 Okay, so we are in Edmonton, not to begin an interview with Mr. Jim Carter. So let's begin. So, Mr. Jim Carter, could you say your full name and age? Yeah, my name is Jim Carter, and I am 65 years old. And where were you born? I was born in Glasgow, Scotland. And when did you move to Canada? I came to Canada in 1959, so I was nine years old. Okay, still a child. And in Scotland, what did your parents do? My dad was a farmer, actually, in Scotland, and did the same when he came to Canada. Okay, what kind of farming? Dairy farming, actually, in Canada, but he had dairy and mix farming in Scotland. Okay. Now, do you want me to look into the camera, or to look into the camera? Oh, probably just in me. Yeah, yeah. Better for both of us. Sure. All right. Sometimes I want it on the camera. Yeah, yeah, no. I think it's better. It's a little more comfortable, too. Okay, as a child, I guess you kind of had a split childhood. Yeah. But what did you do for fun, or were your interests? Well, you know, being raised on a farm. You always have work to do there, and chores and that kind of thing. And we had a dairy herd in the mid-60s that was fairly large. And my dad did all the farming himself. So as children, we all helped at calving time and all that kind of thing. And we did get involved in some sports. But you know, in those days, sports weren't nearly as organized as they are today. And so we played pond hockey and that kind of thing. But it wasn't organized the way it is for the young people nowadays. Of course. And I know for dairy farms, where I grew up, there was a few dairy farms. The milking is done usually at 12 hours apart, right? Yeah, morning and night every day of the week. So what time usually? We used to do the milking at about 7 in the morning and about the same, maybe a little earlier than that, 6.30 in the morning and about the same time at night. That's not quite as bad as some farms I hear. Yeah. Some are like 3 and 3 and 4 and 4. Yeah, it all depends on the cycle, I guess. Yeah. Okay. Now, when was the first time you had shown interest in engineering or science or the domain you would eventually get into? Well, you know, growing up on a farm, you always have machinery and equipment that needs to be repaired. And so I was involved in that at a very early age. So you were in the mechanics. Yeah, and doing mechanical things. You learned how to weld and you learned how to tear down an engine and rebuild it and do those kinds of things. So I was very interested in engineering at a very early age. My parents were pretty emphatic about their children getting an education. That was kind of the way it was done in those days. And so there was a lot of emphasis on the education component. And when I began to work in the summers away from the farm, I ended up going to work on some tobacco farms and then eventually ended up working in the underground mining industry really because that was a good paying job in the summertime. And so I got interested in mining. Okay. And then when I went through university, I decided I would choose mining engineering. And for that, I probably would have taken mechanical engineering. Yeah, as you were already interested in machinery. But we'll get to that later. But you were also involved with machinery later in your life. Yes. So the mining jobs were summer jobs you would do in high school? Yes. High school and university. And when you moved to Canada, where did you move exactly? To Prince Edward Island, actually. Another maritime. Yeah. Excellent. Where in PIA? Just across from Charlottetown. I think it was called North River in those days. I think they've amalgamated it with Cornwall. So it's Cornwall and York Point and North River are all one in the same region now. I still have quite a bit of family in Charlottetown. Yeah, I am. Well, it's a very nice place. Yeah, a pretty place. Much more of a tourist place today than it is an agricultural place. Yes. Yeah, a lot of the entire province lives off of tourism. Golf courses and tourism. Yeah, for sure. So you went to, you mentioned university, so you took mining engineering. Yes. And that was in Nova Scotia, right? Right, yes. I took my pre-engineering at UPEI, and then I did my degree in mining engineering at Dalhousie. Well, in those days it was called Nova Scotia Tech. And then it became Daltech, and then it became, well, it became Tons, the Technical University of Nova Scotia, and then it became Daltech and how it's just Dalhousie engineering, essentially. Okay. All incorporated. Yeah, so it's evolved over the years into Dalhousie engineering now. Okay. And what classes were you fond of, not so fond of? You know, I liked all of the mining classes. Obviously, in engineering, you do lots of the sciences, physics and math and lots of math, in fact, advanced math. And so I, you know, I enjoyed that and enjoyed the engineering aspect, the design courses that we had. In mining engineering, you take a bit of a sort of a broader spectrum of engineering courses than you do in some other disciplines because you have a little bit of mechanical, a bit of electrical, a bit of civil and, you know, and then the specialty in mining, so it involves a fairly extensive, or a broad background in engineering. And I enjoyed pretty much all of the courses that I took. Yeah. All right. You were a good student then. Well, I'm not sure I was a good student, but I certainly enjoyed the course material. I suppose if there was any that wasn't all that exciting, it was remembering the names of, you know, hundreds of different rocks or that kind of thing. There was a lot of memory work involved in being able to identify those different things. But it was all interesting and good stuff and you could relate it to developments that were going on, you know, in the country and around the world. Yeah, taking one geology class. I really liked it, but it's all by heart stuff. Yes. Yeah. Learning specific terms and names, remembering them. Okay, so after Dow, what was your, say, was your first official job or your first professional? Well, when I graduated, I had, you know, that was back in the early 70s and, you know, the resource industry was doing quite well in those days, so you generally ended up with three or four job offers, which I did. But I chose to go to work for the iron ore company in Canada and Labrador City. I guess for a couple of reasons. One being that the job offer there, in terms of compensation, was higher than the other alternatives that I had. But also, I wanted to, I had spent my summers working in underground mining, and I wanted to get experience in surface mining. And of course, IOC at the time in Labrador City was, you know, the largest mine in Canada by a long shot and had some very modern technologies that are like a fully automated train system that transported the ore. And, you know, some of the largest equipment used in the business in the world there. And some pretty challenging conditions in the Labrador trough with drilling and blasting and cold weather conditions in the wintertime and all of that sort of thing. So it was a real challenging opportunity. And the IOC always had a presence on the University campuses in Eastern Canada in particular in those days and had a good reputation. So I decided to choose that job. And how long did you work there? I was at IOC for about 20 months altogether. And not unlike a lot of other grads, they went there and usually they stayed for a little longer than that. But I had an opportunity to come out to Calgary or to Alberta rather and work in the coal business. And I followed a fellow that had worked for the iron ore company for quite a while. He came out to be the mine manager in Grand Cache for Smoky River Coal, which was then owned by McIntyre Mines. And he was recruiting people. They were starting a big surface mine and I had worked for him at IOC. And he indicated that he would be really interested in me at least coming out and having a look at it, which I subsequently did and ended up making the move to Alberta. So it's quite a quick turnover. Is it often a quick turnover for mining business? You know, in those days it was. Just because there's so much going on? Yeah, that was the reason. But I think for me it was more a matter of I had worked for this individual and he knew of my capabilities and that kind of thing. He saw me as somebody he would like to have working with him to start this new mine in Alberta. So it was unique in that sense. If he hadn't left I probably wouldn't have come out to Alberta as early as that anyway. I probably would have found my way out at some point. Eventually? Yeah. That was eventually your plan? Well, I would tend to go where the action is and the action has been in Alberta for the last 40 years. Yeah, for sure. So would you say this man was your, you would have been one of your first mentors? Yeah, I would have been an early mentor for sure. Yeah. And what was his name? Bob Keynes. Yeah, and Bob had started out working with the R&R Company of Canada as a permanent employee and went back to university and did his degree in civil engineering and at Nova Scotia Tech actually as well. So, and Bob had actually interviewed me to go to work at the R&R Company of Canada when I was on my job interviewing process at graduation. So he's the one, if I understand correctly, when you both left to go out west. Yeah. He's the one who started that mine. Yeah, yes. It was in the beginning stages, but he was really the one that helped to get it launched and really moving up the curve. And you also would have jumped quite a few steps by joining him. Yeah, I started out as a mine foreman, but it wasn't long before I was general foreman. And I was a mine superintendent by the time I was 26 years old and mine manager at 27. So probably one of the youngest mine managers in Alberta at the time. And in those days you had to write an exam to become a mine manager. And you had to be qualified at blasting and a series of other things. So I had to serve my time. You had to have a certain length of time at the mine face. And then you had to write the exams. And I did all of that. I was a mine manager when I was 27, 27 years old I guess, yeah. Impressive. Yeah. Can you tell us a bit more about the conditions or if you remember specific stories from actual, from specific tasks in mining? Yeah, there was, you know, I think each mine site has its own set of challenges. For one thing, you know, for example, the ore that we were mining in Labrador was very hard. It was a magnetite type ore which is very hard. It requires drilling and blasting. And it's so hard that the drill bits that you use for drilling would not last very long. The bearings would go and the tungsten carbide inserts on the cones of the bit would wear out very quickly. The tungsten, you know, because that's hard. It's very hard. And so, you know, that was a tough environment. And even after you blasted, you had stuff that was really heavy and it was very, very high density material. And it would be hard on equipment, on shovels and drills and on haul trucks because you were loading this stuff in and it would be in, you know, fairly large sizes. And it all had to be crushed. So that was a pretty big challenge there. And of course you had the climatic conditions in Labrador that weren't necessarily all that easy to deal with sometimes. And then when I went to Grand Cache in Alberta, of course we were mining coal at the 5800 foot level. So in the foothills of the mountains, you know, Grand Cache is about 60 miles away. The crow flies from Jasper. So you're kind of right on the Rocky Mountain Range there. And so we would get snow in the spring of the year right up until about the first week of June. So, you know, we'd be hauling coal from 5800 feet and we hauled it down 2,000 feet on a road that had a 10% grade with switchbacks. It was a pretty tricky hauling situation. And then so you'd have to put chains on the coal trucks in the first week of June. And then by the third week of September, you were chaining up again for the following winter. So it was, you know, pretty challenging conditions. That wasn't the case every year, but certainly there were years when, you know, it was that late and that early, if you will. And so that always provided some challenges, you know. You really lived in the winter for a good portion of your life. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, Grand Cache was a nice place in the summertime. But, you know, not unlike any communities in the mountains, you had unpredictable weather. You could get clouds coming over and you could get, you know, snow that would fall virtually every month of the year. Even July. Yeah, over time, yes, exactly. As you started working your mining, have a few different jobs, what did you ever work in a job, you could say that, or an organization or company that was quite dysfunctional? Or were you in certain situations that were quite dysfunctional? You know, I think in the 70s and probably up until about the mid-80s, the industry struggled because there was quite a bit of growth in the mining sector and the competition was really high for skilled people and skilled management people. And a lot of companies didn't have a chance to grow their own talent. They were expanding so fast that they had to go and hire it in. And in the course of that, you end up not having enough time to really establish the norms of how you're going to operate as a company and what your values are and what the key philosophy around how you're going to operate is really established. And so you ended up with a lot of what would be called not as desirable a workplace as you would like to have and as you would normally have you didn't have that competition for skilled people. And so, yeah, it was always a challenge. I can remember in the coal business where you would like to have three journeymen for every apprentice you had. We would have one journeyman and seven apprentices because you couldn't hire journeymen and tradesmen anymore. They were all in such high demand. And so over the years, in the industry, you learn how to compensate for those kinds of things by, first of all, making sure that you're training enough apprentices and that you create an environment where your turnover is minimized and all that kind of thing. So, yeah, you know, whether I would term them as dysfunctional I don't think I'd go that far and just say that it's a product of the environment that everybody found themselves in. So you said that time because of the boom you assume most companies would have gone through that problem? I think most of them did. Some of them to lesser degrees than others but then by geographic location you know, sometimes that would exacerbate the issue like, you know, being in Labrador in those days you couldn't, there was no road in and out of Labrador City so you had to reserve a spot on the railcar to get your vehicle in and out every year when you wanted to go on holidays and those kinds of things. So it was a, and you know, we didn't even have live television the first few months I was there so, you know, you had listened to the hockey game on the radio and then you would get the tape about a week later and you'd watch it, those sort of things. So, yeah, you know, really for a big center and there were 8,000 to 10,000 people living there at that time between Wabash and Labrador City two big mining operations and so those presented their sets of challenges for everybody but, you know, true to form the industry in Canada has never been deterred by that kind of thing and lots of people have managed to make a go of these things in spite of the geographic and climatic headwinds that they've had to deal with. Yes. And you had already mentioned a lot of challenges with mining but, I mean, your career spanned much more than that. Through your entire career, what would be your most difficult project? Well, if I looked at them as sort of small pieces along the way we ran into quite a few individual sort of items of the various mine sites that I worked at and I would start with Grand Cache in that we had a very difficult downhill haul with our coal haul there and before I got there the company had had quite a track record of accidents on the coal haul route itself and so we had switched it over to a group of independent truckers that were hauling coal for us on a contract basis and they were getting paid so much per ton for moving coal so that was quite an incentive for them to really produce but the problem was you had to watch them from a safety point of view and we ended up with quite a few incidents and then we decided that we're going to take over that I was the mine manager at the time that coal haul and do it with their own equipment so we ended up selecting some 50 ton caterpillar trucks to do the job there was a lot of controversy around whether those trucks could actually work with the constant downhill haul with breaks overheating and all that kind of thing Were they fairly new at that time? They were fairly new that truck had been around for quite a while it was a 50 ton 773 caterpillar but they had never done that sort of downhill haul so the heat build up on the braking systems and the cooling oil was quite severe so that was quite a challenge and a bit of a risk in buying the fleet and putting it to use and we also had the first and only fleet of that size truck that had chains on the back to deal with these cold and snowy conditions that I mentioned earlier on and I guess the second one would be when I went to Syncrude as manager of Overburden I was charged with the responsibility of altering the mine plan along with others originally the drag lines and the bucket wheels that Syncrude had chosen for mining were to sit on top of the Overburden and the drag line was going to dig the Overburden just like it would do in a coal stripped mine and cast into the pit and then pick up the oil sand and put it onto the windrow for the bucket wheel reclaimers and that mine plan was not working very well because the angle of repose of the material the angle that it would stand at was too flat and it was encroaching on the oil sand and we were getting contamination of the oil sand with waste material so my job when I came there was to was to convert over to a truck and shovel operation to move the Overburden and get the mining, major mining equipment down on top of oil sands and then start moving Overburden in advance of the mining process and you know we had such a volume of material to move that you had to really go to the biggest equipment available and there was a lot of controversy around whether we could make the big trucks work in the oil sands because of the soft ground conditions and the first player in the business great Canadian oil sands which eventually became SunCore had gone to bigger trucks and then they had lots of problems and so they went back down to a 85 ton truck so when I came to Syncrude I really I had to select the equipment hire the people, get the whole operation up and running and I chose the 170 ton electric drive trucks and there was a lot of controversy around whether we could make that work or not that was in 1979 but I'd known the truck quite well because we had the original ones actually at IOC in Labrador City they were a 150 ton truck then and they pushed the capacity up to 170 and I also had them in grand cash on the coal business and I knew the truck had the attributes that were necessary for this oil sand application which was really soft ground conditions and high rolling resistance and so on and we worked with a manufacturer to get a propulsion system on them that was similar to the application that they had in the railroad side which allowed the wheel motors to traction motors actually to work in series and in series parallel and parallel so that all was part of that equipment selection so that was a big career risk in some ways because it could have not worked very well at all and it did it worked out very well and in fact it eventually led to the whole industry we switched over to trucks and shovels on the front end of the operation which came with some other technology that we developed called hydro transport and all this by the way was done in a research facility we had so we grew to this day still has a hundred people in research here in Edmonton they really pushed technology yes over the many years and even when crude oil prices went in the tank we still maintained our R&D facility so we invented the mixing the oil sand with water and pumping it into the plant instead of conveying it into the plant and that really matched very well with trucks and shovels and mining and we were able to reduce our energy input per barrel by about 40% by doing that because we lowered the temperature as well so that would be the next probably career risk I suppose is that we were building the new North Mine and we tried this technology out that I just described and we actually turned it on on Saturday night Thanksgiving weekend 1993 and within about half an hour we knew we had a winner on our hands by March of the following year we had it built into our business plan which involved a $400 million new mine to use that technology so again you know we did that on a very short time horizon really and so you know choosing that technology I mean again was another you know you could have invested the $400 million and had all kinds of problems but it turned out to be a success story again so did you have a lot of for every time you kind of you would push for a new technology or a bigger truck like that did you have a lot of people who were against that initially on the 170 ton trucks there were a lot of people in the oil sands that were against it some of them had worked at Suncor before and they didn't think that they would work and you know they just they just thought a mechanical drive would be a better truck but it didn't take them long to come on site after they saw the first year production and how we managed to make it work and then when they contemplated the number of trucks that we needed going forward because you know Syncrude today would have probably 140 trucks that are 400 ton in that size and if those were 170 ton trucks I mean the fleet would be more than double in size and you know the traffic density in the mine site everything gets far more complicated takes more people and all those things so I think by the time people realized that we could make the 170s work then they realized the economies of scale were there and after that Syncrude became a proponent of developing the bigger machinery bigger trucks, bigger shovels were always working with the manufacturers to push them to go to the next stage which in the absence of the end user not doing that they would never have probably stretched as far as they did because I saw you had also not only the 170 but you had worked for the up to the 400 yes, yes Syncrude was the we actually Caterpillar actually had a worldwide steering committee on the 400 ton truck which we were participants in Syncrude was probably the company that probably exercised the most influence over Caterpillar in developing that truck at the beginning they didn't necessarily want to do it didn't see the market being big enough and so we pushed pretty hard and they were able to deliver for us so quite a history there of pushing the edge of the envelope on new technology throughout my career all along and you know whenever you do that you're offside with common thought sometimes and that's tough but at the same time that's what differentiates the good operations from those that are just sort of also also in the game kind of thing yeah, tagging along yeah, yeah and at Syncrude you had said a lot of people in the business in general were kind of if you're on the 170 or moving up what about the Syncrude itself, your company? Well even within our own company there were people that were skeptical and you're always going to have some of that when you're changing from the current people are comfortable with what they already know but you know there was enough people in the organization that were willing to take a risk and knew the economic realities of what we were trying to do economies of scale have always been the deal in the oil science, you need to have high volumes because you've got a lot of fixed costs and to keep your fixed costs down you have to do it through the volume game and so we had enough strength in our senior leadership management team that we were able to get behind it and support it. How did the decision work you being the chief of overburden operations like was it still had to be approved by the board I guess? Well not our board but certainly our senior executive team and a subcommittee of the board that actually looked at technical matters in the mining side of our business and so I had was charged with the responsibility of leading the equipment selection making a recommendation taking the proposal through to for approval and getting the owners to endorse the plan so yeah I had a lot of help from a lot of other good people but I was kind of the point person on advancing the file forward. And as just one last question backing up to the the challenge of bringing bringing the trucks down from the mountain, were there in fact any accidents after we switched over to our own fleet of trucks we had no accidents no significant accidents in the time that I was there so that would have been about two years before I left McIntyre mines to go to Syncrude we ran our own fleet and did it without incident. So those were all clearly big challenges are there any or if you can choose one or a few fond memories or something specific you remember from I was going to say as I progressed in the organization I was 39 years old when I took over as vice president of operations at Syncrude so I had the whole facility and I had the title of chief operating officer added to my my job description in 1994 and then I became president chief operating officer in 1997 so the last 10 years I was there I was president of the company responsible still for the whole operation which we were growing quite dramatically over time and so in the course of that component of my career there were similar challenges you know for example we in about the late 80s very early 90s you know our owners really weren't getting a very good return on capital employed in the oil satin business it was we spent you know the first 12 to 15 years toiling away to get this system to work and to build a workforce and do all those things and in the late 80s it was costing us about $18 a barrel to make a barrel of oil and we were selling it anywhere from $17 to $20 and many times lower than that and so in order to attract more investment to grow the business we really had to get our cost down so I was part of the executive team Eric Newell as the CEO and myself as vice president of operations our other executives we targeted on trying to get to $12 a barrel operating cost and a return on capital employed that would be 12 percent and so when you go through that and you end up having to cut your costs where you can but you don't want to do it at the risk of throughput and production and reliability and especially in a very complex operation like that because we had our own utility plant made our own power made our own steam a big upgrade which is like a refinery you know complex operation and a huge mine and a mineral processing facility and a big maintenance facilities and all of that so it's really difficult when you go to reduce your cost to know where to take it out that isn't going to impede production and so providing the leadership for that and leading that exercise was always a big challenge but again we were successful because we had a lot of good people at Syncrude and we were able to engage all of our employees even the folks down on the shop floor and we we did that all the time and so they really got to act as owners of the business behave and act you know and believe that they were owners of the business and so that really helped us to move the move the indicator move the dial yeah it was a good company you were all everybody felt a part yeah we worked hard to build that kind of relationship with their employees that's good Did you join any organizations or any other committees yeah sure I've been a CIM member since 1973 so I always belong to the CIM and encourage our employees to belong and to support the CIM I I also belong with the Syncrude board member on the association of Canada which you know is the industry association really for all of mining in the country and I actually chaired the board from I think it was 2002 to 2004 at a time when we were putting in place what we call towards sustainable mining which is really to profile of mining industry in a more positive note than it was being regarded as by the public so yeah I belong to a lot of those things I chaired the industry advisory committee at the University of Alberta on the mining engineering program we actually managed to wrestle from the jaws of extinction they were going to shut the program down and in fact I still chair that committee to this day and I got involved in a lot of things in the community because in Fort McMurray and not unlike the other mining towns that I've lived in if you can call Fort McMurray it's a resource town community we were building the community at the same time we were building our company we were really building an industry so you had kind of a three pronged plug if you will you had your own company that you were building you had the industry that you were contributing to building and then you had a community that you were contributing to building so I was involved in all kinds of things like getting the ski hill built almost like a mayor yeah in some ways the mayor of course was really the mayor and had to get elected and all those other things but we were all there to help make it happen and I think that just part and parcel of what happens when you live in a resource community you end up doing that or at least the people that really contribute end up doing that and the sort of communities grow so fast yeah and I was on the board of our local community college for six years as well because it was a key component of the community because it was the only sort of arts facility that we had as well so they had a 550 seat theater there and that's where if we had any big name entertainers coming to Fort McMurray that's where they'd perform and that was all part of Keano College and a big component of the community and whether it was in your during your mining years or your years with Syncrude what did you do for fun or any social activities or social trends that were popular job and industry we always great outdoor life in all the places I've lived so fishing and hunting we're there all the time we did lots of boating my kids learned how to water ski at a very early age and my wife and I actually spent one summer vacation on Lake Athabasco so we boated all the way from Fort McMurray to Fort Chippewan and then out onto the lake we did all kinds of things like that I would say those predominantly were the things that we did for entertainment but you didn't have an awful lot of abundance of free time either the jobs were always very demanding and running a big company like that it's a 24-7 job really so were there anything the company would do together or the guys if you live at work there must be some periods in time where you guys socialize you do that by virtue of the size of the community to some extent but we used to have annual barbecues for our employees every year we had a lot of employees from eastern Canada so we would have a lobster boil every spring and to commemorate the hard work and effort and all that kind of thing very much a cordial atmosphere that we had at Sincrew we started out with the intent of being non-union and you know if you looked at Sincrew when it really got going in the late 70s it was a time of pretty poor management relationships in Canada it was not that long after the Clich Commission in Quebec where they'd had all kinds of difficulties with construction labour and that kind of thing and wage and price controls were in effect just prior to that and so at Sincrew we had decided that we wanted to have a non-union environment in a better relationship with our employees so right from the very beginning we worked that way with our employees having them on teams working together to share with them the success of the company so there was really no closed books on anything and that enabled us to have a relationship with our employees that was very unique and it still exists to this day Sincrew is still non-union today and I think our employees would say that they feel pretty well represented and taken care of by the company and were there and this can also be completely different so maybe a cheaper question if we're to start with more of the beginning of your career in mining were there any social issues or problems like that were a trend like alcoholism or drug use or infidelity or anything whatsoever well you know resource communities because of the element of isolation there can sometimes be a tendency for people to sort of work hard and live hard as well party hard and I would say that there probably is a bit of an element of truth to that that in the northern communities is a little bit more of that but at the same time it's a bit of a pre-screening of people when they go to those communities because if you're not really serious about working in the industry and being a bit of a pioneer with a pioneering spirit then you wouldn't take the effort that it takes to go to a place like the city or Fort McMurray or Grand Cache Alberta or Manitou Wage in northern Ontario those are all places where it's not for the faint of heart so I think there was a little bit of that but then I would say that the industry itself has always been on the leading edge of making sure that people are fit for work and that they show up for work not under the influence of either alcohol or drugs when I think about what we did at Sincrew over the years and working with the building trades unions by the way as well because even though our own workforce was not unionized we had lots of the building trades folks on our site doing maintenance and construction work we implemented pre-site access testing you know and we were pretty much the leaders in terms of making sure that employees understood the benefits of being drug free and that kind of thing and our safety record at Sincrew over the years and indeed not just Sincrew but the whole industry today would support that that's been a worthwhile effort. Was that pushed by Sincrew because it was an notorious issue beforehand or? No you know we just knew that to have a safe work site we needed people to be fully engaged when they were there and that there's lots of opportunities to get seriously hurt on a big industrial site like Sincrew and so you need everybody to have fully their mental state has got to be positive and ready to go to work otherwise they're going to harm themselves or others and I think that was clearly understood and people bought into it but we were leading the pack in terms of doing that introducing things before their time in some ways so this usually is quite a one-sided job or even environment but how present or or not were women throughout your career? Yeah well that's a really good question we had you know we had provided a lot of opportunities for women in particular at Sincrew we had a couple of programs one of them that we implemented in the early 90s was called this program and it was one that was launched by the federal government they did a pilot project on it in Ontario and the pilot project itself did well but it couldn't really seem to get traction in Ontario and we were looking for ways to engage more women in our workforce for a couple of reasons the first one was that we had invested heavily in computers like a lot of others had and through the 80s and then by the early 90s you know we were all questioning are we really getting any benefit out of this and then we we began to reorganize our workforce and it was all part of what I was saying earlier on about getting our unit cost down and making the business more attractive we we really started to harvest the investment that we made in technology and then we reduced the number of administrative type folks and so rather than lay them off we said well let's give them an opportunity to work in non-traditional roles so this bridge's program enabled the women to go and we set it up so they could go and try out they could test drive several different trades type careers and then we gave them a specified period of time at which point they had to choose which one they would like to do and then we indentured them as apprentices and let them learn how to do those things and so you would have a secretary that would in those days make maybe 55 or 60,000 a year now had the opportunity to become a tradesman and eventually make 100,000 a year today it would be probably 150,000 a year or more so we had lots of women that took us up on that and so in the end we ended up with about 25% of our heavy equipment operators being female as opposed to what 4 or 5% someone had before and then in the trades side we had a lot of women that took the trades and got into the system and but the other benefit was when you're in a community like Fort McGuery or Lam City or any of those places if you can get the husband and wife both working for the company then you've got two employees under one roof and housing is always an issue and they must feel also a lot less isolated so we did a lot for women in non-traditional roles and we also did a lot on the Aboriginal front as well lots of efforts there and you know, Syncrude to this day is probably one of the largest private sector employers of Aboriginal people in Canada and also helped to create businesses that Aboriginal people would own and yeah and was there a specific program as well for Aboriginal for hiring Aboriginal within your company? Yes, yeah we we didn't go as far as affirmative action like they've tried to do in other parts of the world but what we simply said was that we couldn't find a reason why Aboriginal people wouldn't be represented in our workforce to the same degree that they were represented in the greater community okay so in Fort McMurray about 10 to 12% of the people are Aboriginal so why not have that and so we work towards that and currently Syncrude would be in that sort of 10.5 to 12% Aboriginal people so about 450 to in that number now if we change a little bit quite often natural resources companies are under a lot of scrutiny for sustainability or the environment and you had you had then worked on efforts towards sustainable mining that's correct with the mining association of Canada can you talk a bit about that? Yeah you know I think one of the things that we learned in the very early days at Syncrude and in fact I think again Syncrude was probably a bit ahead of its time we had an environment department before we actually had an operating department at Syncrude and a lot of that has to do with the regulatory requirements in Alberta you know before you're able to start a mine here you have to go and prove to the regulator and turn the land back into a state that's either as good as or better than it was before from a productivity point of view you have to be able to demonstrate a 30 year mine plan that shows what the mind out area will look like after and that has to be acceptable to the regulator where you don't get a permit to start and so in the very early days we had annoying the sort of the footprint that we were going to have at Syncrude with when Syncrude started and the target volume was 109,000 barrels a day today Syncrude would make really good day 350,000 barrels so about three times the size today so we had an environment department right from the beginning that was there to make sure that we helped to do this thing with the minimal amount of impact possible on the environment and we've there's lots of examples of things that Syncrude's done over the years it's probably got the most reclaimed land of all of the surface miners in the business Syncrude has a herd of bison that we put in place in 1994 it's a 300 herd 300 head of purebred wood bison on reclaimed land they've planted 7 or 8 million trees I mean those that have been done on the mind out areas after the overbred has been put back in unfortunately when the media go to look at these things and you know national geographic would be a shining example a few years ago they took several photos of of the oil sands and they always try to capture the tailings pipe with the tailings coming out of it which is kind of you know the worst thing that you can look at and never took any film footage of the bison 10,000 hectares of land that have been reclaimed and the millions of trees and the dumps that have been reclaimed and permitted so you're constantly fighting that battle of the media and the proponents of those kinds of points of view because that's their business it's been a growth industry for the last few years and so unfortunately we get a lot of negative notoriety which is undeserved in my mind because the companies are trying to do lots and they have done lots if you look at Syncrude just on the air quality alone at one time Syncrude used to put up about 300 tons a day of SO2 up the main stack when they were making 200,000 barrels a day today Syncrude probably puts up somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 tons a day it makes 350,000 barrels a day water withdrawal from the Athabasca river and it used to take out three or four barrels of water to make a barrel of oil today Syncrude takes less than two barrels to make a barrel of oil so all of those things have been improved upon over time thanks to technology but also to the will it's a little bit like the truck thing going to pushing the manufacturers to go to the 410 truck pushing the technology providers to have flue gas to sulfurization that takes SO2 out of your air and cleans it up and the case of Syncrude turns it into fertilizer that's then sold into the agricultural market pushing that it's incumbent on industry and industry you know what it sounds by and large stepped up to the plate on that I'm just curious too when you do have to go apply for for a permit to for drilling or mining or that the rule is you said 30 years your mine plan is one of the things that you have to submit in the regulatory approval process so within 30 years you would have to I guess replant the trees so what happens however it's an extreme productive mine let's say it'll last you more than 30 years there's enough for 50 years of resources in there how does that work is it you have a permit renewal every 10 years so you have to go back in front of the regulator every 10 years and report on progress and that would include things like technological advancements that now allow you to take more of what would not be considered part of your body before but now because you've got new technology you're able to get the cost down and that stuff that was either buried under too much waste material or too low a grade you can now do it because you've made advancements in the technology so as you go back to get your license renewed you would you would propose those new technologies and then you would get an extension out on the back end and after let's say a certain amount of years your mines finally dry you have how much time then to kind of settle the land you have to what you have to do is you have to reclaim it to the original mine plan to demonstrate that it's it's reclaimed in a sustainable way so there isn't an ongoing maintenance owner's maintenance charge and then once you've satisfied that requirement the government will issue you a permit a reclamation permit that says that the land then reverts back to the crown back to the government of Alberta and usually how much time do you get or does that take? Well it all depends you know Syncrude got the first reclamation certificate for a waste dump and it took a long long time to do because I think the government folks were a bit you know nervous about issuing their first permit without seen to be seen to have done a thorough job and so there was lots of questions that needed to be answered and those were done and it took several years to make that happen so it isn't just a oh you've got it done I'll write you a piece of paper and you get on with it you have to satisfy all these requirements which can take time can take time, yeah and there's an effort to try and avoid perpetual maintenance you know into the future sort of thing I see also you had worked on created the oil sand technology roadmap I was involved in doing that through the Alberta Chamber of Resources. Did you elaborate a little bit on that? Yeah it was you know we did that back in about 2004 or 2005 and it was really to just describe the technologies that the companies that were wishing to develop the oil sands were sort of commonly focused in on and really to define you know the future in terms of technological development and it served as a bit of a roadmap for the industry for a period of time and it really you know it involved Syncrude looking at what we were doing and our research and then collaborating with the other players to identify you know the opportunities that they could see going forward and then putting together a bit of a contempt you know a a grouping of all of those thoughts and then mapping it out so that the industry you know it would be there as a as an item for the industry and for players coming into the industry that we're interested in it and others. And you had mentioned earlier Syncrude with the its effort to get more women to participate in this industry and your company. You mentioned also the same thing with Aboriginal people but you specifically have done a lot of work to help Aboriginal communities or foster relations between the industry and Aboriginal communities haven't you? Yes, yeah I did a lot of that through my involvement with Syncrude over the years and you know as a company we established lots of hiring opportunities obviously, direct hiring but also helping them to develop businesses that could provide services to the industry and of course of doing that we're getting a lot more involved with the Aboriginal communities because you just can't get there without involving them as well and helping them to move forward so for example in the communities surrounding our facility we would get involved with them and helping them to develop a socio-economic plan for their community so they could do some thinking and identifying what they saw as the opportunities and then they would get a community engagement going that way and we would help them to build capacity in their communities to do those kinds of things and we would provide them with some help or we would fund some help for them to do that and then help to train some of their own people in that whole concept and you know that was all about you know sort of giving a Aboriginal community so that they could they could really become fully engaged in the economic development that was happening and I would have to say for the most part in Northeastern Alberta those communities are way further advanced than some of the other Aboriginal communities in the rest of Canada they've become big participants in the development and they're getting employment, they're doing well, their children are going to university they're now all kinds of things that would never have happened had we not been able to do that I still do some of that now even in my retirement my wife is on the Senate of the University of Alberta and she's been working to get young Aboriginal children from communities in the North to come down and have the experience at the university at an early age so they can find out what the university life is all about not be intimidated by the 45,000 students that go to U of A yeah exactly communities are quite secluded yeah exactly with any reluctant communities in your career yeah you know I would say that you know it has not always been a smooth journey in helping the Aboriginal communities to move forward a lot of times just from misunderstandings on both sides of the table but if you persevere with it and you're willing to build relationships you can usually figure out what is the obstacle that's in the way and then you figure out how to get that out of the way so you can get the right thing done and I think overall by and large we were very successful in doing that at Sincrew the Aboriginal people are no different than anybody else if they get an opportunity they'll demonstrate very quickly that they're more than worthy of it and they'll do a good job their absenteeism was as good as any others their safety record was as good and they generally stay until they're 65 and they don't leave the community when they're finished they don't go to Arizona for the winter generally they kind of tend to stick close to home so it's a good thing all around and it's an untapped source of human capital that a lot of Canadian firms have not really cottoned onto at this stage of the game I think the mining industry has done a good job I think the oil and gas industry is learning that it's a good opportunity and they're picking up on it and a lot of positive things to be said about it what do you believe to be your biggest accomplishment or improvement or advancement in the world of mining and or petroleum you know I would have to say that I've been fortunate in having a great career at Syncrude and just being able to go from the oil sands being involved in that right from the day the beginning when it was considered to be an R&D curiosity and moving it forward through all of those phases including making it a competitive industry being involved in attracting investment to it seeing it grow and seeing it become such an economic locomotive for the Canadian economy I mean this is a really true Canadian success story and it doesn't get talked about in the right light today but when you when it creates as many jobs as it does it provides as much in a way of royalties and taxes to governments it pays for hospitals, it pays for schools it pays for roads of people of the north it provides them with opportunities that they would never otherwise have had it brings a level of education to the country we have PhDs in engineering that worked at Syncrude in fact I can remember at one time getting our folks to do a little bit of a study on how many PhDs we had in our company relative to the number of employees and we ended up with we had 40 PhDs and we had 4000 employees at the time so our ratio of PhDs to employees was higher than Nortel at the time and Nortel was considered the high tech darling of the Canadian economy we had more masters degrees than they had as well and so I say that only to indicate that this industry has been a great industry all around both on the knowledge base creating jobs and opportunities creating energy security for North America and most of it has been done through Canadian know-how the whole front end of the business, the mining and the mineral extraction getting the bitumen out of the sand is all Canadian stuff and we should be proud of this industry that we've got and it's been great, I've just loved my career in that whole thing and being such a big part of that so would you say that's what you were proudest of in your life? and if you were talking to someone much younger like me or some children what would you have to tell them as your most important life lesson what could you tell them regarding your career and I do say this to my children and I have six of them and I've got the 18th grandchild coming along the way so I get lots of opportunities for these kinds of conversations over the years but I've always said pick something that you really like to do and do it with passion and if you do that you're going to be rewarded in many ways both monetarily and all work out in the end and you will have a real feeling that you've made a contribution to the world and to life and I think if you pursue your career on that basis that's the most rewarding thing that you can do and is there anything else you'd like to tell me or to add to the interview? I guess I would just make a comment that I think this is a great thing that's being done here and to capture some of the thoughts around the resource development in Canada and both for the archives Science and Technology Museum but also for the CIM as well I think it's a great thing to do and honoring the past especially in this world that we're in today because everybody wants to look through the windshield and not look through the rearview mirror let's face it honoring the past is a wise thing to do because if we don't do that we end up repeating the same mistakes that everybody did years ago there's no need to do that so I think it's just great to do that and to demonstrate some of the opportunities that are available for the young people of today well thank you very much for the interview thank you