for me. And I, we do obviously in the social assessments that we do and any baseline or community work, gender and, you know, the perspectives of women, those, it's critical and it's always included. But, but going out, going after work specifically around the gender issue is not something that I've, I've ever done but it is, it needs more work. It does need more work and it's, you know, I mean, Canada's, Canada's distinct in a lot of ways because there is more gender equity and there are more women in professions at many layers. I mean, you look at the PDAC and numbers aren't equal but certainly, you know, there have been some wonderful senior women leaders, not only in PDAC but also even in some of the mining companies. But it's, it's still the exception rather than the rule. So we always say there always need to be more women on boards in particular. Yes, yes. Because you do have, I mean, now there are way more women than men who go to university and there are more and more women who takes the STEM programs. But there still seems to be a lot less women who end up with jobs in those fields. I don't know if it's what it is today but that, that is... There are glass ceilings. You know, and I think it's tough. A lot of professional women don't want to admit it but there are glass ceilings. We once, when I was with Golder, we did a gender assessment for ARPEL which is the Latin American Oil and Gas Industry Association and the, it was particularly interesting because the entire committee that were our counterparts were women. A case in point, why would a gender assessment, which obviously is men and women, require a committee entirely of female counterparts? But they were very, there was a lot of resistance to the findings about the glass ceiling that and barriers to advancement within the industry and people have a hard time with that but it exists. It does exist in the mining industry and the exploration industry. A different social question here but up until today, do you think there's a disconnect between the mining world, the natural resource world and the general public? And if so, can you explain or elaborate a bit on that? That's a good question. I think there's a disconnect in the sense that, you know, what we know to be the case that there is, it's, it's not a respected industry. Most people, for example, I'm a sociologist and most people that I went to graduate school with are shocked to hear that I work in the mineral industry, right? They're also not Canadian so it's not. You know, in Canada it's a little bit more bread in the bone, you know, it's a little bit more an integral part of the identity, certainly of Western Canada but I find that, I find that very difficult. I find it difficult that so such an increasingly large percentage of the population and I don't know what the numbers are but you know, certainly in day-to-day life you find it take for granted that mining is a negative thing, right? And then it's everywhere like it's... And it is. It's core to our way of life but people don't connect with it and the tough thing is that I don't think more self-promotion by the mining industry is a way to address it. I think that, you know, I actually haven't thought about that so I'm not going to pontificate on how I think it should be addressed but you know, I think good balanced informational stuff is informational campaigns are important, keep it in the eye, let people know what's happening and things like that. Unfortunately, in a lot of other countries outside Canada it's much more self-promotional so it's more counterproductive than it is than it is productive. But yeah, I think it's problematic. I think it's more the case in developed economies than in the developing countries but we do find increasingly like Chile today. Chile is as fundamental a mining country as you can find in the world and the general population more and more are saying that they do not consider mining to contribute to society. They do not see it as a positive activity even in Chile. So there's this... I think it's a sea change for Chile but I think it's indicative of things that are happening elsewhere. You think it might have to do as well with the shifting of rural populations to urban populations? Who then never get to kind of encounter how nature helps us and how we transform things. Where milk comes from? Yeah. Or wool. Yes. I don't think in the Chilean case that that's what it's about now. I think it's bigger sociological, ideological shifts. The way that mining revenue has been used and for whom and question of equity, social inclusion, development. It's got a bad name. In a sense. Yeah. I would say in North America and Canada it's more associated that the negativity is more associated with environmental damages and I would say in many developing countries it's associated to some extent with environmental risk, environmental damages, but more so with inequality and social exclusion of populations. Okay. Good. Thank you. In your opinion, are there any... And this could be a broad... I'm looking at it very broadly, but in your opinion, are there any events, people, inventions, contributions, disasters, anything really you can think of that you believe must be mentioned when discussing the history of natural resources in Canada? So, yeah, loaded question, but it could be really anything that pops out at you that you think that should be mentioned. That's crucial. The thing that comes to mind for me is the White Horse Initiative, not because it was entirely successful, but it was a stepping stone along the way toward building a different approach, a more collaborative approach and an idea. So I think it was a stepping stone that even contributed to MMSD, which came later, and the North American work around MMSD. And this idea that rather than a polarized approach and contestatory and fighting and conflict around it, that there was a way to build common ground, a common understanding, a shared understanding of what the different perspectives are and find collectively a path forward. Now, IBAs emerged in Canada, maybe not in... This would be a good question for Canadians, since I'm an American. And I wasn't here during the White Horse Initiative. So did the IBAs come out of that work to any extent? It never occurred to me to ask that question, but the other key thing that is serving as a model in the world today, I think, out of the Canadian experience is the Impact Benefit Agreement. And it's a stepping stone again. I mean, I think the models are going beyond that now. They've gone beyond that to some extent in Canada with participation agreements. But that as a concept and a way to capture methodologically, how do you really capture an agreement of free, prior informed consent to some extent may be met by a negotiated agreement. There's really important differences between free, prior informed consent and a negotiated agreement, especially because negotiated agreements can be with a restricted number of leaders rather than the populace as a whole. But these are models that are shaping the way resource development, especially in conflicted zones, is being done around the world today or where we hope it's going. And that model has come out of the Canadian experience. And benefit sharing is also coming out of the Canadian experience as an important part of that. So, those are very positive, positive things. I mean, there are, I'm sure there's some other really significant events in Canadian history that will affect. I hope that the Mount Pooley disaster affects the regulatory framework around tailings dams to a large extent, but we won't know that for a while. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. We'll finish up with just a couple of questions. First one, I guess I can split in two because it's be a tough question to answer because this can be broad. But what do you consider to be your proudest, what are you proudest of in life? And we can do in life in general and proudest of professionally. There's a couple that's okay. I would say, okay, first professionally, that's easier. I'm really proud of the trajectory and path that oncoming ground has had since its founding. Good name, by the way. Thank you. Thank you. Ian chose the name. I have to give credit where credit is due. So, I think our work has been from a really solid base in terms of the values and the commitments that we had. We, because oncoming ground was a partnership for 10 years, so it's very much a weed. But, and then on a project level, I definitely think the human rights impact assessment for the Marlin Mine, which we did, it was Gold Corpse Mine. We did the work for an independent steering committee that was formed to manage it. So it was a fully independent piece of work. But that was, I was very proud of that piece of work. Tough as it was to do it. That's often because it was so tough. That's what makes you the most rewarding work. Absolutely. And groundbreaking, new stuff. And I will say that one of the things that has been the most fantastic about this field is that it has evolved for the, you know, nearly 20 years that I've been in this field. It has constantly evolved. And, you know, we don't get stuck doing the same old thing, same old thing. We are always evolving our work as well. What am I most proud of on a personal level? I would say my family, obviously, I'm hugely proud of my family and my daughter, who wants to be a social justice lawyer, taken after, learned something. But I would also say that I was a woman in the field. The transition to running oncoming ground myself, which has been over the last two years, and taking that leadership role myself, and also the, really to some extent, the leader, not to some extent, the leadership role that I have within the industry. Because having gotten in early, having been involved with this in a long time, for a long time, I'm very proud of that. And I think you had another question there that I was thinking about earlier. In terms, you had a question on your sheet about dysfunctional experiences. Yeah, I went more with the challenge, the biggest challenge, but yeah, dysfunctional. And what's, I think, the really important lesson is that all organizations are dysfunctional. All people have dysfunctional tendencies. And the sooner you figure out that that's just part of the backdrop and that you have to figure out what part is getting, what part of you and what part of the job is getting sucked into those dysfunctional actions and find a better way to operate the better off you'll be. And so there is always an opportunity, in the same way our field has evolved, there's an ongoing opportunity to learn and grow and get more, get better at transparency and clarity and communication and all those things that we teach our clients about, but they're core principles for our work as well internally. And to finish off, if you were speaking with someone much younger like a student, for example, what would be the one life lesson or piece of advice you could give them for their professional future? Do what you're passionate about. Life is long and work, unfortunately, takes up a huge amount of time. So you have to really, I believe, you have to be doing something that you really believe in that you're passionate about and find the way to do it the right way, to do it in a way that's consistent with your value system. And that will mean pretty much every day is rewarding. A little abstract, but that's kind of what came to mind. Thank you. Is there anything else you'd like to add or share? You know, I think we're in an interesting time right now. The industry has been in crisis, in particular the junior sector, which we're in Vancouver. This is the heart of the junior sector. They've been in crisis for three years now and it doesn't look like it's going to get better anytime soon. Prices are still very problematic. Financing is not available. There's also been a real backsliding in some sense at the level of the majors in terms of the understanding of the relationship between a new kind of mining industry and sustainable development. And I think we see it most explicitly in the way language has come to reflect that sustainability is about sustaining the mining industry. And that might include managing social risk and dealing with these other problems and not having conflict be such a big cost and things like that. But it's where the concept of sustainability has come to be about the mining sector. And I think that the industry as a whole has really lost sight of, this circles back to your earlier question about the disconnect. So to the extent that that is a comfort zone for the mining people, I think it's a mistake because it's really meeting civil society and the broader population on their ground, on the way they understand sustainable development and the challenges for the future that are going to allow the mining industry to be part of crafting that in that collaborative way. Not taking on and transforming language like sustainability to be self-serving and to be interpreted as how do we keep our industry going. And it really is, I think, in more and more collaborative work to lay out the terms and the way that mining can be done in a given location in a way that meets the needs and expectations of local people who might be indigenous people that have been on that land for an uncountable number of centuries or it might be another kind of population. But that kind of collaborative prior work, I think, is where sustainable development is captured and where the industry has to go if it's not going to continue to be seen and it's not going to continue to have that disconnect between the value system of broader society and where the mineral industry is. That's my final parting word. Thank you. You're welcome.