 All right, so we're here at the CIM convention in Montreal, the Palais des Conguérés, with Vic Picalmus. Hi. And yeah, so it is Sunday May 10th, Mother's Day, and we're gonna start our interview. So to begin, just some some quick basic questions. So here we go. So could you please state your full name? So Victor Vitatus Picalmus. It was born in Milardic in 1950. Milardic was the gold mining capital of the world. It had something like 40 operating mines in that area. It was just the an incredible mining camp after the war. There were a lot of immigrants that came over, including my father who came over from Lithuania. He ended up, he was a civil engineer back in the old country, but they didn't need civil engineers. They needed mining engineers. So he naturally said he was a mining engineer, and after some some time in the in the surveying department, he became the engineer and the chief engineer and ended up in various mining camps. So I have a history of mining. Excellent, excellent. You can just by the way, you can converse with me just so that. Just us having the conversation. Sure. You talking more than me, of course, but yeah, just us too. Alrighty. Could you please state your age and also the date you were born? So I was born in on June I was born June 29th, 1950, and I'm just about 65. Excellent. And you had stated where you were born and what your your parents had. So my parents were immigrants that came to Canada after the war and the the government of Canada recruited a lot of immigrants for the mining industry and so a lot of the mining camps like like Milarnik and Sudbury and various other ones across the country had a lot of immigrant population, Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, all of the different different countries were represented. Yeah. And you as a child because you grew up right right in the middle of it essentially? Absolutely. I was born in Milarnik and in mining essentially. I was born in mining and and in those days there was some houses that were given to the given to the people that ran the mine. My father being a mining mining engineer, as I mentioned, he he was trained as a civil engineer, but did convert to a mining engineer because that's what they needed. So I was born in in a house downtown Milarnik and moved to a house that now is where a huge open pit is. The Osisko mine is mining the remnants of all of that basin. It's going to be the largest open pit gold mine in Canada and and where I lived is no longer there. They move the entire town over and where my house was is is part of the pit. It's almost symbolic. It is. It is. Just there's a lot of symbolism in mining as you'll see later. And and as a child, what did you do to pass the time? So it was interesting. I had a lot of French speaking friends playing on the streets. I spoke Lithuanian at home with my parents and then they put me in English school. So I was at Renault Public School and in fact they put me in when I was five years old. The plan was that I was supposed to fail. I just learned how to speak English, right? Because I didn't speak a word of English before I was five years old. But darn I went and got great marks. So they had to promote me to second year. Sorry? You're good with languages. Well, all my buddies spoke French. So obviously you learn how to speak French very easily and and I guess every every so often my father would move and it was part of it was part of mining. Basically after three to five years either the ore ran out in a mine or because of the mining legislation of the day, a lot of mines had a tax-free period of three years. So they would high grade the the the ore and then close it move on. And it was tax-free. It was until they caught up with that scam and there was there was quite a bit of quite a quite a few mines that ran that way. But he he worked in in the melodic area. He worked up in Chapelle, which is near Shabugamu up in Mescomine. He was a chief mining engineer in those different places. He also worked in Cadillac, which was south of of Milardic. He worked in the Kirkland Lake area. I my first job when I was a teenager still in high school was that in a crusher house working with the conveyor belts and cleaning the the spillage and a variety of jobs that that frankly got me into into the mining industry in a practical way. Summer jobs I did up in northern Quebec, a place called Lebel Sir Kivill. I was going to school at McGill. McGill had a great mining school. It was the best in the world. At one point it was giants were teaching there the greatest one of the greatest fathers of rock mechanics Professor Morrison and people like Don Coates who wrote the definitive work back then on rock mechanics. There was a very heady time and in the summer I went off to make money and it was very lucrative. Mining engineers, mining students back then were just the cats meow. We could get jobs in any old place. It was just amazing. And I worked for Crattison Exploration. And we would do magnetometer, electromagnetometer, gravimetric surveys, do layouts, laying out the diamond drill holes and things like that. And even though I was a very young guy, I remember I started when I was five, so I ended up as party chief. I had about 20 people there and the reason I ended up as party chief was because I could contour maps, you know. It was the only... Yeah, so it was interesting that just a simple skill, you know, like you do all the work like everybody else during the day, but then in the evening, I didn't mind doing all the contours. And then we set up where the drilling sites were and all that sort of thing. How old were you at that point? Well, that's a good point. It was 17 years old. Yeah, 17 years old. So you can imagine, 17, 18, 90. So it was three summers and working with some exceptional people, absolutely exceptional. Dale Henricks was the head of the Karate and Exploration Group. I think he's still kicking around in the business exploration. He had a good intuition in terms of where the gold was. And we did find actually some gold deposits up there, but they were too small. And somebody should get back there. Because remember, in those days, gold was $35 an ounce. Now it's over a thousand, right? So what was profitable, you know, what was not profitable then could be profitable today. We found a lot of different deposits, but we were primarily chasing gold. Was that what your father had done as well? Was he mostly gold mining? Well, my father went from gold mining to molybdenite to copper to silver, different kinds of mining operations. Some large companies, some small companies, he did a lot of, and he was also a prospector. He loved prospecting. One of my earliest recollections was going on his shoulders as a little kid going through the bush staking. You have to blaze the trail from range line to range line to mark out your claim. And then you filed a claim and then it's yours while you do some work on it. And if you discover something on that property then you become rich. So he never became rich. But we had a lot of fun. It was almost a hobby in a way as well. It was a hobby too. And I grew up very fast because he decided that rather than my going on his shoulders or just following him, he'd send me out with a compass blazing the trees myself, you know. Of course, today that would be child abuse. But in those days, kids would do that with their fathers. And we did a lot of exploration together in Northern Quebec and Northern Ontario. I eventually ended up also working underground at Caradison Mine in Virginia Town. And I was a surveyor. But more interesting, I was also a miner's helper. I worked in the square set slope, which is a very, you use square set mining with posts and caps and beams and that sort of thing, where the ground is extremely, extremely broken up and difficult to manage. And I remember that was a Polish miner and I was his helper, Stan. And Stan came from Poland. I think he actually was a professor in philosophy or something like that. But obviously he didn't go into philosophy here. But he definitely, you know, we had some interesting discussions. And we spent a lot of good time together there and then I obviously practiced a little of my engineering design stuff as well. Graduated McGill, worked at Iron Ore Company Canada, Shefferville, as a bank stability engineer. So at McGill, what was your program exactly? Mining. Mining engineering. Yeah, it was mining engineering. And at the time there was, I think there were only nine schools of mining across the country. And some schools had closed down because of the mining industry you should know is a very cyclical industry. So the commodity prices go down. Everybody's cutting back and no jobs, that sort of thing. And then it goes boomin' and then they're looking for more and more and they can't get more. It's a boom bus kind of an industry. Because you were saying when you went to McGill it was busy. Yeah, it was busy. We had lots of jobs and I could get jobs anywhere. And I went to the Shefferville job. This was Iron Ore Company Canada. Brian Mulrooney was the chairman of the board, I think, and eventually he closed that place down. Because even though it was a very high, high grade, 55 percent iron, it was a very high grade ore body, it was very costly because it was kind of removed. It was, yeah, it was shipped to the ore by train to Shefferville or to Setheel and a variety of different reasons. The commodity prices went down. Eventually he did shut it down. It was an interesting community to live in. All mining camps are interesting committees to live in. I mentioned to you that Millardic and Val d'Or and Ruan and Kirkland Lake and Sudbury as well are all built by immigrants. There was a huge immigrant population that came after the war and went up there. Shefferville, there are no roads into Shefferville. It was just the railroad that came in. So it was a very different kind of a setting. So everybody was from someplace else and we had, I think, the largest consumption of alcohol in Canada at that one regime, the alcohol outfit. We'll get to that. I'll ask you about that. We had an interesting community center and we'd all get there and there's nothing to do so you all participate in everything. The one thing I really loved was the Northern Lights. You lie down and you just watch the Northern Lights. It was better than television. Absolutely. Our computer games were already like that. It was magical. Luckily, yeah. It was pretty rustic and I decided, yeah, I'm not sure if that's what I want for the rest of my life. So I decided to go to do a master's. So I did a master of engineering. Still in your 20s at this time? Yeah. That's right. And in those days, the federal government actually was quite generous in terms of its support of research. And they gave McGill a million bucks. Can you imagine? They don't give a million bucks now to across the country. But they had this grant to do permafrost research. And we built, right from scratch, a huge facility that still is there. It's on Montenegro, the mountain there. Big dome. If you look at it, that was my lab. And so we built the insides, walk-in freezers, and we shipped permafrost from Shefferville all the way to the Montreal airport. I'd pick it up in these big ice chests, bring it into the lab, put my parka on, and test the rock. All of the machinery was there for cutting, diamond saws, and everything like that. For cutting the rock, it was frozen soil, really. And you'd take that frozen soil, test it, and then thaw it out, reconstitute it, and test it again. So all the work that had been done in the United States and elsewhere was on reconstituted soils, frozen soils. This was actually the first time that there was natural permafrost that was being tested. And all of that was very interesting. I remember there was the U.S. Corps of Engineers that were hovering, and I was wondering why would they be interested in that. I found out it was for the design of treads on train vehicles and tanks and things like that for warfare and the Arctic, that kind of application. And there was only two testing machines of the capacity that we had at McGill. One was in Norlitz, Russia. And I remember exchanging some information and testing techniques and things like that with a fellow investigator over there. It was still part of the Cold War, remember? There was a Cold War going on, and so we had to be careful of what we shared and what we didn't share. It was the scientific work that was useful for everybody. But anyway, I went from there, and I was thinking of doing my PhD, but I hated being a poor student. I really did not like being a poor student. It's just...anyway, so two companies gave me offers. One was Zinckel, and the other one was Falconbridge. And, well, I ended up at Falconbridge. They were more persistent, you know, in terms of getting me... I became the senior ground control engineer at Falconbridge. It was a wonderful company. It was an absolutely wonderful company. Falconbridge, of course, has a really storied history as well. Thomas Edison was up there, had invented some geotechnical equipment, and in fact, one of the shafts was named after Edison. He was an investor in mining operations, so he had come to Sudbury. So I spent some time there, and there was a terrible tragedy that really changed the course of my life, probably still would be with Falconbridge or its successors, because I really love that company. But there was a terrible tragedy. There were five people, top executives, that were flying in from Toronto to Sudbury. And they hit an antenna at Berry, and all went down, all perished. All of the president, the vice presidents of technology and HR, it's coincidental that at this CIM I met Russ Bucklin, who used to be the VP. His son is here, which was interesting that he'd still be in the business. And so we talked about his father. Mining then was, and really, I guess it still is, it's a very insular group. We all know one another kind of thing. We all have our pedigrees, like where's your father from and what's this and what's that. So if you stay in the industry, you become more trusted. And of course if you screw up, you might as well get out and go sell shoes. But good people in mining tend to land on their feet in different parts of the world as well. It's a global industry. I ended up, because of an interesting set of circumstances, there was some miscommunication and whenever there's a crisis you have to be careful about communications. There was a fellow that was recruiting for the Ministry of Labor. And I had never thought of working for the government. But this fellow was insistent. And things were a little shaky there at Falco Bridge. I don't know. Sorry? Why was it shaky that way? Well, because we had lost all of our executive and there was, you know, nobody knew where it was going and the share prices were falling. There was some issues. One fellow that was put in charge frankly didn't communicate the plan as well as he should and some of us were uncertain in terms of where our future would be. And he eventually got fired and the company flourished after Gordon Slade took over. Somebody you should interview. He lives in Sudbury and he's a very, very excellent mining person. I remember he came to my retirement party, a retirement going away party. Really great guy. He says, well, Vic, are you sure you want to go to cover him? I said, well, I already gave them my word. So he says, well, work a year and then after that think again. But I spent 30 years in the Ministry of Labor. I was the Chief Mining Engineer for the province. I really respected the fellow that recruited me. Ernie Isaacs was the Chief Mining Engineer. He's since died. So was he looking to find a replacement? I'm sorry? You said he recruited you for the Ministry of Labor. I came to the Ministry of Labor. And did you take his place or were you just? I did. So at first he recruited me not to take his place but to rewrite the section on rock mechanics. I was a rock mechanics engineer and he needed a rock man to talk about instrumentation and testing and all that kind of stuff. So I ended up as the Ground Control Engineer, the first one that the province had. And after he decides to go for the top job at another organization called Masha, Mining Safety and Health, he recommended me for the job. And so I ended up as the Chief Mining Engineer. And it was really interesting that very quickly I rose to be the director of the program, the youngest executive in the Ontario Public Service. And that was an interesting story on all of its own. The fellow that was the director before me was a guy named Peter McCrudden. He came from Timmins. He was head of a number of mining companies, McIntyre Mine was the last one he was at. They used to call him Pistol Pete. He always used very colorful language, as mining people do. And he didn't suffer fools. He, you know, I get on with it. What do you want to say? And Pete McCrudden basically gave me a really good mentorship, coaching, whatever experience before he retired. In fact, I remember going down to Toronto and he had some encounters with various women executives and he was a little bit leery about, you know, working with that gender. And he says, you go talk to them. You go talk to them. He says, you know, at any time I just blow up and then they start to cry. You know, and he would say things like that. I said, Pete, you can't say that kind of stuff, you know. And I ended up working with the Assistant Deputy Ministers and fairly high up individuals. And for a younger person, well of course you're going to work and you're going to work. And there were some very talented people that we had at the Ministry of Labor and it was just excellent. At any rate, Pete McCrudden when he left, certainly had left a good legacy, I remember the interview for that job, which was historic. On that interview panel, the head hauncho of the Ham Commission, this is the Royal Commission into health and safety in the mining industry, James Ham, Dr. James Ham, himself set on the interview panel. The executive director for the division wasn't a mining person. He needed somebody that could understand the problems in mining. I did some work on James Ham for our, I think he was inducted this year. I'll have to double check, but this year I think he was inducted in our engineering and technology health thing. Well, he is magnificent. He was the Dean of Engineering. He wrote an excellent number of books, frankly. He was big on health and safety a while back. And he was the author of the Ham Commission. Yeah, that was him. And he also toured the North Country ten years after his report came out. There were two other commissioners on it, but he was the principal one. I remember him working in the United States at the Brookings Institution to compare the American experience with ours. I remember bringing him around to various mining camps in Elliott Lake, for instance. They thought he was God. I mean, this is the guy that changed the history of health and safety, not only in Ontario and Canada. Before his report, mining had its own regulation. Construction had its own regulation. Occupational health was handled by the Ministry of Health. It was all scattered. There was nothing holding together. After his report, which dealt with mining, the government of the day, this is with Bill Davis as Premier and the Deputy Minister, Tim Armstrong, decided we needed a consolidated Occupational Health and Safety Act. And based on the recommendations of the Ham Commission, based on the ideas that came out of that report, internal responsibility systems, all of the roles and responsibilities of workers, supervisors, employers, everything, that went in as the law, not just for mining, but for every sector in Ontario. So you can imagine here is God sitting on your interview panel, you know? Anyway, it was an amazing interview. I remember the director of the HR group. And I knew some of the other people that were competing. In fact, one of them worked for me. And I ended up working for him later on. And I thought, well, this other guy is really much better. He's more polished and all this kind of stuff. Any rate, they picked me. And so I became the director of the mining program. And I remember going in to see Tim Malardney in those days, the Deputy Minister had to appoint the executive, the director. And he says, yeah, Vic, I understand that you're successful. Congratulations. And he says, you know, we look at the mining branch as a bit of a lightning rod. But he says, the only problem is we're not sure whether the lightning rod is there to protect us or whether it attracts that lightning. Mining, anything that happened in mining always got front-page coverage. Anything that happened in any other sector, three, four down and maybe it got covered. But mining, boy, anything happened, it always got coverage. And it also got lots of air time in the legislature. So you had to work. Well, there's something about the environment we're in. You know, we work miles underground. We're in a very strange environment that most people can't relate to. We had, in those days, the strongest unions going much stronger than anything else in other industries. And in fact, in some ways, the reason we have the Occupational Health and Safety Act is because we had a very strong union, Steelworkers of America, in Elliott Lake. And they just decided, well, they walked out the illegal strike. And they stayed out until the legislature. And in those days, Bill Davis, of course, was the premier. And there were some very powerful opposition members that essentially debated it and debated it. And then finally, we need a Royal Commission to look at why we have such high incidence of lung cancers. And the ventilation was not all that good in Elliott Lake. The safety standards were not all that good. And because of the Ham Commission, it was dramatic in terms of the fall and fatalities and lost time injuries. It's an incredible story, an incredible story. So with that as the backstop, here I come in and I had it pretty good. I had it pretty good. We were the cat's meow. There were no better in the world than us. Our mine rescue handbook was being used by South Africa. They were buying thousands of copies because they used the Ontario standard in South Africa. We had an amazing talent in terms of engineering and in different areas of working environment, electrical mechanical. We had the only testing facility for wire ropes that other provinces would send to Ontario and we would test ropes from other countries, Mongolia and elsewhere. And we had money as well because when you get into trouble, people think, oh, let's throw a little bit of money. Well, we actually did reduce the accident rates, fatalities, lost time injuries, everything. And we trained our inspectors to actually help, not just in force, but to help the industry. I had an amazing amount of money to train my inspectors. And it was the largest training program put on by the Ontario government. At the time, there was a lady named Rita Burak who was the assistant deputy minister for finance at the Ministry of Labor. And she said, I don't know if your hands are shaking, but mine are. This is the largest. It was pretty close to a million bucks to train. And the way we sold it was not only to train our inspectors, but also the industry. So it was a partnership with Masha, the organization that I mentioned, the former chief, mine's engineer, went to head up. So we made it happen. And it was a good time. Accidents were going down and everything. I ended up in a major commission of inquiry on the Ministry of Labor. There was some allegations of impropriety that politicians were directing the public service to prosecute where they shouldn't prosecute or not prosecute where they should. That sort of thing. There were allegations. And we had something called the Mackenzie Laskin Inquiry. And Boralaskin's son, actually, was headed up the and he became a Supreme Court Judge in his own right. So there was also the management side was analyzed quite significantly by Mackenzie. And of the three divisions, there were three branches. There was construction, mining and industrial. Mining looked great. We had training programs for all the inspectors. We had expertise, technical expertise. We had all that kind of stuff. And unfortunately, the one that frankly had the largest bulk of workers reporting to industrial didn't have as much resource put against it. So I went from an area where I had great comfort. And I could get the, oh, and the leadership back then, both on the labor side and the management side, were exceptional people to work with, exceptional people. There were giants. There was Walter Curluck from INCO. There was Henry Brejo from Placer Dome. There was Mike Sapko. There was Bill James from Volkenberg. These guys were incredible. We had also a lot of technology being developed in the 80s. We had the Miranda Research Center here in Montreal. We had the Sheridan Park in Toronto. There was amazing discoveries. We mechanized most of the mining. Because of that ham commission, a lot of our innovation was driven to help make things safer. But at the same time as we're making things safer, we're making them more productive. So it was a win-win for everybody. So safer, productive mining. And then we hit a bit of a snag, and I'll get back to my transition there I mentioned in the late 80s. In about 85, we had something called the Stevenson Report. And it was because of a rock burst that hit Volkenbridge. And four people were buried, three of them instantly. And one, unfortunately, we tried to get them out. He was alive for about a day and a day and a half, I think it was. And we were digging. It was the first time mine rescue was used in a non-fire emergency. And we were using micro seismic monitors to find out whether the place was safe for the rescuers and all that sort of thing. It was a story all in its own that's documented actually in the Stevenson Commission reports that should be in your library because it's an interesting story. In that story, we moved the yardsticks. I was transitioning from being chief mining engineer to the director. And we had four labor, four management representatives, and a neutral chair. Trevor Stevenson was a mediator from the ministry of labor. So he kept the peace between the labor management people. And I was his technical advisor, kept the thing going. And we had use of the Premier's airplane going off to all the mining camps in Ontario. It was an interesting time and gathering information from workers, from technical people. We brought in experts in rock mechanics and all of the technology that we used. The report, frankly, was implemented, most of it, not all of it, but most of it. And also there was a recommendation for mining research. And the province wanted to put in one chair in rock mechanics. And they funded it for a million dollars. The industry said, well, perhaps we should put one in U of T and one in Queens as well. We had three mining schools in Ontario. And so the leadership in those days was brilliant. And they could see that having new knowledge being developed was something we needed for the industry. So it was Walter Curlick and Henry Brayhoe and others that came up with the industry funding that doubled the amount that the Ontario government could put up. The fellow that headed up the unit in Sudbury at Laurentian University was Peter Kaiser, Dr. Peter Kaiser. He's raised more money than any other person in mining for research across Canada. The guy is amazing. He should be here this weekend, I think. Maybe. I tried to call him but he works for me. He works for me still, by the way. He's retired but he's a special advisor to the president. So it is coincidental that after all of this I end up being in an organization now that I head up, the president of Morocco Mining Innovations. But he started. He had his chair at Laurentian. He started a geotechnical group, GRC it was called, that eventually molded or morphed into Morocco. And he also started SEMI, which was another organization. I'm going to see their booth later. Right. And Doug Morrison, the president of SEMI is here too so you can have a chat with him. But those 80s were an amazing time for technology, for innovation, research the whole bit. And I kind of went from mining to industrial. So I went from an industry that I knew really well. 20,000 people. Industry and labor leaders that I could trust and I really respected. Two, three and a half million workers. Everything. You know, nuts and bolts. There was only construction which was about 300,000. So there's mining, construction and then everything is rest. And the way I cope with it is I built the mining model in the industrial. I figured it worked for me there. And don't ask me why because you probably already can figure it out. But I took the three and a half million workers and I put them into pots and industry sectors. 12 industry sectors. 12 apostles, you know. Anyway, I decided, okay, auto sector, you know, petrochemical, you know, all the different sectors. And these days I think they've broken it down to subsectors and everything. But I wanted to keep it simple back then. And part of it was that we built mechanisms that we started in mining. But now we have them in other sectors like the health care sector. The health care sector has an advisory committee with labor and management from that sector advising the government on what should be done. The standards, how could we make sure that accidents are reduced in that sector. And the same for the firefighters and same for the steel industry and things like that. Well, mining had those mechanisms way before anybody else had. We had something called the Mining Legislative Review Committee that started with labor and management support and any recommendations they would make government would obviously think that's a great idea. And when you have the people that are going to be regulated that can give you, you know, a balanced view of things and it's always government's final role to decide what to do, of course. But having that mechanism makes sense. The other thing we had back then was regulated mining training programs. Common core training. So not just for safety, but for doing the job and safety was built into doing the job. The first industry that was regulated training was mining. It's now being adopted in other sectors. So we had pretty heady days in terms of how that was all rolling along. And after 30 years in the mining industry, not the mining sorry, in the government, after 30 years in government I got an offer to come to Queens as the Kinross Professor in Mining and Sustainability. And quite an honor, quite an honor. How that happened was that I was on loan from the Ontario Government to the School of Policy Studies at Queens. It was called the Davis Fellowship. So it's quite an honor to get because it's one year the government donates it and you teach you're supposed to teach a course. I taught three. In health and safety in policy execution and with a colleague of mine project management. And we had and I had a great time and somebody from the mining department across the campus found out there was a mining engineer and he likes to teach. What are the chances? So after I went back to the Ministry of Labor after my stint as the Amethyst fellow they came calling and I ended up as the Kinross Professor in Mining and Sustainability. So I taught a couple of courses plus I started with colleagues from other departments masters in Applied Sustainability and I did that and then when it was an industry chair so Kinross donated the money to support the chair. When that came due somebody from Sudbury phones me up and says check the the Globe Mail and they were advertising the position that I presently have. So two and a half years ago I thought well I wouldn't be nice to go back to my old haunts in Sudbury and I found what a lovely place. I loved it back then but now everything is green the air is cleaner Ottawa or Toronto or even Kingston the air is cleaner. Most Canadians think of Sudbury back in the 70s it's not that way now we've got 300 lakes and you can swim in them 300 lakes in the city it should be called the city of lakes for gosh sakes I'm not sure if there's any other city in Canada that has 300 lakes that was because of amalgamation in the late 90s everything is green the air is good the food amazing they brought in a whole bunch of different ethnic restaurants and I would put the top four restaurants in Sudbury against the top four in Kingston they're that good they don't have a Scotch club yet but I'm working on that but otherwise I'm loving it Sudbury is a great place you know we have a very interesting group of people that's very dedicated to mining research 40 researchers that are working in energy, climate change in geotechnical engineering and safety, mining safety and great plans for the future and this might be a tougher question but as an individual yourself in your professional career if you had to choose you find to be your biggest accomplishment biggest accomplishment whether it be at the government probably my son having a son I'll tell you yeah I think most fathers would say that or most mothers probably would as well their kids their accomplishments I remember dropping them off at school learn lots, have fun that was the motto I gave them but professionally I guess I had remember I had 30 years so I saw a lot of history in the public service when I was when I was at Falkenbridge we designed some very interesting instruments that we never patented basically we just used but I'm just trying to think of I think some of it has to do with the legislation that I drafted I guess the Stevenson the Stevenson report probably I would probably say that's one of the ones I'm most proud of since then since I went to Morocco we just we just finished a job for the Ministry of Labor on technology and the management of change and I'm very proud of the work that was done there I also while I was with the Ontario government I had some very interesting work that I did with the Secretary of Cabinet Tony Dean one of the greatest policy minds I've ever known and we did some work on collaborative public services between Ontario and the federal government and we restructured some of the services labor market stuff came over to Ontario and other services went to the feds and we designed these common counters that are peppered through the province I was one of the founders on the Provincial Ministry Council which is all the regional directors outside of Toronto we seem to have a greater amount of energy to make change so when I was the regional director for Eastern Ontario we combined forces with other regional directors from the other ministries and we kind of figured how do we make things better for Eastern Ontario and then we joined forces with other groups of regional directors from the other five regions of the province and we created something called the Provincial Ministry Council and it was the chairs of all of the units that went on some of the tougher assignments when my carers friends came in and gave a challenge to Rita Burak, the secretary cabinet at the time that she had the down size of the public service from 86,000 people to 64,000 that's a heck of a job and how do you keep a public service running while you're doing all this stuff so we did it it was a nasty job I don't know if it was my proudest moment but we did it it was something public servants are not are not politically aligned unlike the United States where everybody from director up is a political appointment in Canada deputy ministers and down are all professional non-partisan public service so we give honest advice and loyal execution and whoever the people elect democratically we support them so I think that time that was a very difficult time for the public service was I think I feel I did my my best work because we kept the public service going we in fact improved some of the metrics service and Accident rates which we really worried about because when you're going through all that people's minds are off their work right we kept the Accident rates down so it was it was a it was a trying challenging time but we made it happen and that certainly was a proud moment too that's a good question it gave me a few a few that I worked with anyway and maybe a bit more about your time in the private sector with the different mining companies but what were your social activities professionally with the other co-workers well I'm a professional engineer so I wear my iron ring I'm very proud of it and I still volunteer with the professional engineers of Ontario and I've been involved with Canadian engineering accreditation board we make sure that various universities have good standards in terms of their engineering departments and there's always an element of fun you know everything we do like CIM for instance we're here at the CIM conference there's all the galas the evenings it's it's wonderful to see people that you haven't seen for a year or sometimes longer I mean some people I haven't seen for 10-20 years and they figure I'm still you know like I'd never left Falconbridge and I'm like whoa and I run into some very good people that I knew back then and try to tell them where my life went and some of them stayed put but most of them ended up in different countries Indonesia South Africa and South America and this way and that way but they tend to come home after a certain time I enjoy philosophy so in Sudbury we had something called the Tehr group and it was Tehr de Chardin was a philosopher and we had the largest Tehr group in Canada actually in the North America and we would invite speakers from all over the place you know that there's something special about Sudbury 1.38 billion years ago there's this meteorite that hits the marked spot of where Sudbury's going to be right? I mean hey and and right now a snow lab which is where they're searching for dark matter the snow lab has got 7 or 8 experiments on the go to figure out the origins of the universe 13.8 billion years ago the universe is born and we haven't got a clue what happened the second before and the discovery of dark matter will happen in Sudbury and it's in a mine Cretan mine so before I left Sudbury planning this thing now it's incredible Stephen Hawking's has already been there a couple of times and the experiments that they're doing now I'm sure within the next 5 years they're going to discover the origins of the universe and it's all happening in a mining town in Sudbury yeah so Scotch Club is a Scotch you asked about social yeah sure like mining people absolutely like beer any kind of beer and Scotch and Scotch Scotch is special I remember when I was when I was at Queens I gave lectures on networking because you got to be a good networker to succeed in mining and I always said you know a good cup of coffee that's all you need really you know you want to talk to somebody hey how about a cup of coffee sure and then you get a relationship built with a cup of coffee and I said if you really want to close the deal Scotch in the evening so I joined a Scotch club in Kingston years ago now and I still go on to it I still go back every two months to Kingston to keep my membership up nobody quits there you have to die or whatever but you don't leave that Scotch club it's so hard to get into you know it's a very limited number of seats in that it's a kid it's at the Kingston brew pub in the top flight and it's limited on the room size so I'm trying to start one in Sudbury I figure that's the place and it's not going to be just mining people it's going to be others as well because of course we have to unite with the rest of the the world and society and all that sort of thing miners unfortunately it's a strength in our weakness I was going to ask we tend to stick together we're very insular we just kind of protect one another we hate media people because they always come up with some nasty you know thing and we have legacies unfortunately we didn't cause today is a very different time than a hundred years ago a lot of the legacy issues are being cleaned up like the Laurel for instance just near Belleville that's where gold was first discovered but they left behind an awful mess while it's being cleaned up it's going to cost something like 50-80 million dollars and it's going to be cleaned up also Camp Koschup and Timmins or Steve Brock there's different places where the legacy issues have given mining a bad name tarnished and we have legislation now that you can't even start a mine until you have a closure plan until you guarantee financially that you're going to clean it up that you can reclaim it so that it can be used for other reasons you know so I think we have to sell the story we have to tell the story of why mining is so important to the economy of this country that mining people are really good down-to-earth types that really want to contribute we are the largest employer of First Nations of any sector we you know you go down Young Street University hospitals lots of hospital buildings are named after giants of the mining industry York University has the Schulich School of Business LaSonde, Pierre LaSonde has donated money to University of Toronto and to various hospitals Goodman, Ned Goodman has donated an amazing amount of money we're not supposed to say how much an amazing amount of money to Laurentian University for the Goodman School of Mines and also for the School of Business actually at Brock University Mining people are generous people and they come out and they help and there's a lot of a lot of countries that frankly the only way they're going to get out of poverty is if they develop the resources properly so we have to get outside of our little and tell our story yeah well this hopefully start you had mentioned it's the largest employer of First Nations which is good how I mean you can compare it today but think of your whole career the presence of women how absent or present were they so embarrassingly enough we actually outlawed women from underground there was a law from women underground believe it or not and that comes from England and in early times women and children were used to do the hardest labor in coal mines and at some point people were so upset at it that they said no more women and children in mining do you know why it was like that in the first place was it because they were smaller remember Dickens time the poor houses and they're smaller like children obviously can get into and women were more finessey yeah they were not as clumsy let's say any rate for some reason there was a myth that women were bad luck in mines and how that perpetuated into North America anyway it ended up in our mining laws and believe it or not we had it till I think the 50s yeah and then the queen comes to visit Sudbury well guess what the law changed so women of course are loud underground and they make some of the best workers like for instance on driving scoop prams and things like that they're far better dexterity and they're more careful not to drive into the walls they make better workers I shouldn't say that it's sexist but women in some mines are well accepted and we have lots of them not so much in others it depends on the mining company as well the more progressive ones no problem in fact we have a lot of women foremen a lot of women mining when I started mining I think there was one at McGill and she ended up in a desk job when when I was teaching at Queens it was about 30% were women now that was a high number not as high as say legal the legal profession or the medical profession they have more women than men legal and medical profession engineering is still unfortunately not hasn't caught up to those other professions we it depends on the school but it's between 30 and 35 that area chemical engineering is 50-50 chemical engineering has managed to integrate women and they're great engineers the top engineer at University of Manitoba was a woman of the nation as well and so we have to get away from some of these silly restrictions that we have placed in the past and a lot of them are just cultural we have to just get over it I think the younger generation is just not into that and they treat everyone the same and we've got quite a generational change from when I was going through university to when I was teaching just three years ago you know things like engineers with the borders trying to help other countries and things like that a lot more socially responsible kinds of activities the whole respect for the environment I think is basic to engineering now so I think it's all good it's all good it's getting better and better good I know you have to go soon right? so here we'll just try to finish right up here this is probably one of my favorite questions that I like to ask if you had to if you had to talk to someone much younger for students what would be the most important life lesson you could give them or piece of advice well I think you have to be true to yourself you have to make sure you know what you want I've had some students they finish mining engineering and then they come to me and say you know thank you very much in all this and I tell them where you're going well actually I'm going to go teach kindergarten you went through engineering and you went through mining engineering which is to teach kindergarten yeah I did it for my father he wanted me to be an engineer but I really don't want to be a teacher I said you know that's sad so be true to yourself make sure you know what you want and if you want adventure if you want challenge world travel there's no job like it mining mining can give you so much but you have to want it you have to make sure that that's in your you know in your DNA you want to be in that industry you have to have patience remember I said the mining cycles go and sometimes if you're hitting the bottom you may find it a little harder to get a job. You may have to go a little further afield to get the job maybe in another country but you will get a job good people are always hard to find so I think also make sure you network properly don't do it ad hoc build a strategy for students in second year when I was doing introduction to mining I had them all come up with business cards so they all had their business and they had the little queens logo on it and they had we went to Staples and they got the business card material and they put their names and their email addresses and when they give them to an employer or somebody that might part of their network so the person had that and would put it in either a pile or in my case I have this the business card holder I've got 40,000 names in there and now they've got these electronic business card sorters a lot simpler but I'm old school so I still keep my stupid business card holder so build up a network integrity is so important and the world is small so be careful the decisions you make sometimes it'll catch up to you if it's the wrong one also if it's the right one and somehow something happens to you something better will happen later but integrity is is something to be safeguarded yeah thank you yeah is there anything else you'd like to add or share with me you know mining has been very good to me it's a great profession it's a great industry it needs all kinds of people countants, lawyers even historians you know we need the history told of how this country was born yes the railway railway story is amazing but the mining stories are even better and they have a lot of similarities I find absolutely the technology that's been developed the mechanization side of things and the importance to the country mining built this country and it's still building it and we have to make sure that we realize that mining is a base is at the base of this country we have to make sure we cherish it the whole north country still has an immense wealth when I was going through McGill all the mining schools were teaching us that there's no diamonds in this country it's just impossible to have diamonds well there's a lot of diamond mines now as you know the techniques that we're using haven't even you know the geophysical techniques the exploration techniques haven't even haven't even got 10% of the wealth that's there you know we find huge gold mines right beside the highway running from Susanne Marie to the Thunder Bay just beside I mean so there's a lot of wealth and Canada needs to develop its north it's good for the first nations there was a national chief of the assembly of first nations Sean Atlio one of the greatest leaders I've ever met basically said it's going to be mining and energy that's going to take the first nations out of poverty and they have to get good at it they have to train themselves as business people as engineers help build that foundation that this country is based on so I'm very optimistic and I'm seeing good things happening and it was a great industry to be part of and thanks for the interview well thank you very much for your time made me relive a lot of moments that I hadn't thought of it for a while I'm glad