 Okay so we're here today at the Canada Science and Technology Museum and we are going to have an interview with Mr. James Cuny and the interviewer as usual will be William McCrae. So we'll just begin with you stating your full name please. James Patrick Cuny better known as Jim Cuny. And where did you go to school? Well I went to a number of schools but I guess the ones that I should most mentioned are University of Toronto where about 1971 I finished a master's in East Asian Studies focused on classical Chinese literature and a minor study of Sanskrit. I spent then a year at National Taiwan University deepening my knowledge of classical Chinese but also learning current spoken Chinese Guayu or Mandarin. And I spent about a year in India as what I would call a tenor and scholar pursuing Indian classical languages and literature. I also went to the University of British Columbia was initially working on a doctorate where my thesis focus was going to be on some linguistic aspects of the translation of Buddhist sutras into Chinese during the Tang dynasty. But deciding that that was not going to be an employable future at least not one readily in demand and having my first child on the way I decided to switch paths and join the mining industry. Okay and then what got you into the mining industry I mean because that's a completely that's not that's not on the surface a relevant academic background and I would say that almost nothing that I've done in my academic world is related directly to the mining industry but a lot of it has related indirectly. My basic orientation in life is probably as a philosopher interested in the meaning of things and the purpose of life and various ethical moral questions and various approaches to understanding the nature of humanity. And this has proven very interesting very interesting background for the mining industry because I've sometimes said if you're of a philosophical disposition there's no better place to position yourself than with a mining company because not only are you dealing with the more fundamental philosophical questions of the relationship between humankind and the material universe you're also dealing with a huge range of ethical concerns related to the impact on the environment to the extraction of natural resources the impact on communities on the whole range of issues related to public policy and and political priorities and so forth. So if you have a reflective disposition and analytical orientation mining is not a bad environment in which to practice those attributes or orientations. So how did you get into mining and what was the first job? The first job well when I said I was I was interested in just finding some regular full-time employment and not being a part-time academic as I was then being at UBC in the mid 1970s. I happened to have the good fortune of being hired by Kaminko which is a venerable Canadian mining company it's now been absorbed into tech resources but for many many years it was in the forefront of mining in Canada with a specific emphasis on mining zinc and lead but it also got into copper and and other metals over the years and they had of course a major smelter operation in Trail British Columbia. In 1975 Kaminko which was at that point a subsidiary or partial subsidiary of Canadian Pacific Enterprises relocated his head office from Windsor Station in Montreal to Vancouver for a couple of reasons one to remove itself from all the uncertainties connected with a sovereignty movement in Quebec but two I think to be closer to its primary operating facilities in Trail. So I went downtown and I met a person in this company who had an even more exotic background than myself he'd been on an Arctic expedition had done various other sorts of very unusual things and we related and he ended up offering me a job he was part of a strategic planning group in Kaminko and this was made up of about half a dozen or so individuals of various types of academic backgrounds not necessarily related to mining but some had metallurgical or chemical engineering backgrounds but they're also economists and and business strategists and so forth and in those days Kaminko had a very broad orientation with respect to its potential business interests and so the role of the strategic planning group was to sort of scan the world understand the future and determine where some niche opportunities or perhaps major opportunities for Kaminko might lie so I was hired as a generalist and my first title was information analyst and the role was simply to take a subject that one of the fellows was working on and go out and research it and write about and the little analytical paper on what I thought it was all about and what the potential implications for Kaminko were and and so that's how I got into the business and because I was able to write they actually asked me during my first couple of years to do the company's annual report and and that's a very interesting way to get to know exactly what's going on in the company so I would sit with the senior executives in the company and the president CEO who was then chairman of the board and the senior executives and they would talk about what they thought the important activities and accomplishments of the company had been during the past year and then I would write up the overview and that way I got to know what mining was all about and particularly what Kaminko's business was all about but the I should tell the story the the person who oversaw the strategic planning group at Kaminko at that time was the then president he wasn't CEO but he was president of the company and his name was Gerald H.D. Hobbs and Gerald Hobbs actually came from a family that had founded a Canadian steel recycling industry in Vancouver called Western Canada Steel and Kaminko back in the 70s acquired Western Canada Steel and as Gerald was the president of Western Canada Steel they gave him the title of president of Kaminko but he was not a mining engineer he was a business person basically but a person who was quite reflective and and inquisitive with respect to the world around him and and so he's the person that sort of maintained the strategic planning group in the company to think about the future so one day I'd only been there about a month or six weeks or so and I've been introduced to him once he calls and he says he'd like to have a conversation so I prepare myself in those days yet a straight new tie and make sure your jacket was right before you went up to the president's office and I get up to his office and they sit down and he says Jimmy says I'm resting with a question I'm thinking this may be my last day in the mining industry because I really have only been here for a short time and don't know that much about this business I'm sure I'm not going to be able to have an intelligent response to whatever he asked me and then he posed the question he says I've been wondering he says what do you think the root causes of the inquisition were well I was back in my comfort zone so we talked about the Middle Ages I've done some study of the Middle Ages and one part of my academic career and and the Crusades and then the reversal from the Crusades into internal puristic types of movements against the Abagentsi and heretics and Cathars and so forth this is all very historical and he sort of said okay all right I guess I kind of understand what you're saying but how do we get to the inquisitions I told him that you know this was an effort to sort of exile or expel the people that were not operating in a consistent manner with the more moralistic expectations of society is it then was and he thanked me for that and about a week later he said you know he says I've been thinking about our conversation and the Anglican primate in Toronto has asked me to give a presentation of the upcoming Synod on business and Christianity could you put together some thoughts for me so I wrote a paper and he gave it and with it was an opportunity for me to do some research and the writers I had not previously explored such as Ronald Niebuhr and Jacques Elul and people who are quite known for taking an innovative approach to understanding the relationship of Christian ethical principles to society and the economy overall and the speech scored and they printed up a thousand copies and they distributed it to every Anglican church in Canada and I was in like Flint so to speak but later on upon reflecting on that I came to realize why he had asked me that question what were the root causes of the inquisition he didn't explain it to me at the time and I'm not sure since he was a somewhat intuitive path-finding type of thinker where they'd even formulated his question internally that's explicitly for himself but the main thing that he was seeing was that the mining industry was about to enter an inquisition an inquisitorial period where a lot of what it was doing came under serious question from church groups and then eventually they weren't so prominent in the 1970s from non-governmental organizations from academics even from certain organs of the media and and so I began to realize that the job that I had was to muster the best defense possible in this inquisitorial process I was basically in some respect you might say the devil's advocate for the mining industry and that's how I spent a good part of the rest of my career I got a lot more specific than terms of the other things I did sustainable development so forth but understanding the ethical norms that either governed or should govern decisions within the mining industry became a major sort of focus of my thinking as I continue to my career there any other questions for you see transfixed interesting so from there what became your next position well yeah so I stayed with Kaminko for six years and during that time I had four different titles now Kaminko was a very interesting company it was a multi-generational company there were people that were working for Kaminko when I joined including the person who the person that hired me reported to who was a third generation coming Konyan his grandfather had immigrated from Italy and worked in the lead smelter and trail in the 1890s and his father had been had risen to be superintendent of a smelter and he was then a vice president and so you know three generations of the same company a certain progression and it was a company which is very rare today but it was less rare in those days that that tended to hire the person rather than the skill as industry evolved over the next 30 years or so it was regarded as being much more managerially efficient simply to hire the skill you retain the skill as long as you need that particular skill sometimes the person that possesses the skill has another skill that maybe will fill this slot as things evolve and it's earlier skill isn't so terribly needed but more often than not he would simply be dismissed and so so there's no sort of long-term loyalty a long-term connection to the company I was fortunate in that Kaminko and then after that Placer Development which became Placer Dome were both companies that were building a sort of organic collectivity that sort of went you know had a sense of internal loyalty and it was a very difficult circumstances certainly some people were dismissed but there was an effort to sort of find an opportunity for an individual and not simply sort of concentrate on the skill that he had in particular time and when it was perhaps no longer needed to dismiss him so Kaminko offered me an enormous number of training opportunities in about 1977 they were beginning to develop the Highland Copper Mine which is now one of the major mining copper mining companies in copper mining operations in the world and up in central British Columbia and I don't know if it's Gerald Hobbs or one of the other people in the strategic planning group but they say you know we are this is all sorts of complexities with respect to the social impact I mean there are a number of communities around there Ashcroft, Cache Creek, Merritt, Kamloot, Slogan Lake and so forth and we need to do some anticipation as to what our impact on those communities is going to be and how we should plan to sort of manage that impact and so why don't you go off and take some courses and figure out how to do a socio-economic impact study so I went and did that and came back and then I oversaw what was at that time I think the first socio-economic impact study for many major mining project in British Columbia and I have to reflect on that a bit because at the time there were certain as we then called them Native Americans we hadn't gotten to the point of using the term First Nations back in the 70s who were virtually ignored I think perhaps in this 250 page socio-economic impact study we did they may have had a page or two. Cook's Ferry Band or the Thompson River Indians as they were known and now called the Inclapomic First Nation. I was invited last year to take part in some dialogue exercises and negotiations between Kaminko and Tech Resources and the Inclapomic First Nation to develop a mid-mine life agreement and I told them that you know that socio-economic impact study were being written today would be 80% about the interest of Aboriginal Canadians and 20% about the non-native communities but it certainly wasn't that when I did it in the 1970s so she showed you how those things evolve and then there was issues around risk management. Kaminko did not have a lot of operations in developing countries that have one smelter operation in Kerala and India which was disastrous the Kaminko-Binani smelter operation it was disastrous because it was a very sort of what I say left leading community that was where the workers were frequently on strike not just for labor relations issues but for political issues and so there's a lot of hesitation about you know what also I should say in the there was a country Central African Republic where the president John Beto Bocasa who later became the emperor of the Central African Empire and he was finally overthrown decided that Kaminko's Diamond Project in that in that country would be more beneficial if he owned it than if this foreign company owned it and so he sees the diamond operation and and through the mine manager in jail I remember one of the things I did was help negotiate the release of the mine manager we never got the diamond mine back but there's a high degree of suspicion about investing in foreign countries and so I was asked to sort of develop an expertise in helping to manage the political risk around mining investments and I did that too I had a lot of basic understanding of socio-cultural dynamics from living abroad in a number of countries and then political dynamics from actually having studied political science at one point earlier on and became basically what was regarded as the company's political risk analyst and I remember the one of the papers I did at the time was on the Philippines there was a copper opportunity for investment in the Philippines I wrote a paper early days of Ferdinand Marcos he was only just I think becoming the dictator that he later became but I told him it was going to be a very difficult operating environment and the president Gerald Hobbs managed to sort of get the thing cancelled the executive vice president responsible for exploration I don't think ever forgave me for that and that was the beginning of a long complicated relationship I had with project enthusiasts who did not believe that there was any political risk that couldn't be managed effectively if you just sort of were smart enough and to some extent they were right but they were often fooling themselves you know it led me to the conclusion that mining company management has an almost unlimited capacity for self-deception they're really interested in developing something and so my role was to sort of blow the whistle and try to sort of reduce the degree of self deception in so far as possible I never could say that I could countervail it completely so I did political risk management and then I also did strategic planning and I did I got very involved in that I went down to Stanford Research Institute in California I know and spent some time with them they were constantly involved in in futures scenario development work and that sort of thing and so I brought that into the company so within those six years I developed a portfolio of skills that were were new and and and just sort of incoming as far as the mining industry was concerned which gave me an interesting resume which I made use of in 1982 and class of development there's other mining company in town smaller than Kaminko but very energetic and and very globally oriented quite international in its interest decided that needed somebody to manage government affairs and political risk and so forth particularly with the emergence at that time of environmental non-governmental organizations on the one hand and at first nations assertiveness on the other hand and so I joined placer left Kaminko I was reluctant to leave it in a sense because I was very happy there though in retrospect it was absolutely the best thing for me to do and I joined placer development as it then was later became placer dome in 1986 but 1982 I joined placer development and my title there was manager government affairs that was the first time I had the title manager before I was always a an analyst or senior analyst senior business analyst senior project analyst but never manager don't know they could have made that leap in the incoming come might have been possible anyway I did make that leap when I joined placer development and that put me into a different operating environment which as I said is it was much more international what could you give examples of the international work or studies you conducted yeah well I did a lot of studies the placer now that's referred to it as placer now placer had a long history in Papua New Guinea it's very first mine had the Bilolo dredging operation which was a placer mining operation whence the name of the company started sometime in the 1920s it was back in Papua New Guinea with some advanced exploration projects when I joined it and they eventually became two mines in Papua New Guinea as for countries that I have analyzed certainly none as more socio-culturally complicated or challenging than Papua New Guinea and we had a mine and the friendship became the missile of mine on an island off the Louisiana archipelago to the southeast of mainland Papua New Guinea and then one in the central highlands called Porgra. Missima is now closed but Porgra is still operating and even today it's a very controversial mine Barrick is responsible for operating that and it's been a very very complex challenge but also there were the Philippines placer unlike Kaminko did invest in the Philippines about the time I was telling Kaminko not to and they had an operation called Marcopper and they added a Baron duquet now one of the constraints of operating the Philippines was that no foreign company was permitted to own more than 40% of a mine and and so it was difficult to have a majority control or ownership the people at Placer figured that they could just sort of find strategies that would enable them to influence the decision making in that company but and they did but that company in 1996 I believe it was had a major environmental disaster which became one of the more significant activities that I had to try to manage the company's way out of it's called the Marcopper tailings disaster the one with the river yeah it's the river it was a I don't know if you want me to go into that it was right a complex you could quickly complex just around the situation well so the mine had mined out the initial pit which I think was called the Tappian pit and left a big hole inside and out and the decision was taken in the late 1980s to develop a an adjacent or a body which was somewhat marginal economically and but the decision was taken let's do it and it was interesting I was there when that decision was taken by the company it was taken partly because they thought it wouldn't be a good idea to walk away from Marcopper there's been so much sort of corporate goodwill was it were invested in that island the the electricity generating facility at the mine site actually supplied all the electricity to the island it was a major source of business revenue for small businesses on the island employed quite a few people on the island and it was thought well with the right management so forth this the San Antonio pit as it's called could be marginally profitable anyway could justify its existence now it historically Marcopper had had a situation where were complicated historical reasons which I won't go into the tailings disposal system was into an adjacent bay called Callican Bay which wasn't that deep something about I think 50 70 feet deep if I remember correctly which had had a viable fishery that supported the community called the Callican community I guess and it that became very controversial now the reason why all that happened was this was doing this Mark this Marcus dictatorship and ML to Marcus privately and I only found this out later after the Marcus founders overthrown was the majority shareholder of Marcopper and so they arranged for the tailings to be disposed in Callican Bay and it was not a happy situation for the for the local fishing community there that's for sure it was controversial well when the development of the Antonio pit was proposed it was agreed that the tailings could be deposited in the original Callican Tappian pit and and that was done and that was regarded therefore as a relatively benign environmental operation except what had been ignored and it was partly because Plasti did not have very close information about the some of the details of that operation was that during the mining of the Tappian pit a a tunnel had been built to provide for the removal of typhoon rainwater frequent typhoons put a lot of water into the pit and drain that water into a neighboring river system which was the Boak River and so forth then the disaster happened when the hydrostatic pressure on that tunnel which had been blocked by Philippine engineers and and not inspected by Plasti we our technical people could only go and work at Mark Hopper they were invited by the Mark Hopper company right and in this case they thought it was cheaper to use the Philippine engineering firms rather than use the more expensive Canadian engineering firms for this tunnel blockage situation so we didn't really have technical information on that as far as I was aware and eventually the block of the tunnel failed and the tailings started gushing out that tunnel into the original I think the mechaloptic river which flowed then into the Boak River system and so I was told we have a disaster and it was interesting you know one of the things that I had done for the company shortly after I joined I guess in the 1980s no it was actually a little bit later on late 1990s was to go around to all of Plasti's operations of the world which at that point were about 12 to install a crisis anticipation crisis response system and but I was told by the CEO at the time don't go to Mark Hopper because we don't formally manage that unless they ask you then you can go they never asked me and so I never did and ironically it turned out that the one operation where Plasti had as big as disaster biggest crisis was Mark Hopper and they were totally unprepared we had we had no system set up as to you know what the response mechanism should be with the immediate communication system should be you know who needed to know what when and so on and so forth and so I got over there probably the five or six days of this happening by that time the the tunnel had blocked itself up from the pressure of the tailings that were attempting to escape and and the Mechaleptic River was like an airport tarmac I walked I think a kilometer and a half down it just on the surface right and so all the tailings had settled and hardened nobody had been killed in that accident fortunately obviously the river had been smothered so whatever aquatic life was there was was ended and and there may have been some damage to some farm animals I'm not really sure I think there were some damage to some farm animals pigs and so forth so the the main risk to people of that situation was that if a typhoon were to come the houses which had been you know fairly safe from the the rushing river that would result from a typhoon we're now at danger of being flooded because the river is filled and so we had to do a relocation of a fair number of houses on the island most of the global NGO community got very excited I mean this was this sort of fit their agenda perfectly you know a major mining disaster and so there's a huge amount of attention given to to this situation I should say ironically I helped help mobilize an NGO myself in this respect because I thought you know when I got there and there's a major major sort of social concern about this all sorts of parties with all sorts of interests competing for attention so I said there must be somebody that has studied the society on this island Marin Duque that I can use as an advisor and I did a little bit of research and came across a woman anthropologist who then I think was teaching at Waterloo University did her PhD at McMaster living in Callican Bay and writing her thesis on the people of Callican Bay and their concerns about the mine and so for her name is Catherine Cumans for the first few months we had quite a I thought potentially productive interactions as we tried to think of what the what the strategies might be to to rectify the situation not on the physical environmental side that obviously was needed but certainly on the social healing side and her main concern was that the damage that had been caused to the residents of Callican Bay over the years by the earlier mining operations that Mark Hopper should be recognized and and attended to not just the damage that was caused by the people living in the other side of the mountain who had never been what you might call stakeholders of the mine because they were not within the orbit of the direct impact of the mining operation who were getting all the attention because they were immediately affected so we had this situation and do we do we try to deal with all the problems of Mark Hopper right now or just try to deal with the critical problems that have resulted from this particular tailings incident and I was in favor of a more holistic approach but the senior people in the company did not want to go any further than simply attending to the BOAC impact and it gained back primarily to the fact that the company was only a 40% equity shareholder it did not actually control the board of the operation nor did the control management there was a placidome person who had been seconded over to the Mark Hopper operation to act as mine manager and there are a couple of three placidome people and eight member board of directors for the Mark Hopper company but a we were participants in that and if it were going to be an overall holistic response the view in the company was that it had to be done by the shareholders in total of the Mark Hopper corporation this is in the post markers area and the major shareholder who owned the other 60% of the operation or something close to that with the name guy named burden and Bernadino and he was totally uninterested in spending any money whatsoever either in recompense or environmental cleanup and so given the fact that placidome was an international company of international reputational exposure and so forth and I think because it was the right thing to do our CEO made the decision that we would take a hundred percent responsibility for responding to the tailings disaster but not for everything that the mine had done in all the complaints against it that were more historical in nature so that was a complication and because of that complication Catherine Cummins decided to go more on the aggressive and confrontational side I believe that was probably something that she decided rightly in her in the in the interest of the of the concerns that were up a most in her mind which were the the impact on the residents of the village of Caliocan Bay and then other NGOs chimed in I mean we had church groups and so forth and I spent quite a lot of time working with all these organizations to see if we could find some kind of strategy that would would move the company forward towards a successful resolution of the issues I guess I should wrap up this story but eventually what happened was I was in favor of making the cleanup of the tailings a labor intensive operation we could probably have hired several hundred people with trucks and wheelbarrows and shovels and so forth but our senior engineering people did not think that the company a could manage that sort of operation nor did they think that it was without significant potential liability for anybody getting hurt or claiming as well as the case claiming that they were poisoned or something by the tailings and the tailings as such were not toxic so we went for a heavy-duty mechanical way of cleaning up the river system with a building brought in and one of the I think the world's largest dredging machine built a trench of the foot of the Boat River and washed the tailings down into the trench covered them over so they were they were inert and that was taken care of we couldn't we couldn't get rid of all the tailings that were beached along the riverbank maybe mounting to less than five percent of the total to three percent perhaps which we could only be handled by a labor intensive approach so when we decided to withdraw from the Marcopper joint venture totally and in seller remaining interest to Ferdinand Bernardino we put a certain amount of money as I recall it was about 25 million dollars forward to cover the full cleanup of the river system and he immediately turned it into a labor intensive organization of course he got all the credit for that they would have everybody was quite happy everybody was employed they will have an annual festival or not an annual monthly festival to to celebrate their good fortune that you know finally you know everybody was working and and that was the kind of image I was hoping that we could create had we gone for a labor intensive approach but perhaps it wasn't practical I don't know I can't say I was necessarily right on that but it seemed like a good idea at the time at least to me and then as far as the NGO world was concerned this really galvanized the NGO world and the company actually you know before before the Marcopper situation I mean I was very well aware of NGOs is one of the reasons I was hired in plaster in 1982 was because of the emergence of environmental NGOs and this was 15 years later and and and suddenly we were dead center as the focus of environmental NGOs and their concerns and complaints but that that introduced the company's management overall to NGOs it was quite interesting that started a major engagement with NGOs that plaster undertook and if we were you know in our in our councils considering a potential investment in a project and I'd be sitting at the table CEO or somebody would say well what do you think the NGOs are gonna want from this what would be what would be the NGO priority here and I would because I was barely familiar with them and their issues and concerns would be able to sort of say what I thought it was actually we would find out for sure so the NGOs got on the horizon as something that we had to work with and and it was in that same time frame that for quite different historical reasons I started introducing the idea of adopting a policy of sustainable development for the company now that goes back to the early 1990s sustainable development was enunciated at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and you read that yeah and following that Canada adopted the policy theme of sustainable development and the way of implementing that was to establish on tables on the environment of the economy which would bring together the various different perspectives environmental social economic and community and so forth and and and go through facilitated discussions to attempt to find common ground around major issues of concern identify areas of difference Commission projects of research of those areas of difference and so forth so we established a national roundtable environment economy which it lasted up until about a year and a half two years ago when the government ended its existence which was a very unwise move and my particular perspective and each of the provinces established national roundtables and I had a very good fortune in British Columbia primarily because I was one of the few or maybe almost the only person in the mining industry that had maintained reasonable conversational relationships with members of the New Democratic Party which I thought was my duty to do is in the role that I had respect to managing public policy issues that could affect the industry to be appointed by Premier Michael Harcourt to the BC roundtable environment economy and so I was the person from the mining industry there's somebody from forestry somebody from tourism somebody from hydroelectric developments and so forth and then there were NGOs environmental NGOs or community representatives or some aboriginal representatives and and so forth and they we went through these facilitated discussions around different industrial sectors and different sort of general concerns like the future of Puget Sound and and George's Strait and so forth but we never got to the mining industry and eventually we were going to get there it was almost the last major item left on the agenda when Premier Harcourt decided that the roundtable had done enough and he wanted to move into a different forum of regional planning and and I was left with my preliminary thinking on what initiative related to mining and sustainable development would look like so I I took that to to a meeting that was held in Spokane Washington in late 1995 the meeting of the North West Mining Association which the company was sponsoring and I was asked to give a keynote speech and my CEO suggested that I should do it on managing political risks since that was what I've been doing a lot of those at that time Mark Hopper had not yet occurred but I was doing it in other countries for sure and so I suggested in that speech that we needed to adopt the mining of the state generally needed to adopt a more holistic approach to managing its risk because we did manage you know environmental risk with a certain set of principles and objectives and relationships and so forth that we have managed our public policy risk with another set of principles objective relationships and we managed the interactions with communities but the rest of the world in the aftermath of the proclamation of sustainable development was developed was was moving towards a more integrated approach which meant that you don't simply consider these different types of challenges that exist for any kind of large industrial company but particularly for a mining company isolated from one another but you see them as as being related and so you try to develop a balanced and and integrated approach to considering the socio-cultural dimensions the environmental dimensions the economic dimensions which means that within the totality there could be some trade-offs in order to achieve the optimal combination of those various shared objectives and let in my point I made was that unless we could get on this page we were going to have difficulty in the public policy arena not just working with number of governments even including Canada and the various provinces that adopted sustainable development as an overall sort of political vision but in many developing countries and in the World Bank which had also adopted this which was a necessary ally in various developing countries around various projects and agencies of the United Nations which of course originated the the whole concept through the to the environment through the the initiative related to to the environment in the economy in the Rio Convention that came out of that and so that speech was greeted with a lot of negative reaction I remember very clearly I thought I had scored and I'm surrounded by senior people from our company and the senior vice president of exploration at the time says I think you're building a Trojan horse bringing the enemy our adversary's inside our camp you know gonna weaken or we saw others that it sounds like capitulation to the NGOs some others said you know aren't we gonna be called hypocrites we try to talk this way you know because we know we're not doing everything perfectly very challenging business that we're in but my CEO kind of was intrigued John Wilson said well let's explore this and a few months later he had an opportunity to give a speech and they put together some words for him and I put in a paragraph into about sustainable development and the following day the National Post featured an editorial headlining something new from the mining industry Wilson just said I think we've got something here so let's go forward with it so we intensified our external communications and dialogue with the NGO community to find out what would it really take for a mining company to to be able to project itself as an adherent of sustainable development we did an enormous amount of internal consultation I went around to different mining operations of ours and happening getting elsewhere and we sat through discussing you know what what really would we be doing differently if we adopt sustainable development when some places like Papua New Guinea they were doing just about everything imaginable to manage their environmental and political risks so they said well I don't think we'd be doing much differently but we'd be sort of looking at what we're doing differently right describing it differently other places maybe had a few more challenges that would have to catch up with particularly with respect to indigenous peoples who largely have been ignored in Canada at that time by the mining industry but eventually we came to an internal corporate consensus that we could live with this and in February remember it very clearly of 1997 after a final major strategic meeting of about a hundred or more people from operations all around the world hammering out the final words and phrases of what everybody thought they could live with in this sustainable development policy we brought it to our board it was very interesting there was one there was I can remember some of the linguistic debates that we had which from a from a philosopher's perspective as I then thought I possessed probably did still do we're very interesting and it was around the issue of using the term human rights now we had operations in Chile and and the operational management in Chile were very concerned that we started in 1997 which was you know only eight years after Pinochet's regime espousing human rights as one of the core elements of sustainable development we would immediately be branded as anti Pinochetistas in Chile this would politicize our role in that country to a degree that would be very difficult would that have been a bad thing well they would be it would have put you you know if you're operating in our country which has a high level of political sensitivities around certain areas such as human rights in those days is now involved now the mining industry for a whole range of reasons which I can describe later if you wish has moved way beyond its nervousness around human rights but human rights was regarded as placing you very much in the political domain and so there's this set of issues that corporate management had about being in a foreign country and getting that deeply involved in the politics of that country you know ironically about the same time frame shell was going through this situation Nigeria with the Goni land and in the issue around Ken Sarawita philosopher poet that was hanged by the military government at the time and learning lessons that you know you probably had to get involved in some degree of human rights because you know not being involved while you have so much power and influence over eventualities was maybe a responsible in Chile it was different I mean you know it's not that Chile had significant human rights issues it was that the society was deeply divided as to whether the Pinochet regime had been overall it obviously had some very serious deficiencies of specific sorts related to human rights but overall had been better for Chile or not and and the company did not want to find itself you know put into one camp which was primarily the left-wing camp in Chile with respect to that set of issues simply by saying that we support basic human rights as it was seen by United Nations Universal Declaration let us say so I would have politicized the company from their point of view but but where we ended up was I said you know at one point I said well you know all we're talking about here is fundamental freedoms you know freedom from persecution freedom from arbitrary arrest you know they said you can use that term fundamental freedoms doesn't resonate in Chile in any manner so there we just put that in our policy that the company you know undertook to to operate in conformity with the fundamental freedoms and the term fundamental freedoms actually you know occurs in US the United Nations documents as well so so that was an example of the kind of wordsmithing that we had to get through which wasn't just a matter of wordsmithing it was a matter of you know I say holistic contextual kind of thinking with respect to the implications of the words that you use and those implications you know have all sorts of ramifications that both concrete and philosophical that that are very good to be aware of so it was a very significant awareness raising exercise by plaster domes management and senior employees with respect to this broad set of issues which were you know the challenges that the company had to deal with it went to our board of directors in February of 1997 the draft policy and amazingly the board took out certain weasel words we had certain words and they're like may or could and they put in will but we done they made it stronger and and so there we were we were the first and only mining company at the time to to have a corporate policy that integrated our industrial activities with a broad set of concepts around sustainable development it was not only a policy but it was a set of specific objectives for the different mining initiatives that we had around the world it was a commitment to various reporting procedures protocols and it was a commitment also stated in our in our first draft of the policy to to work within the industry to bring others along in the same direction and one of the things that was not surprising actually is that once we had adopted this policy sustainable development we attracted a certain amount of attention from the NGOs many of whom had actually been allies encouraging us to go this way now they said well now now we're gonna make sure that you live up to it so we were probably submitting ourselves the more pressure it's almost like we had raised a flag everybody started shooting at it and coincidentally I was involved from 1992 onwards with this organization which was then called was founded in 1992 the International Council of Metals in the Environment and for its first seven eight years it was headquartered here in Ottawa and the founding of the organization took place largely at the ever Canadian mining companies particularly INCO and Falcon Ridge and Aranda in those days none of whom were Canadian mining mining companies anymore but anyway there were there were leaders and getting this organization started and I became after years of serving on this particular committee I became chair of the Public Policy Committee at the ICME and set as my objective getting the ICME to move in the direction adopting sustainable development and there was again huge resistance a lot of the resistance was quite political some of the member companies definitely saw sustainable development as being very much a part of the European social democratic policy orientation and we're not comfortable with that it was you know some of the UK members and not some of the UK members but certainly the US and Australian members were a bit concerned about the the left-leaning apparent left-leaning orientation of sustainable development they referred the the Adam Smith invisible hand with respect to economic decision-making and and so we had a certain amount of resistance we had a very strong resistance in fact I remember the around that same time late 1990s the then head of the American Mining Association General Bernard Loss and I think his first name was Bernard who had retired from the US Air Force as a four-star general I used to brag about the fact that he learned the art of management from Curtis LeMay I don't know if you remember General Curtis LeMay but he was the he was the general during the Kennedy administration I guess and probably Johnson administration the US who wanted to bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age and that would resolve the Vietnamese conflict remember General Lawson it was a strange choice to be head of the Mining Association I always thought but you know he appealed to I guess a certain element of mining company management in the United States made a speech that the mining industry as he assessed it was outnumbered and he says from his military training he knew what to do when you're we're outnumbered by your adversaries you bring in reinforcements but he wasn't terribly good at finding reinforcements to bring in and and he gave a he gave a speech against sustainable development which is quite memorable in my mind I mean basically describe sustainable development as being reds under the bed and sort of subterfuge that would drain Americans other precious vitally vital fluids or something to that extent straight out of Dr. Strangelove so we had some very significant opposition to this concept of sustainable development but I had one very good ally and that was in the World Bank and the mining technical division of the World Bank was headed then by quite a remarkable individual named Peter Van Der Veen a Dutchman who had been a mining engineer with Boliden maybe some other companies and had experience in the in Latin America particularly Peru and was quite sympathetic in fact because the World Bank was formerly part of the sustainable development initiative launched by the United Nations was constantly looking for ways to expand the integration of mining with sustainable development so Peter and I had a number of conversations on this and he suggested one point that we conduct an intensive three-day exercise with the industry to think through all the implications of the concepts embodied within the framework of sustainable development and see if we could come to some kind of position of accepting the the possibility that the mining industry would overall adopt sustainable development as a framework for its activities so you had this three-day workshop in Washington DC which was indeed very intensive and we brought in NGOs we brought in some academics we had World Bank people United Nations people and we had about 20 companies from the ICME represented and and we went through the different elements of sustainable development you know whether it was environmental issues how you would deal with those differently whether it's social and community issues even whether it was economic priorities and the challenges of wealth distribution and poverty reduction around mining sites issues of governance and corruption and so forth and at the end the industry caucused and they had been shaken up a bit by this experience but they hadn't been totally converted and and I was just trying to sort of muster them in the direction of coming to some sort of consensus and support of maybe moving to the next step of being very vague here but of adopting sustainable development and then finally a senior member of the committee that I chaired representing BHP which is now BHP Billiton stood up and he said you know he says I I don't like the look of sustainable development I don't like the smell of sustainable development I don't like the taste of sustainable development it sticks in my throat but maybe we have to swallow it for our own good and then one of the guys and maybe Roger has a point no he retired a couple months later so perhaps he felt that he was free to make such a radical statement but I like to say that it was with that degree of enthusiasm that the mining industry crossed the line and said yeah let's move the next step towards sustainable development and I expected to be a very gradual process but it wasn't once the the cap was out of the bag so to speak the industry woke up and they said okay if we're going to do this then we've got to just do it you know with all engines firing and so the ten of the companies met at the World Economic Forum in 1998 I think it was and and decided that they were going to launch a global exercise on mining minerals and sustainable development they went to the World Business Council sustainable development Geneva to provide an umbrella for this exercise and and give some detachment so it wouldn't be it wouldn't seem to be simply an industry led initiative but it would be an independently led initiative and and the interest international Institute for environment development was brought on board a group in London to conduct global consultations and there were regional consultations set up and in the Americas and other parts of the world and as we went through this period from 1999 2002 which is a major industry education process of coming to terms with the implications of sustainable development so that now 2002 policy was adopted the summary of the global consultation called breaking new ground was was issued and the ICME transferred into the International Council on Mining and Metals headquartered in London and that has been a leading Institute with respect to advancing the understanding and the implications of the whole range of issues around mining and sustainable development so it's been quite a quite a major path for the industry to have taken and I'm fortunate that I was there at the beginning although I have to say I kickstarted it where sustainable development is concerned though as they say you know success has a thousand fathers and failures and orphaned this succeeded and so there are many many people that claim a lot of credit for for making it happen but I was all alone at one point I can remember quite well I was gonna ask you you had mentioned a lot of the the resistance you had gotten especially from the mining and natural resources communities but when you first started because you were technically like a mining guy was there a lot of resistance from it could whether it be the media or NGOs or aboriginals well I have to say as far as by that time you know placer had placer had a complicated relationship with NGOs but we probably had one of the most intensive relationships with NGOs because we're on the one hand we were dealing in a defensive mode related to the Maricopa situation on the other hand with a proactive mode related to the sustainable development policy development and I remember one of the NGOs say at the time yeah we can talk to you it's just like Vietnam it's you can fight and fight and talk at the same time right and so we were sort of the one-hand fighting in the other hand talking and I remember one of the one of the most senior members of the NGO community at one point he was quite interesting fellow from Australia said you know in fact you should interview him his name is Michael Ray he's now head of the the organization of responsible jewelry manufacturers but Michael Ray who then was with WWF and he was their global mining lead says Placer don't what you're looking for is peace with honor in some respects I think he was right it was a complicated situation I don't think we I don't you know there were certainly many many NGOs that were skeptical about you know how far we could take this and there was some that were more realistic and some that were more idealistic obviously the more realistic one said well you know improving a mining company is better than trying to make it perfect and failing so but there were some that wanted degree of perfection which you know we weren't able to achieve those days there was a a lack of consultation with Aboriginal people on those days I have to say I mean if the thing had been done 10 years later it would have been quite different and partly that was because the Indigenous peoples around the world but the Aboriginal communities in Canada particularly were only beginning to sort of wake up to their potential a to be involved in B to influence any kind of developments that might occur on the traditional territories so they really weren't prepared to engage because they hadn't gone through their own sort of mental developmental process I think quite as far as they subsequently have and we weren't prepared to engage because we operated certain minds that you know none of our minds at the time had any kind of relationship with First Nations with one exception that would be the you know maybe two deter late mine and muscle white mine in Northern Ontario had developed some relationships with First Nations but in BC there were no relationships and at the time we had mines in Quebec as well there were no relationships there so and the two that I mentioned were you know early-stage pathfinding kind of relationships it would have been difficult to move those into a corporate dialogue about the role the company overall so that was a deficiency but you know once we had this policy we were quite frankly called hypocrites and I was even mentioned in the press once is the biggest hypocrite the mining industry because I was going around saying here's our vision here's what we're trying to do here's how we see ourselves this fundamentally is the purpose of mining sustainable development and so you know how can you believe that and and in a sense it was only partially true but it wasn't totally untrue it's only partially true because we weren't quite measuring up to to the ideal that we had set for ourselves and it was a constant the that that was the whole idea of adopting a policy which was going to be a stretch right it was the sort of force you to sort of be aware of an ideal beyond your present level of performance and if there are some people that were nervous about that you know a number of years later I about seven eight years ago I encountered a concept which had been introduced by Norwegian social and political philosopher Jan Elster called the civilizing force of hypocrisy and and this this became a very important concept in my own mind because it suddenly caused me to recognize that hypocrisy was not just simply a negative characteristic that hypocrisy could be a driver of change and that because hypocrisy causes cognitive dissonance at some point you either find yourself abandoning the pretense or conforming to the image that you're projecting and so it does propel evolution and you know it's interesting I gave a speech a couple of months ago to a group of academics from around the world who's who were involved in teaching engineers about the concept of sustainable development and I introduced this concept to them and they had thought of every possible motivator for moving in the direction of sustainable development except hypocrisy so the biggest Jan Elster should have been there the biggest set of questions I had after this was tell us more about hypocrisy well hypocrisy is pretty easy to achieve actually if you're without many people do it all the time particularly in the political realm I suppose but anyway so so the NGOs were critical they they did see us as hypocrites but they continued working with us and it was always you know for almost as long as I was working within the industry it was sort of a simultaneously fight-and-talk situation still that today even today I've had email exchange about an event that might take place here later in the year trying to involve the NGOs the mining industry and you know is this going to be a constructive dialogue where we actually sort of come to some kind of mutual realization that there are strategies available to improve situations or is it simply going to be a platform for protests or name and shame sort of activity and you know there's a very genuine interest on the part of the industry of that realizes that by virtue of the type of industrial activity it's engaged in by virtue of the complex social environmental challenges that it faces in most of the remote regions where it takes this industrial activity that it needs to find new more effective approaches to dealing with the issues that it confronts and so the industry is very oriented to engaging with NGOs if we could be constructive but what's the what's the benefit of simply being you know accused of this that and the other thing it satisfies maybe a certain sense of righteousness on the part of the NGOs that level the accusations but but it doesn't really achieve very much and but not all NGOs in that category I mean in fact it's interesting some of the NGOs have sort of developed two sides of their activity so one is the advocacy side and the other is the constructive engagement side you know and I can name a few that have gone in that direction but those that remain totally locked on the advocacy side believe that's where the bread and butter is and that's what they need to do and and maybe they don't really have much of the way of constructive solutions to offer anyway so what can you say as of today we look at Canada and this topic comes up once in a while in the interviews I've had would you say there's still a major disconnect between your mining industries or even your natural resources industries and society and media and and not necessarily just opposition but a disconnect maybe a lack of effort between both parties to understand or even the fact that there's a lack of education between it could be people and the mining industry for example well you know there's a spectrum of understanding certainly most of the industrial world is based in the cities and and functions according to a set of economic expectations sociocultural habits of the industrial it can even call the post-industrial age right now primarily everybody's involved in service economy right they work for museums and things like that so with rare exceptions of museums and take an interest in something like mining there's not a large awareness as to what it's all about I mean the mining industry and some of its proponents love to say that you know just look around you I mean most of what you depend on from the doorknob over there to the to the structure of the chair you're sitting on you know eventually was a mineral in the earth that had to be extracted and refined and so forth to give you the metal that you're making use of and as I said you know from a philosophical point of view the relationship between humankind and the material universe which goes back in stone age, bronze age, iron age you know right up to now is a major part of our of our being but it's not something that most people reflect on it's something that should take more or less for granted I mean unless you know unless you're of a mechanical disposition you have very little knowledge of what's under the hood of your car right doesn't mean anything to you and that's true I think of most people's lives that they're not aware really of the challenges of providing mineral resources for the material universe in which they operate it's less true of course in communities that are closer to the mining operations themselves now they themselves would probably not see the industry in terms of its global holistic role but but more in terms of its immediate impacts environmentally and socially and so forth economically that that they experience so it's a mix the media again you know there are a few people in the media that maybe have an understanding and sympathy for the complexities and challenges of the mining industry but not that many so it's a specialized it's a specialized as far as the sort of intellectual orientation of society's concern is a specialized focus specialized sort of set of information there have been some efforts to get beyond that I mean you know the mining industry itself has been supportive of efforts that they even the grade school level but particularly high school level to make sure that you know part of one's general knowledge when you finish high school is that you understand how mining fits into everything and so there's that but it's you know it's just sort of a marginal part of one's education I think so yeah it is a challenge I I'm not sure you know in terms of in terms of the activity and the contribution of the industry overall how important it is the society in general be aware of all these things and be part of the decision processes I mean it might be that leaving it to people that are more specialized might might actually produce better outcomes this is the big issue right now not with mining but with pipelines in this country right it's a very similar situation that's I'd mention natural resources yeah so it's a very similar situation that the struggle between integrating general public concerns into decisions between leaving it to technical and specialized knowledge and that balance needs to be found and the same thing exists with with with mining I mean I think with respect to pipelines for example the government of Canada at the present time has gone too far in restricting decision making to factual and technical inputs and not integrating adequately cultural values and so forth in those decisions so that you know if you if you really have concerns and a large part of Canadian society has concerns that we have to eventually move off fossil fuels then at least that long-term vision should be part of the backdrop of the consideration of respect to pipelines which means that you know the decision to build a pipeline and this is true with mining right now but not with pipelines as far as I'm concerned should be integrated with the prospect of decommissioning pipelines we don't build mines today without thinking of the end of the mine yeah maybe because we know that our bodies and it will definitely as a course of nature come to cease producing you think you build a pipeline you're building something that has no end well if indeed you know the orientation of society is and even some of the major thinkers about energy futures are saying you know by 2050 even even the speech by somebody who saw the Arabia recently you know we're going to be phasing out of fossil fuels so why so that should be those values those perspectives should be part of the integration the decision process and to limit it simply to the specialist scientific and technical and factual inputs with respect to immediate impacts and and the development of the engineering challenges of developing the project is a is far too narrow and socially irresponsible approach to making major decisions at my view well finish on one one question in a very prolific career what do you do now well you know it's interesting in terms of titles and so forth I have three academic appointments one is an adjunct professor to the mining engineering department at UBC my main activity there has been in being part major part of the preparation and submission of a of a proposal to develop the Canadian international what's now called the Canadian international resources and development institute the initial phrase is a Canadian international institute for extractive industries and development and this was response in response to a a request for proposals from the government of Canada from universities to put in submissions for establishing such an institute we did that at UBC and another academic appointment I have is an adjunct professor at the beauty school of business assignment Fraser where I've been active in initiating something called the responsible mineral resource initiative rmsi brought those two together rmsi or beauty school business with the mining engineering faculty at UBC and we made our submission and we won the 25 million dollar award along with commitments for about another seven and a half million or so from partners that wanted to be part of this initiative major partners simply joined as one of the three coalition universities and that's a co-politicique de Montréal that's so I and I'm chair of the have been chair of the advisory council to this initiative since it got started two years ago it's been very slow getting off the ground it's been somewhat frustrating to those of us that thought that more could be achieved sooner than has been done but it still has potential I think and I'm still remaining sort of in the mix with respect to trying to make it succeed I'm also I hold an appointment at McGill University the Institute of the study of international development as professor of practice in global governance and I was in residence of McGill for the second half 2013 conducted a forum on on Aboriginal issues and mining and also taught a course there a graduate course on gold gold guns and governance we called it which is about anticipating and dealing with conflict around mining industries but the major demand for for me over the past year so has been related to a concept that I introduced into mining quite separately from the sustainable development initiative which I discussed and that's the concept of social license to operate and it's interesting that that's become so prominent because when I introduced the term I for me it was just a way of describing a certain situation that had evolved and it was done at a conference at the World Bank in March of 1997 when they convened a group to discuss the next 25 years of mining and my subject being political risk or was where was managing political risk going to be going over the following 25 years and this again is from the perspective of 1997 simultaneously we were working a sustainable development but I didn't talk about sustainable development in this event I talked just about a more narrow conception political risk and the fact that globalization was doing two things globalization as a concept is just that emerging and one thing it was it was reducing barriers to entry for foreign capital investing in mining and so you had a lot more trans boundary operations of international mining companies and two it was moving in the direction of more rapid communications around the world instant knowledge about anything that happened anywhere for anyone that wanted to know what it was and that was very early days before the huge development of social media that has subsequently taken place but in those days there was a story which I initially heard of the World Bank of a mining company that had this amazing experience they'd been working on an exploration project in Papua New Guinea and then reached an agreement with the local landowners around the site where they were exploring and a few months later they were talking to a tribe in Brazil about a possible exploration project and the tribe in Brazil says we want the same deal you gave those people in Papua New Guinea and this seemed astounding you know nobody would think twice about that kind of story today I mean you just get it by Twitter even if you're even if you're buried in some remote village in some kind of tribal community but in those days it was new and what that meant was that in many developing countries the local communities where we were operating were isolated in a sense not just physically but politically from the governments of the countries and and so we would go in there and the government would basically say well you know don't worry about local community and we were down there and we realized that you know we couldn't ignore the local community and the fact that they were developing these international connections meant that they were beginning to have allies in the NGO community and churches media academics and so forth and so we had to take all of that a lot more seriously and so I said well you know when we deal with the government we're trying to get a government permit so when we're dealing with local communities I said let's call it a social license I mean it's larger than a community permit because it's not just the community it's a community plus it's international allies so that's the social license that we have to earn and so I introduced this term purely as a point of reference for pragmatic political risk management that we had to work at two levels locally and because we run a two-track approval process for major mining processes locally and nationally and but it was very quickly picked up by some of my friends in the NGO world and said wow this is this is a way of empowering communities and so they moved they moved this simple concept from sort of a pragmatic reference point of political risk management to an ethical concept where they started talking about the ethics of corporations so you have corporate social responsibility which requires that works with communities in order to achieve the social license or the sustainable development framework then sort of brought in social license although not during the MMSD period it's interesting to note not until later or it invested communities with certain fundamental rights so it transferred the the focus of concern from the corporation attempting to get its its relationships with communities on a sustainable and non-conflictual basis to the community's right to have what now come become in many cases free prior informed consent before any project can can progress and so forth but then more recently the term social license has become totally detached from immediate local impacts and it started referring to any kind of issue where the national approval process does not adequately include other public concerns so this refers back to the discussion we just had on pipelines that you know the government might want to reduce the consultative arena simply to factual and technical input and not receive input related to other extraneous as it would regard them extraneous concerns such as climate change let's say or biodiversity impacts or something in the oceanic impacts and and the result is that we say well you know you may have government permission for this but you do not have social license and you even recently both both Justin Trudeau and in Thomas Bocair talked about certain policies of the government where Stephen Harper doesn't have social license well this is not at all the way in which the term was meant to be used when I introduced it I mean as I say some of the expansion of the meaning in terms of besting you know ethical content and communities and and corporations and so forth as opposed to this pure political risk pragmatism I can understand except because we're still talking about managing local impacts but when you start talking about these general concerns you're no longer talking about managing local impacts I think you're dealing with more broad public policy issues which I think go beyond the scope of the term social license right so that's that's perhaps a misuse of a concept at least if they were up to me I would not use it that way so as a result I've been interviewed many times over the past year you know like radios and newspapers and so forth on this on this subject of social license and that's that's a good part of how I've been spending the last 12 months anyway well thank you very much had enough have you I guess I have yeah no thank you yeah it's always good to trot out an old war horse and hear whether you can still nay or not yeah I know quite a quite a few interesting stories thank you very much well maybe you can edit that and there's something useful