 So, could you give us your name and age, please? Hi, Eric, yes. I'm Ed Thompson, and I'm now 79 years young, and I've been in the mining business now for, I guess, close to 60 years. I was born in the Muscoke area, which is now the holiday playground for Toronto, but in the middle of the Depression, 1936, it was a very tough place to live and grow up. My father was just a general labourer working in lumber mills in the bush. And in the middle of the Depression, he would tell us that he made a dollar today by cutting wood. He barely survived. So, how did you become interested in mining and engineering? Well, it was mainly, as a lot of things in life, sort of by accident. I had to do a lot of jobs as a young person because we didn't have any money, so I started working when I was 12 or 13 and working in lumber mills. I got river driving when I was 17 or 18 up in the Nipagon River in Northern Ontario. And the last year I was up there, there was a mining boom going on for a metal called lithium. In 1955, it was going to be the Wonder Metal, and there were several deposits on the around Lake Nipagon. And the supervisors were running around with pieces of spod humane in their hand, which is a lithium ore, and staking claims, and general excitement. I had not decided what I was going to do. There was essentially no guidance in those days in high school, and my mother had died when I was seven, and my father was really uneducated, could not really read or write. So I was essentially on my own, but in the last year of high school, someone had suggested I filled out an application form for University of Toronto Engineering, because I did well in mathematics. So I had filled in this form for engineering, and no idea how I was going to finance it, because I just lived by my own wits. And about the time, towards the end of the summer, I got a letter from U of T saying I had a scholarship or a bursary that would help for the first year. And I was admitted into the general engineering course, and I initially thought while I take civil engineering, I didn't really know anything about various engineering branches. And with this mining rush at the last minute, I switched over to geological engineering. With the idea, the first year of engineering was common at University of Toronto, so you would have a chance to switch later on if I didn't want to stay in geological engineering. But I made a few friends that year, including Norm Keeble, who was in my class. He was a well-known mining personality and a few other people, and we joined a similar fraternity, and I stayed in geological engineering. Just by sort of a fluke of luck. So you started out working in the woods, did you enjoy it? Was that one of the reasons why you went into geological engineering? Yeah, at that time, when you're in your late teens, I had no idea what office jobs were. I had always worked outside and thought that I would like to have more of an outdoor life than an office life, and certainly in geology, you get lots of time in the outdoors. Had you come to Toronto before or before you started in engineering at U of T? I had been here a few times. My mother originally was from Toronto. She had met my father in Muskoka and moved there when they were married in 1935. So I had a number of relatives in Toronto, and I would come down on the train maybe once a year or so to visit them, but I had really no experience in Toronto and was completely naive. Luckily, I had a friend in Bracebridge High School that was more tuned in than I was, and he was engineering the dentistry course and had arranged a place for us to stay the first year in Toronto. After a week or so, we gradually figured out the landscape and fitted in. Could you tell us about your experiences in the mining engineering courses at U of T? I was generally disappointed, I guess, in the courses at the University of Toronto. There's an old saying in the teaching profession, those that can do and those that can't teach. There's only a couple of professors that really got us enthused and we enjoyed going to their classes. Can we take a break? Absolutely, yeah. Some of the classes were very large and I thought some of the teaching was sort of outdated. They had more people that had had a career, but they weren't up to date with modern methods and evaluation techniques. After I graduated, essentially I had to learn the basics of economics and tax planning and all the numbers that you need to do evaluations. You had to learn it all over because they didn't really teach that at U of T. I did quite well, I worked hard and I had offers for doctorate programs from four of the top universities in the U.S. at that time. I had gotten married and I was in debt and I decided I'd take a master's degree if I could do it in one year at U of T. And Professor Bill Gross, who was one of the better professors, said that if I put my head down and did a simple thesis and worked like hell, I could do it in a year and that's what I did. Did Professor Gross teach? Pardon? What did Professor Gross teach at U of T? Dr. Gross taught economic geology and we in later years would work together to farm lacana mining. He loved teaching. So what did you do your master's thesis on? I did my master's degree up at Red Lake and it was an economic type of degree. It was called Possible Guides to Oren the Red Lake Camp and we did geochemistry and some of the bathalists up there and studied cross-folding and structures. I wish I could say I had predicted the great new finds that came along later in Red Lake and they're still developing some of them. The Spruce Channel deposit that Goldcorporate developing now is a world beater. It was in the area that I said was potential but the thesis didn't lead to any new finds. Falkland Bridge actually paid for part of the work but they never ever did any exploration in Red Lake so I don't know what their interest was. So this is your first job? Was it working in mining, working at Red Lake? No, the first job I had in mining of course were in summer jobs. So we had to, because I was paying my own way, you had to have a good summer job to earn enough funds to pay your tuition. So the first two years in the summer, Ankle at Sudbury used to take on about 600 students and I worked as an underground miner the first year at the Lac Mine inside of Sudbury for five months. It was good pay, you got bonus as a miner so it was a very profitable summer. And then the second year I went back and worked at the Fruit Stoby Mine for Ankle. They were right outside Sudbury so that was my mining experience. Later on in the summertime I worked one year with the Geological Survey of Canada doing regional mapping. And that was Northwest of Red Lake. I think that was the hardest summer I ever worked to. We were doing regional mapping and we worked from day light to dark trying to do this regional mapping program. Could you tell us a bit about working as a miner with Ankle? With Ankle, the mining methods have all changed now. With Ankle at that time at the back, they minally had stoping where it was called squarespace at Stopes where it was massive sulphide ore. And they had this beautiful BC fur timber that they put in the stopes to keep the ground up. As an old lumber man I really felt that of putting this timber back underground. And it was very hot work in the stopes and very high costs. So they worked from, essentially the levels were 150 feet apart, feet in those days. And you started at one level and you worked up to the next with squarespace at Stopes. The summer I worked at Fruit Stoby, they were mining very low grade disseminated ore. Joining the open pit was called Blast Hall and we loaded up long vertical holes and blasted with big tonnage into open cuts. The grade was probably maybe a fifth or a sixth of the grade was at Levaque with the squarespace at Stopes. Can you tell us about some of the difficulties you faced during your mapping work? The master's work? No, it wasn't in particular. We had a clear program of what we were trying to do with the masters. We were measuring the late stage flows of liquids and magmas that came up. Trying to see whether the late stages of the magma or as it flowed to one edge would contain the gold. And whether you should be looking for gold deposits at that edge of the magma. And the other part was structures, cross folding and faults which is pretty normal work in the geological business where you're working in with structures. They often control ore bodies and faults often provide the channels for deposits and mineralization to come in on. So it was a fairly straightforward thesis and went well and I got it done that year and graduated and started full-time employment. And the full-time employment was at? The full-time, I started with the group that time was called Keeble Mining Group that later evolved into Tech Corporation. And the Keeble Mining Group that time consisted of a bunch of very junior broke companies headed by Dr. Norman Bell Keeble. And he had started a small mine in the park at Tomogamy, a very high-grade small copper mine, and used the profits, a couple of million dollar profits from that to piggyback into buying a number of other old companies, Tech Hughes and Pickle Crow and Goldfields uranium, and trying to use their treasuries to explore and find other mines and do other acquisitions. So I spent about half my time doing exploration work with them in various parts of Canada around Pickle Crow and several years out of the B.C. And when I wasn't working in the bush in exploration, I was working in the office on acquisitions, trying to acquire new companies. And I did that for about 10 years with them, a couple of the years in the early 60s. I was mainly in British Columbia and I opened their first office there in 1962. One man office on West Pender Street, and if you go to their offices there now, four floors and a lovely new building. It's quite a contrast to the first office we had there in 1962. Do you describe your first day of work with Keeble? I don't remember. That's 65 years or a long time ago now. Norma always thought that it was important to put up a good show when he was trying to get investors to give them money for exploration. So we had an office in the most modern building in downtown Toronto at that time on Adelaide Street, the Board of Trade Building. We had part of the 10th floor on the Board of Trade Building. It was a very nice office. Later that building would be renovated twice and then torn down as part of the Bank and Old Scotia complex now. So I spent maybe a week or two in the office that first spring of 1959. I was still in university and headed up to Pickle Crow to conduct exploration around the Pickle Crow line in Northwestern Ontario, which is a pretty barren, God-forsaken place in the area around Pickle Crow. I almost left the business. What was especially difficult about that area and working there? If you've ever been up around Pickle Crow, it's mainly swamp and what isn't swamp is lakes. You'll never believe the black flies and mosquitoes until you go up there. Anybody describing to you, I think they're exaggerating about 10 times. There's virtually no outcrop to map as a geologist, so we would spend a lot of time just looking for the outcrop. We were doing geophysical work in some places where we would try to do a survey to see down through the swamp and overburden whether there's any massive sulfides below it. The living conditions were very tough. We were living intense and we would have to fly in our supplies from Pickle Lake. It was hard keeping crew there several of my workers abandoned me during the summer. We didn't find anything either. It was very tough working conditions. What sort of instruments did you use in geophysical work? Well, initially geophysics has changed an awful lot in the last 50 years in Canada. Canada, of course, has been a leader in geophysical techniques all around the world now. You see geophysics, it's Canadian geophysics, Canadian companies doing the geophysics. At that time, the magnetometer was one of the first instruments that just measured the magnetic differences. Though if you have a massive sulfide deposit, usually there was some magnetite or puritite in it that would show up as an anomaly, which you sometimes drill. We were doing also a survey called the Dr. Clark had amended, called Long Wire Geophysics. Where you stretched out a copper wire over four or five miles and put a generator at one end and put a current into it. And then with an airplane and a receiver would fly back and forth across the wire. Hopefully about 400 feet of lines, but it was all done off airfoam maps, so it was a little irregular. So it was quite a job getting this long wire in place and getting it energized. And getting it flown before moose would get caught in the long wire and have it all dragged through the bush. And it would often take a week or more before you could keep the long wire in place and get the survey done and see whether there was any anomalies. Did you make any important discoveries while you were at Keyville Mining Group? Not in that first summer, but over the ten years that I was there, we came up with a number of deposits that we either acquired or found. In BC, I was the first one, we had the Gibraltar Copper Project for a couple of years. It's still being mined in a big way. We didn't take it into production. In fact, we exported it. Copper prices were down and we let it go. Other people afterwards, when copper prices improved, did more work on it, and placer development originally put it into production about ten years later. We put the Tri-Vag mine, copper mine in operation in Ontario. In BC, I helped them acquire the Hymot mine, which was a big, open-pit copper molly, and it's now part of the Valley Copper operation. We also found and then acquired the Columbium deposit in Quebec that is still in production and was recently sold for some 300 million dollars, I guess, to another company. Several have come to mind. Could you describe that overall process of discovering a find and then deciding whether to exploit it, like the parts that you were involved in and the parts that you passed on to other people? The process was much simpler in those days. You could come up with a deposit and probably, if you decided you wanted to put it into production, which we did at Tri-Vag, a small copper mine. Within about a year, we were closing the Pickle Crow mine and we had some excess machinery and staff, and we just essentially moved it down to the Tri-Vag area and had the mine in operation. But other deposits take longer where you have to go underground and the miners take over, the metallurgists take over, they do studies on the recovery and it can often take eight to ten years. And nowadays, it even takes longer because you have so many different environmental permits you have to get and you have to consult with the native people and you have to consult with the communities. So the whole process is much longer these days. So why and at what point did you move on from the Kiebel mining group? I was there for ten years and I was getting a little bored with what I was doing and there was a number of family members. I think it was called Tech Corporation, but at that time they had merged probably eight or nine companies into a bigger group. And there were seven or eight family members in the organization at that time and I could see my uprise moving upwards would be somewhat hindered by family connections. And in the 1970s there were a number of other opportunities around. I was approached by a number of people for various jobs and my old professor from U of T days, Bill Gross, who I'd had maintained contact with over the years, was in the process he and others were forming some junior companies to explore in Mexico and other places and I decided to join up with them and help run these junior companies. I would be based in Toronto and Bill would go to Mexico and live in Mexico so I left Kiebel and joined up with the street junior companies, Tormex, Pure Silver and Laconex that I helped form. And we started exploration work in Canada, the western U.S. and in Mexico. At that time the big emphasis was on Mexico. So this is the Cordex Syndicate? We formed the Cordex Syndicate at the same time in 1970. One of my companies, Laconex, was a 25% owner and three other companies, Rayrock, Mogul and forgot the other one, were United Cisco, which eventually went in the barrack. We each put up $50,000 a year for John Livermore and Pete Galley to explore in Nevada for gold deposits. And Livermore had previously found for Dumont, the original Carl, in mind so they had promoted him to his level in competency. They made him a president of the Canadian company, an administrator and he wanted to both be a prospector. So he left New Mons and went back to Nevada and we started exploring in a very low way, $200,000 a year in Nevada through the Cordex Syndicate. And over the years, I guess, it was a three-year syndicate. I think there was, by the time I left in 1985, we'd had five or six syndicates with various partners and it is still running actually to the day. Andy Wallace is now running the Cordex Syndicate for a company called Columbia Goldfields. It was quite a successful syndicate, but on a shoestring type of budget we came up with over the period of about 15 years, I guess we came up with all six or seven properties that went into production. So could you describe your exact role in the syndicate? Well, my role was as president of the Canadian companies. I just attended syndicate meetings and would go down and visit some of the properties. I always liked getting out in Nevada because you see lots of rock and you could get around very easy and drilling was cheap. We could drill for a dollar a foot down there in the 1970s so I would go down on a regular basis and have a look at the properties and travel around. I was part of the management that decided how much drilling we were going to do on a project. We would try to put it into production, that sort of thing. So you traveled a great deal for your work? I traveled a lot for work over the years. When I was with La Cana we had offices across Canada, Reno and the United States and sometimes in Crudelaine and then three or four different localities in Mexico. So later on I had an oil and gas division in Calgary. So yes, I was probably in head office about half the time and half the time traveling. Did you notice any interesting or important differences in the work culture in Canada, Mexico, different places where you worked? Oh yes, every area has different rules and regulations and problems. In Canada, Quebec was usually the best province to work, but conditions changed from election to election and local governments. But over the past 55-odd years, Quebec has usually been the best place to work. They're more mining conscious and they'll help you with roads or power plants when you're trying to put something into production. The other provinces, depending on the government of the time, are very in their wish to have mining in their jurisdiction. In the U.S., there's not very many of the U.S. states that you want to work in. Nevada is one of the best ones. Arizona and Utah, maybe Alaska aren't bad, but most of the others, they don't have decent mining laws. They don't want mining. In Mexico, the time when I was active there, it was very difficult to work in Mexico. It's changed now and there's hundreds of companies down there doing exploration and mining without problems. But at that time, they had a feeling that the mining was part of their main part of their economy and they didn't want to give control to foreigners. You could only own 49% of a Mexican company. There was all sorts of regulations and had very high taxes. The 15 years I worked in Mexico from 1970 through to 1985 generally were very difficult years, fraught with a number of problems. What sort of problems did you have? Mexico, as I mentioned, you couldn't really control things too well because you only had a 49% interest. The tax regime was changing. In 1980, when we had high gold and silver prices for a couple of years, they brought in an excess royalty tax that essentially skimmed off most of the profits on us. Another time, we always kept our money in the banks down there in U.S. dollars. They devalued the peso and seized all the U.S. dollar bank accounts and just gave us pesos for those at about a third the rate. So just in that one, we lost two-thirds of our money. It was very difficult in those days operating in Mexico. We lost control of one of our mines for a year or more. Our general manager had some documents that sort of gave him ownership of the mine. He took what came in with some pistol arrows and took over control of the mine. We had a heck of a time getting it back from and through the courts for almost a year. So security was more of a challenge in Mexico than elsewhere? That's right, yeah. And it still is to some extent depending what state you're in that Mexico still has a lot of problems now with drug lords and there's still the robbery of the gold operations. It's changed an awful lot. They don't feel that mining is nearly as critical to their economy as it was at that time. Well, it's still a very important part of the Mexican economy. Mexico, I think, is the most highly mineralized country in the world on a square footed basis. Lots of good deposits there. Is security of particular concern when you're working in precious metals? Generally not. Only when you're doing the gold port we would bring the police in for the afternoon or something and then you would get the gold bars and fly it out or have an armored car take it to a refinery. So when you... the milling operations when it's just in carbon and pulp or coated on zinc, they generally don't go after that. They wait for the gold port when it's in bars to go after. So you're still here probably once a year or so you'll hear a lot of robbery online but it's not too common. Were some of the ors that you've worked with particularly challenging to explain? Some of the ors that you've worked with? Yeah, some of them. The deposits are... everyone is sort of unique and they require metallurgical input and testing. That's one of the parts of a feasibility study that we spend a lot of time on taking, hopefully, representative samples sending it to labs and testing whether you're going to do it by flotation or acid leaching or gravity recovery. So there's a number of new methods that have been developed over the last 50 years and sometimes it's very expensive. The operations, you have to roast it and when you do a roaster it's very expensive to build expensive to operate and it's expensive for environmental reasons so you have to recover everything that's going up the stack and that's quite difficult. And up until, I guess, 20 years ago some of these deposits weren't... you couldn't mine them actually and this sat there until new technologies came along to help recover the metals. So your peers and friends are they mostly geologists and engineers? Yeah, it's essentially the people in the business we'll talk about maybe a little bit later the prospectors and developers association which I have been involved with for over 50 years most of those people became lifelong friends and they were essentially in the exploration business some of them were prospectors. In this office where I rent space there's 25 engineers, geologists and metallurgists that I work with so most of the association work parties you have are with people in the business it's a closed shop it's well known no matter where you are in the world you visit a mine you'll find two or three people there that know you or know your friends the Canadian companies are everywhere in the world and they know each other pretty much it's often a number of these people lived in mining towns and the people in mining towns form very close relationships the mining town concept is being changed now with fly-in-fly-out operations but the people in mining towns form lifelong relationships but sort of social activities go on in mining towns how do people bond? Well, the mining towns they make their own fun they always had curling rakes and hockey teams and softball teams and various social things they had a very good social life in places like Toronto you're much more dispersed than you don't do as many things together as a group the CIM and the PDA and other organizations have mining parties but you're dispersed and you have so many competing activities the theatres and Roy Thompson Hall the Blue Jay Stadium there they're a team doing well this year and of course a lot of us were Leaf fans so we go know the Leaf games over the years so there's a lot more activity in the bigger cities some people like the mining towns and others like the big cities are there any particular social problems in your line of work in the mining towns? Not that I recall, I never really spent any time living in the mining towns I was always essentially in the big cities for my home I worked around many of the mining towns but alcohol is always a problem in some of the places that you know the boredom and especially a problem in the native communities but there was no drugs in my days so that wasn't a problem it seemed like most of the families were fairly stable I don't recall anything in particular my wife stayed with me for 50 years before she died about 6 years ago so I certainly had a good stable relationship I feel the flying concept has changed a lot of the culture of mining and metallurgy people moving in and out Yeah they work on a two week basis now so you don't have the mining towns and the closeness that they generated so now you hear them flying people from Newfoundland up to the tar sands plants and many of the other places they have bunk houses and they fly in for two weeks and out for two weeks that sort of concept I don't know what is best there's a big argument there there's people that say that long for the mining town concept and others saying that they prefer to live in the cities for two weeks and mining camps for two weeks I don't know the advantage is that you don't have the when there's a bust in a particular mineral you don't have these towns collapsing That's one of the advantages because once the mines close we saw this problem in Timmins and Kirkland Lake years ago when the gold mines were closing down those communities lost their main source of employment if the mine closes down they just board up the bunk houses and the people go elsewhere but if you look at a map of Canada Northern Canada all the towns across the north essentially we're all mining towns that's how the nation was developed and it's not they're permanent towns now we're going to have that same process in the future because these areas are just going to be closed up and abandoned places like Elliott Lake that once supported 11 uranium mines now it's a retirement community a little sad in some ways you wander around and you never know there was a mine there everything has been taken down and restored there's ducks swimming around last time I was up there there was some deer grazing in the field that was a tailing to palm so it's a very nice retirement community so your main professional organization is the prospectors and developers association of Canada I got involved with them very early in my career one of my jobs in the early days with the Keeble Mining Group which later became tech corporation was grubstaking prospectors grubstaking is a concept an idea that's gone by the boards now but in the 40s and 50s and 60s prospecting was very common and there was a lot of prospectors around and they would come around and ask individuals and companies for grubstake they would be raising anywhere from $10,000 to $30,000 for a summer's exploration program and they would come in and see us and I would often give them $500 or $1000 for a small piece of their grubstake so and I probably with the Keeble Group handled maybe 20 grubstakes a year and all these prospectors were part of the prospectors and developers association at that time you had to be a director of the BDA, you had to be a prospector I would change later on so I got to know these people and they didn't like writing reports or briefs and many of them couldn't do it so they knew me and started asking if they were doing a brief to the Securities Commissioner or the Tax Department on these matters so very early on I started helping on briefs and the association had a difficult period in the mid-60s when Mrs. McMillan had to leave and I helped restore the association the next year and then finally on the board in 1970 of the Prospectors and Developers Association and I was the first engineer per se to be a director and I helped run the convention we have in Toronto every year and then in 1975 Jim Walker and I went in I went in as vice president and Jim was president he was a geophysical contractor and gone a large part of the year so essentially I was running the association during the two years he was president and then I became president myself in 1977 and we expanded the board to 48 members and it had been anywhere between 12 and 30 it seemed to vary how many directors they had they didn't really have any routine for a regular directors meeting we decided that we would go across Canada and we talked people into going on the board to represent the industry across Canada and we would have a meeting every month at the same date so that people could come to Toronto they knew that the second Tuesday of a month there was going to be a BDA board meeting we would do other business, visit relatives or raise money or talk to an engineering firm so we changed the association big time and made it representative across Canada and regular board meetings and formed quite a few new committees that would work on land regulations or taxation, securities commission all these issues that we ended up with 12 different committees and I've been involved in it ever since I started the awards committee with them in 1978 with one award the Bill Dennis Canadian Discovery of the Year and I'm still chair of that awards committee now and we're just meeting now so we have six or seven awards that we give out every year awards night on Monday night to manage people's contribution to the industry so yeah, over 50 odd years I've been involved with them just about every committee and there are many of the people are lifelong friends what's the distinction between a prospector and a geological engineer the geological engineer is an educated prospector really the prospector sometimes knows a little more than a geological engineer to start with and they can teach each other a few things in the early days I found it always wise to listen to my prospectors what they were telling me about it's theory and practice really and depending on what school you come from it might be a good prospecting type geological engineer if you're not too theoretical but there are very few prospectors left now there's a few and a lot of these people are fairly well educated now they've gone to the Aylbury School of Mines or some of them have geological degrees but they still do prospecting so at some point there's a great deal of folk knowledge and experience involved in prospecting especially if there's outcrop where you can see the rock and the alteration in Canada and places you have to rely on geophysics and drilling there's just no outcrop to go by places in the world, in Mexico and a lot of Latin America in Africa where the rocks, you can see alteration and veining and things like that the locals sometimes have a pretty good understanding of what's valuable and what isn't Is there a real interest in history within your association? Yeah, to some extent in 1982 was our 50th anniversary of the PDA and I was a past president and at a board meeting we were talking about what we could do for our 50th anniversary and I chirped up that maybe we should put a book together and everybody thought yeah that was a good idea but they were all busy who was going to do it I knew George Lawn who was a very well known artist and book man and I said well I'll ask George whether he would do it and they gave me a budget and I went to see George and he was very busy doing portrait painting at that time and it wasn't too interested in doing a book but he said why don't you my assistant here why don't you head it up and do it and Monica is quite good at putting things together so I got stuck with doing the book so I contacted 30 or 40 people across Canada to do a write up in their mining camp and Frank Juven at that time was very friendly with Biola McMillan who had been the previous ran the association and had her records so Frank offered to go through her records to put things together but I put together a book called The Discoverers for the first 50 years of the BDA and they still have copies around and it was stories of the mining camps across Canada and probably 30 or 35 mining personalities at the time of brief biography on them so that was a good historical moment that brought together a lot of facts about mining camps from Flynn Flaund to be serrated across Canada and for the 75th I was involved again and we did another similar book for the 75th anniversary of the PDA so Northern Miner did most of that and I certainly learned my lesson by that time and just advised on it too so they have a certain memorabilia but the problem in nowadays is that the space that we've lost most of the mining companies the bigger mining companies at one time had vast libraries downtown nobody wants a library anymore there's not a good mining library in downtown Toronto anymore so yeah, our history is escaping us so it's good that we're putting together something here with the metallurgical group myself, I recently well, 20 years ago I started to put together some of my history in my family's history, I decided that I didn't know anything really much about my ancestors my grandchildren would know less so I started writing a book about my family my history so that was about 20 years ago and it's going to be published probably next week just on a private basis it's called A Boy from Utterson which was a little town where I grew up north of Brashridge so in that I've included my mining experiences over the 50 odd years and I've also included a brief history of the Prospectors and Developers Association and a brief history of the Mining Hall of Fame which I helped start some 28 years ago with Mort Brown and a few other people so it's gone electronic and we're trying to get the exhibits and museums all across Canada we have a big exhibit of the ROM and a few other places Tell us more about your involvement in founding the Mining Hall of Fame Mort and I had both gone to the Mining Hall of Fame in the US Mort was the publisher of the Northern Miner for many many years and sort of the dean of the literary world here and mining stories and Mort went down to one of the Mining Hall of Fames and he came back he gave me a call and he had quite a distinctive voice and I think we should have a Canadian Mining Hall of Fame and I said I think so Mort I agree I've been thinking the same and he said do you think the PDA would go along and help support it? I said I'm sure they would Mort let's get a couple other organizations and see what we can do well it was hard to say no to Mort so he got a hold of Pat Sheridan and Leon McCrary who were quite well known mining people and we talked to some others and we just got it going it was tough sledding for the first few years getting people to come out we decided to have the function in early January and we put I think 12 people in the first year were famous and of course he had a vast backlog of people when we started in 1988 I think it was so it's just gone from strength to strength have you ever been to the Mining Hall of Fame dinner? Should go sometime we get to use about 825 people now at the Royal York and Pierre La Sonde has been our emcee person for the last number of years and we first had a home up at the mining building at E of T and then we moved up to the ROM with the Tech suite of minerals in the back of the ROM for our exhibit and we've been trying to get exhibits across the country in mining museums on the Mining Hall of Fame so we normally put in 4-5 people every year I'm still on the board and the treasurer of the organization and chairman of the awards committee so I'm still very much involved but we have a rule that you go off when you turn 80 and I'll turn 80 next August so I'll be saying adieu to one of my babies it's sort of sad but it's been very successful and it keeps a record of some of the achievements of the various people and it's available if we keep working on it across Canada and museums and the kids go in to see the mineral exhibits at the back of it or some part of it will be the electronic Mining Hall of Fame people where they can look up people there and what they did and what metals they were associated with and normally we have also a section on the importance of what each copper is used for, gold, platinum, things like that Can you describe your current work as a mining consultant? Actually I really don't work as a mining consultant when I went on my own I formed my company EG Thompson Mining Consultants Inc but essentially I did a little bit of consulting on acquisitions and takeovers but mainly I went on various boards and I ran junior companies out of this office for many years I had two or three junior companies that I was either president of or chairman of and helped keep them alive and did low exploration work and ran them on a minimum budget I could keep a company going and I did for many years with an overhead of $50,000 you talk to anybody now and they'll say anywhere from $250,000 to $350,000 for overhead for a junior company So essentially that's what I did for close to 25 years and in my heyday around 2000 I was a director or president or chairman of some 15 different junior companies that were involved in various parts of the world so we were talking about junior companies so I was involved with junior companies all my career I guess when I was with tech we had 15 or 20 junior companies and then La Cana started with three junior companies which I rolled into La Cana Mining in 1975 I left Menorco in 1991 I spent the rest of my career really with junior companies it was quite interesting you have to be a Jack of all trades with a junior company you know you're one or two people running your company so you decide on the exploration plays and who's gonna drill what and how you raise them raising money then you do spending money with junior companies so a lot of the companies were very successful I don't know whether you want to talk about them now but it's some of the big successes we had we consulted David Thompson we had the iron property in Quebec it was an old company that I took over in 1991 and kept going and finally I got a group to put it into production and it went into production at 5 million tons of iron ore per year and Cliffs took the company over a few years ago for 4.9 billion dollars and for many years it was on the Toronto Stock to change for a few hundred thousand dollars since the stock was five cents and Cliffs took it over at 1495 I think it was another company I was involved with for many years probably 20 years as a director I was president for about three years and chairman for another ten was Golden Queen Mining and in a month or two's time it will go into production in Northern California so California is a very tough place to work any other place it probably would have been in production 15 years ago we've just gone through permitting delays very strict environmental reasons generally they don't want mining so they make you jump through it's not a barn burner of a mine everything has to be low grade but it looks like it will be in production finally so I went on that board in the mid 90's and kept it alive out of this office for about three years in 2000 to 2002 and then I was able to bring a president and look after a nice eight dollars chairman until about a year and a half ago and the operators put it into production so I'll mention one other there's probably been 15 or 20 mines from the junior companies that I was involved with the other big one that's just going into production right now is the Patechia project in Panama that we originally had in a company called Adrian Resources Tech did a lot of work on it and dropped it with low copper prices and the in-met decided a few years ago they were going to put it into production when Tech was doing we thought it would cost a billion dollars when the in-met started it was going to be four and a half billion and I think it's up to six billion but first quantum took over in-met and I think it will be in production in the next few months as well so it will be a major 100,000 ton a day copper project in Panama so those were the type of projects that these junior companies brought along the junior companies are very important in the business to bring projects to a certain stage and then usually they have to turn them over to the majors to develop over your career have you collaborated no I don't really work with the universities and that way the only collaboration I had with the universities was with Bill Gross on economic geology and for a number of years probably about most of the time I was with Tech we would sponsor thesis work university on our minds and Gross would generate a thesis that a student would work on one of our mining operations so we would fund that student for doing that but I didn't really have much involvement with the geophysical work part of it though our company at that time Tech, Norm Keyville Senior was a geophysicist and Norm Junior graduated with me in geology then he went to Berkeley and worked mainly in geophysics and the Tech group were always very heavy in geophysics they developed a very famous Digium airborne system took them 10 years and millions of dollars to develop that so the Keyville group did a lot of geophysical work has the technology changed a great deal over your career? oh yes, yeah well we've been talking about 50 years so the the space work helped all industries with the miniaturization of things the magnetometers that we had to use originally that you had to set them up on a tripod and level them up take background readings and now you have a little machine around your neck you just walk and press a button and it takes your reading and records it all and then later on you can draft a little draft of the map showing the anomaly so the and the sensitivity has changed so much both in geophysics and geochemistry one of our problems from geochemical side is that we can measure down to one part per trillion and the general public doesn't always realize that if you say there's a one part per trillion arsenic or something in the water that's you know you need about 10 or 15 parts per million to be dangerous but they they grab on to some of these numbers and they have no idea what is significant and what isn't that women have been present in your career in your field has it changed over time? Yeah it's changed a heck of a lot over time and my early career at engineering at University of Toronto I think we had three women in the 600 odd engineers have started and I don't think they lasted past the first year so essentially nobody graduated but when I worked with tech we always seemed to have at least one woman geologist we had one at the Tomogamy and with Wakana I guess I had one but you know in this office here where there's maybe four or five women engineers but they've only really started coming into the business in the last decade or so if you go up to university now in the Lausanne mining program at U of T I think probably more than half of the students there are women now so it's a tough business though it's you know especially if you're doing fieldwork it's a tough existence but a lot easier than it was the camps are much more friendly and easier to live in than they were in my day or some of the biggest challenges that you face over your career oh god there's coming various shapes and sizes from you know when I started one of the challenges of course was just existing you were put into these places remote areas with often no communication sometimes you had a radio that might work or might not and we're told that two weeks time you might see a supply plane or you sometimes had to travel a distance to where you're going to meet the supply train the plane and it was a tough existence if you had problems I was very lucky that in one way that I had my appendix out in the summer of spring of going into the bush with the GSC and if I hadn't I would have been dead because with the GSC mapping we only we had no radio and we only saw supply plane every two weeks and we had to move from one we spent two weeks mapping and traveling so two weeks time we had to be a spot where the supply plane would meet us with two weeks more food so any accident or anything you you didn't have any way of communicating so that was a challenge there was all sorts of challenges in trying to get permission to explore and to mine and they've just increased over the years now you have to consult with the natives and it can sometimes take a couple years before you're allowed to go in and explore and if you're running a junior company you can't exist that way because the market wants wants news people buy stock they expect you're going to do something right away and if you're delayed a year or two they forget you and they move on to somebody else in Mexico we've just talked about we're really tough in the 60's and 70's with government and with changing tax laws and currency problems the biggest disappointment challenge I guess I faced in Canada was the Blizzard Uranium project in BC myself and my fellow geologist Daryl Johnson discovered in 1977 and we didn't have any money in the company we were broke so we brought in partners from Terry Hydro and an oil company and a couple other companies to help develop it and we developed a mineable deposit line close to the surface to get a feasibility study and I and one of the other partners flew over to Korea and negotiated a sale contract with Koreans for $42 a pound plus escalation and it looked like it was going to go in a simple mine simple operation we would put it in production, the tailings pond and he leaked each one part per million and the deposit was currently leaking 30 parts per million from both ends of it and we were all set to go on it and everybody was going to make money and it was going to be successful in Canada and the government of BC Wacky Bennett Jr. brought in a moratorium no mining or mineral exploration for uranium in BC it was in the Kelowna area where there were a lot of hippies who retired people and they just didn't want uranium in their backyard a lot of misconceptions about uranium as there still is we had public meetings and you'd get people standing up and crying saying that oh they're going to uncover this uranium a radon cloud is going to come down the valley and we're all going to have cancer one lady said I'm pregnant and the heads and all that sort of comment which the politicians listened and the deposit is still sitting there and it's still eroding into the environment I guess it will be mine sometime maybe 100 years from now so there's that sort of problem and it's not unique that sort of opposition everywhere and any development project be it pipeline or mine they're faced with these problems nowadays I'm glad I'm not a young man starting out in the business anymore Chris I should have asked you what you were for the geological survey you want to talk about that recently? Well it was just the summer work and the government decided they would help out a bit and then they added a few new mapping programs they had areas they wanted to map so we were a tag on program that was formed at the last minute the only guy that had much experience or any experience in doing that sort of mapping was Ned Chowan who was later had a fairly famous career with the correct department of mines in the GSC and another guy and I that were senior mappers we were geological students but we really didn't have any mapping experience and our assistants weren't even geological students so we were thrown together at the last minute with any old supplies we had a C head 17 foot prospector canoes and went up to Red Lake and started mapping to the northwest of Red Lake and regional mapping which meant when you did a survey you had to cover 8 to 9 miles a day in the bush which was very difficult to do because it was burnt over jack pine and then when you moved camp which we did every 2 or 3 days you were supposed to map the shoreline from a canoe when you were moving camp along rivers and lakes that is very difficult when you have a fully loaded 17 foot canoe with all your worldly possessions camp and food some of these windy lakes trying to go along the shore and decide what the rock type was so very challenging summer when I about 10 years ago when I was first starting to write my book I contacted Ned Chaun about it and he sent me a copy of the map he compiled and he said that was one of the most challenging summers of his career as well but he found out later that we were the only group that had done our work and time and budget that summer of the GSC program so I don't know whether that was right or not but he stayed on to the GSC for a number of years so I guess he had access to that information but say your fondest memory that relates to your work well generally the biggest the biggest high is going to mine openings you see the result of years of work and planning sometimes you might have been involved with the project for 5 or 10 years other times you were just casually involved maybe for a year or two but you got to go to the mine opening and have a drink and see them make the full roll part so I always found that as a high to see the actual head frame or the open pit and the wheels turning around and for precious metal mines they always do a gold pour for you you see the gold pouring down into the bars and they show it and they have a few armed courage around you so the mine openings are one of the great memories and I guess maybe I've been to 20 of them over the years some that I was very close to and others that I was just sort of almost a bystander too some of the other things of course is the PDA our achievements at the prospectus and developers association we've had a great time there a lot of great parties and we've done a lot of good things we influenced legislation on mining laws and taxation and the securities committee work we were really responsible for bringing in flow through funding which has saved the Canadian mining industry and allowed the Canadian mining industry to have a base in Canada which they went all over the world flow through funding is a tax mechanism where if you buy a flow through share from a junior company they spend it on exploration and you get the tax right off not the company so generally the junior company spending money they don't have any income sometimes never have any income so they never get a right off for their expenses if you're a major company and you're in production and you spend the dollar on exploration you write that off your taxable income so flow through funding lets the public write it off if you have $100,000 of income you might buy $10,000 of a flow through share and you get that deducted from your income of course your flow through share that you have has a zero cost base but it's very popular and we got it going in a big way in the early 80s and the junior companies raised the peak I guess about $900 million a year in exploration funding to find new mines and there are a lot of new mines developed because of flow through funding so that's something that we have pushed and every year we have to keep on the government to maintain it they decide every year whether they're going to continue it the legislation has to come in whether if you read some of their promises they sometimes mention flow through funding they'll then flow through funding for a year so that was important because it allowed the companies to have and their money had to be spent in Canada so it allowed the companies to have a geological base in Canada and then if they raised other money they could go other places in the world so in the decade time after 2000 the Canadian companies when I was young in business there was four or five countries in the world you want to explore now the Canadian companies are probably in 100 different countries in the world if you go to the PDA convention we have anywhere from 100 to 110 different countries come into our PDA AC convention in March here in Toronto and we've been running between 25 and 30,000 people at this convention now anytime you can convince 25,000 people to come to Toronto in early March you know they're not coming in for the weather or the beaches are a good time you're doing something right what do you feel the government's role should be in promoting mining and prospecting? well the big thing they've done is to in Canada is flow through funding but the overall you know if you're looking at various governments around the world you have to realize that in Canada exploration and mining is a provincial matter so every province has their own rules and regulations and the federal government just has an overall view on tax and the government is having an overall view on taxation so the overall reaching necessities you have to have stability stability in your regulations and your tax laws because there's such a long time frame in mining you start prospecting and it might take you in eight or ten years you might never find a good property but then once you've found one feasibility study it might be another eight or ten years so it's not unusual for a mine coming into production spent a twenty year time span so you need to know what the regulations are for that period of time for people to put up money to keep it going if you don't have good regulations people aren't going to give you money to continue so the stability of funding and accessibility of the land you have to be able to get in to explore if there's too much private land or if you turn too much of the land into parks you can't explore in parks so a problem now worldwide and especially in Canada is so much land is being withdrawn in parks or sensitive areas or native reserves our base for explorers is shrinking all the time but there's a role for government in that and they just have to give us the tools to make it attractive tax wise and we always say we need access to the land and access to capital we have to have capital markets to raise money what do you believe is your biggest accomplishment in the world of mining I don't know whether I've had a great accomplishment we've mentioned a number of the mines that I had some involvement in over the years bringing a mine into production is the end result of a lot of people's contribution you know it's not one person it's teams of people that do it so I've been lucky to have been involved probably 20 different mining operations that have come into place but I like to I take particular pride in the associations that I was involved with the PDAC which I spent 50 years running and working on committees and being active and doing a lot of things the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame which is you know very well funded and great organization now with showing what Canadian people have done in the mining sector making it available in museums and I've also been very much involved in what we call mining matters which is an education program that the PDAC started many years ago runs now as a separate organization and we go into schools in grades 4 and grade 7 with a program that teaches kids about minerals and the value of metals they don't realize when they pick up their cell phone or a computer that somebody had to mine 16 or 18 different metals to make the thing run and we have a saying in the business of it can't be wrong it has to be mined so we try to point out to them all the things that they use comes from mining because a lot of the teachers have no information like that either they're a lot of them are anti-mining so after they've gone through our program they're much better off so we do that in various provinces I'm a director of mining matters and I'm one of their fundraisers we have to raise money every year to keep going and it's a worthwhile program the other part of that is that we go into various native communities across the north often mining companies are working in that area will support us and we have a program to teach the native children about mining and job opportunities and mining that's quite a popular area they're worthwhile causes I'm very happy with that and that's what I'm still doing now I'm not consulting or doing anything I just do volunteer work now what are some of the important contributions like Canadian engineers and geologists have made to the field? after hockey mining and mineral exploration is the thing we do best you go anywhere in the world in a mine or an exploration project and you'll see Canadian engineers geologists, metallurgists on these projects often they've found them, they've developed them and they're running them with a few people there might be a couple of thousand people there there may be only half a dozen expats there now but they were responsible for bringing them along and these areas no matter where you are the people that are working in mining are a lot better off than anybody else in that general area and that's one of our problems is that sometimes they're paid too well and they disturb the balance of the economics the farmers don't like us because they pay very low wages to their workers and you develop a mine a mine worker will probably make three times what he would make working as a farmer so we've led the world pretty much in mining and especially in geophysics it's all essentially Canadian geophysics now that's done and metallurgy most of the processes I think if they haven't been developed they've been fine-tuned by Canadian metallurgists you go anywhere in the world these operations metallurgists in this office at any one time South America or Kazakhstan or something they demand to go and consult so there's a few closing questions who would you say was your greatest mentor or had the greatest impact on your professional career? probably Bill Rose who I had I did both my thesis as my bachelor's and my master's with Bill at U of T and then we were together we had a lot of deals before I joined him with a bunch of junior companies Pure Silver, Tarmac, and Lacanix that I eventually went into moved into La Cana so we worked together there for about 15 years he was a good promoter and a difficult guy to work with at times but we had a lot of fun together Dr. Keevel Sr. in one way I didn't work closely with him but he was always enthusiastic and anything was possible with him he never said no you can't do that he'd give you free reign he ever suggested an idea to him you better be sure that you wanted to do it because he was always gun-hole to proceed what are the most important lessons that you've learned? well that's a good question when I started on my own with junior companies after 1991 I thought about various things and the one item that I came up with that sort of directed me when people asked me if I needed to go on boards or get involved in a project or do things with them I had a list of six or seven criteria that I went through and the top one was to be only associated with people that you know, like, and trust and I found that worked quite well everything else sort of fell away from that you can't really have too many safety checks and balances people have to be able to go ahead and make decisions and move on and if you trusted people then when you were away they did certain things and you didn't worry that they were doing something that was illegal or incorrect so that worked well generally in the mineral business we've got a great group of people I've enjoyed most of them there's the odd bad apple but generally they've been a heck of a good group to work with lifelong friendships and I value friendships I work at maintaining friendships and it's certainly enriched my life Is there anything else that you'd like to add? No, I mentioned earlier that I've written a book so that there's going to be a written history of my activities that will be available I don't know whether they're in your archives you've got any place for books or things like that but I'd be happy to donate a book to that archives that cover my history it's their space, it's going to be published I guess in the next couple of weeks Yeah, we'll mention that to you Thank you very much, I appreciate your time My pleasure, I think it's a good effort to get our history put down the number of people doing it now in these days, the number of copies have put together books over the years I've read a number of them, I always find them very interesting I wish there was some central place where we could put all our archives, the books and things like that we have some space at the prospectors and developers association I've accumulated some things but there never seems to be enough space for our archives That's true, thank you Okay, very good