 Okay, we're here today with Sam Markison and the interviewer as usual will be William McCrae We are July 23rd, 2015 July 24 24? 23rd 23rd, oh 23rd, okay Thursday July 23rd 2015 at the University of Toronto. So here we go. Could you please state your full name? Samuel Walton Markison And your age? I will be 65 in four days Happy birthday And where were you born? Richmond, Virginia in the USA And as a child what did your parents do for a living? My mother taught school English in high school and my father sold real estate and also ended up working in What in Virginia you called a savings in loan? I think there's a slightly different name for it in Canada people who gave Loans for people want to build houses. Okay, and And you at a very young age, what was your pastime or what were your go-to activities? Oh, well, I Shouldn't say it, but I actually watched some television Like most kids my age more than my parents might have liked I Got interested in in photography and when I was a teenager and that was a one of my interests I always kind of had an interest in Gadgets or whatever was going on but I was yeah, just of a general sense. Yes, but I was never I Wasn't one of these electronics or ham radio freaks that we had lots of it in my generation that was Didn't quite have the understanding of the electronics or the interest in that And were there was there any interest in Sciences in general. Oh, yes, I like science my my grandfather told my mother that I was going to be an inventor So that was so I had an interest in that type of things, but I also had interest in other topics interestingly while I ended up in engineering when I was Taking all the standardized tests in high school and elementary school I always did better on the verbal parts of the tests than I did on the math math parts of the test so Engineering and and verbal sciences can go together quite well As long as you have a reasonable amount of aptitude in the in the in the in the hardcore stuff And and as a child was there Any idea on your part or even pressure on your parents part of what you should do when you're all grown up No, the pressure was you will go to college in the US or university and count that was the Was the expectation but what you chose to study was never a particular hot topic and As a child or as a teenager at that point was did you have a specific idea of what you were now went to university? I thought I might study chemistry. I wasn't certain. I ended up studying chemistry Okay, as an undergraduate and where was that at the College of Women Murray in, Virginia and After after your bachelors, what did you do? when When I was in my 30 a junior year at University I took a course that due to a scheduling. I was forced to take a course in geology I took the course in geology. I found I liked it then I took some more courses and then as a When I was in my last year decided that I'd like to study process metallurgy with extraction of metals So I applied to Columbia University from women very and I started there in graduate studies in 1972 and Why We know why metallurgy, but why chemistry first of all? Oh chemistry well chemistry came from a high school teacher who was quite dynamic in grade 11 and metallurgy came out because of chemistry because of geology and also when I was a student What the first Earth Day I think was 1970 or 1971 and The environment was on everyone's mind and even though I wasn't one of these people who necessarily participated in all the events Interested in the environment and doing something about it had great appeal to me and I think it had a great appeal to many of my colleagues as well and I think as we all know the the mining metallurgy world has a Had and still has a lot to do around the environment. So it was a melding of chemistry Environment geology and the like okay, and Just pick chemistry instead. Well, well where I went to school. There was no engineering program. It was all okay It was a liberal arts school. So yes, okay chemistry is a great introduction to absolutely process metallurgy and to related topics I'm just curious. Did environmental studies or sciences Exist at that time? Not really. No, okay No, no, you pretty well the you know the sciences where I went to school and in most schools would be physics chemistry biology and maybe geology not all schools had that but environmental science wasn't wasn't really separated out as a discipline and and computer science was just starting was in a Nassan state. Okay, and you are born in Virginia and you did go to school To American schools. So why Canada now? Oh In 1980 I took a job after you know, but after graduate school at a company called Engel hard Which is now part of VASF. I Didn't really that job wasn't to my taste and after three years. I decided to look for job I went and talked to my thesis advisor who Steered me in the direction of working for inco here. So I applied and Got the position and that brought me to Canada. What was the position? I started out as a research engineer at the what was in called the J. Roy Gordon research laboratory in, Mississauga And they are known as the Valley Technical Excellence Center, I believe okay And what was what were your first kind of tasks or what do you remember from the beginning of your your career there? Oh What I remember about Inco at the time in the research group was it was It was actually pretty freewheeling and some of the things we could do and some of the things that we Could try everything had an application, but it was generally You generally had a fair bit of freedom to work on what you were as long as you were in the in the Meeting the objective that you're working on in the vein of we were working on at that in the Engel hard research laboratory They had a quite a rigid system of determinant of trying to ascertain what a project was worth What the monetary value of this project would be if it was successful and Then how much money you could spend on your research to make this project work and It was extremely structured and not really very creative and I didn't think they're productive actually and I think unfortunately The trend of trying to push more direct value from research More direct quicker value is actually accelerated from those times as opposed to you you have to work on an objective You have to work with a goal. You have to work with an area But it's not necessarily possible to define everything you're going to do right from the beginning Especially if you don't know it it exists. Yeah, well then then you bend you're not actually doing research so so so there the more interesting approach Appealed to me also I had studied power metallurgy high-temperature metallurgy as a graduate student and in when I joined in Co in 1980 Well, probably certainly in the non-forest world the best high-temperature metallurgy Industrial laboratory was was in Canada. It would be probably between the Randa and in Co. So it was a Great place to go and may ask why the your first job you didn't like the job in the USA Founded a little too constricting. I also wasn't doing power metallurgy. I was doing something else. I was studying the Processing of white clay which is a very which is an interesting topic, but it didn't necessarily appeal to me So you probably don't know where where you find white clay Probably in that piece of paper or certainly in that and possibly in that piece of paper White clay is used as a pigment for papers or as a pigment in paints To give it the color and so there's a lot of surface chemistry involved in it Okay, and You had mentioned you Went into chemistry because probably because of a high school teacher. Yeah Do you have Mentors throughout your life? Oh, I saw the question. Yeah, I thought about that. Yes, I had a As an undergraduate, I had a professor who who who I quite liked and he was a chemistry professor head of department His name was ta-ta-wee and he was a very conservative individual, but he was He took a lot of interest in students and inch and what they're doing and he and I got along Well, I kept I kept in close contact with him until he passed away in 1987 My Graduate school advisor was a fellow named Herbert Kellogg who was a professor at Columbia And he is still alive and he was a well-known professor And I was very fortunate with him when I started working with him. He was in his early 50s. He had He did mostly work on his own. He had very few students But he and he had created a reputation for himself So I got to spend a lot of time talking with him So when I was doing my research, he and I would typically talk about Meet twice a week and spend about 45 minutes each time talking And that's actually a lot of time a lot of professors time for a single graduate student Possible because of the peculiarity of situation that I was in the The department the mineral engineering department at Columbia was in the Henry Crumb School of Mines Which had some years as many faculty as it had students at that particular juncture in time. It had been been given a lot of money by Henry Crumb and So it was a good suit at the faculty ratio and a lot of interpersonal Relationships which really created a really good educational process for me So I that was a great experience With the question about mentors There's one one name comes up in my mind and it's a fellow. I didn't have much. I did not have much Relationship left He was the head of marketing at Engelhardt when I first started working there And I got a little project in which I was supposed to work closely with the operators and I was quite possibly a cocky young fellow right out of getting a PhD and not paying particular attention to my customers in the operations and in one of the research review meetings things hadn't gone quite well and It didn't appear that We were working very well together and He absolutely humiliated me in front of the group of people Strip off my Mac and it was not a pleasant experience But it was an object lesson in you know, what What was the cause of the cause of him well He felt that we weren't working very well together with the operators and things weren't going well and like that So he so he said and it wasn't right. It probably was all correct but it Hey, you know what you get these things and you learn from them and and the lesson was you know, you have to You have to learn to get along with these people that and work together and I learned the lesson well and I Think for people who may be listened to this sometime in the future who are wanting to do research work or development work with counterparts in operations Yes, it's a real challenge, but you you and you have to kind of lean over backward to be successful But it's worthwhile when you do but there was a very Had a big impact on me because it wasn't fun to dehumiliate it and Also, I didn't want to get humiliated again. So you learn from it and it it helped a lot in terms of Learning how to to work with the people and certainly well within the in co-organization and the valley organization And throughout your career and we'll get more into the in Co and valley, but was there at any point a Dysfunctional job or project even though. Oh, yeah, I had a couple years in the early 2000s working I see I was called the Director of product research and we were working Working in direct conjunction with inco special products Which was part Inco that was little subdivision of Inco that was made to Market products that it could make from nickel carbon e or technology that inco had and also to develop other technologies And the objective was to generate value-added products from nickel that could be sold at a considerable premium to the LME price and That was a very dysfunctional organization I don't think the business metrics were aligned correctly the Personnel didn't really mesh together There was a lot of friction between the organizations I Think there was a fundamental flaw in the underlying business expectations which probably contributed to the dysfunction, but It was a stressful time and Dysfunctional organizations are not fun to work in now. How long did that that lasted for me for both both three to four years and How did the change occur did you leave that? How did you leave? I went after a while. I told people I was in the technology development people. I said I really Just can't do this any longer. We need to find somebody else and a position opened up so I moved across into the more the processing world of the mainstream of inco business processing of metals and This may be a difficult question, but what what looking back what's either the most difficult to the most challenging Job or tasks you've ever you've ever had Professionally difficult the most challenging task an example that I hear once in a while when asked this question is sometimes when people eventually have Higher up positions or positions where they have to manage people the cool thing is laying people off. Okay, well But it could be absolutely completely different Okay in my career, I counted it up one day Not a great thing to count up but I counted up one day and in my career and I Never was always in working in technology groups, but over the period of my career I probably laid off about a hundred and five people Possibly the worst layoffs were in that I have a head was in the 1997 period of both day off when we had to I Guess totally we had a group of about a hundred people This was in Sudbury when I was hitting the process technology group and we had to discharge about 30 people and We had gone through our list Because the way people normally do this is you make a little list of your performers that you can do without and You work your way down the priority list and Then you get to think okay, you feel comfortable with and I was sitting in a group of about Six or seven people who reported to me directly and we were about five people short And I just basically looked at them and said we have five more to go who are they and That really wasn't very pleasant because all of a sudden people had to and including me had to had to Had to look at to the reality of This is who we know we're cutting into the bone there, but this is how we're going to cut and that was not a nice That was not a nice Scenario to sit there and tell people what it happens every day And the other one I think was a put stressful was possibly the last assignment I had at Valley which was 2012 I got the job of Leading a boat of six or not. I guess a ton of people at a non-muff study Into how we would rationalize the Ontario operations Away from making copper plus nickel to making just the nickel and going to considerably downsizing the operation and The reason this was a very actually very interesting task We had people coming from all over the company from all over the operating division in Sudbury and the Technology Center in Mississauga And we did some really great work. We came up for a great plan And the like would basically my job then Was to design out all the stuff that I had invented and put into place 20 25 years early, I guess or something like that so So I and a group in Sudbury created a novel process for producing copper from Inco materials which we Invented during the 80s commercialized during the early 90s and then I think it's actually good work and quite successful But then we had to for all kinds of back a very reasonable economic reasons had to figure So we just won't make copper anymore So how are we going to do that? And it's a little bit tough to Undesign something that you actually Designed yourself in the first place like you're your baby. Yes, right. Yes. So yes now the so the baby is grown up It's operated for 20 years, but it's no longer any financial reason for it to operate. So how do we shut it down? And then to figure out how to do that perhaps a little bit What was very challenging intellectually challenging organ organization was because you're getting people to work from across the different disciplines and different one but You're also undoing what you took great pride in doing absolutely and that happens too Would you agree that metallurgy and a lot of those companies are very similar Even tied to many of the mining companies that have cyclical business So you're talking about laser layoffs and and it is kind of recurring theme in My interviews is it cyclical like mining? I actually made a for a year ago. I made a little PowerPoint chart in which I mapped onto the same space of the nickel price and when I sent people home for layoffs and They've mapped perfectly or they map perfectly well on top of each other with one exception and that was a time when a executive vice president decided that we the technology group was too large so that we should send people home It wasn't done at a time of low nickel prices and we've done that. Yeah, we should just rationalize but other than that the one-to-one correspondence between the prices of nickel dropping and sending people home and in inco We were probably more fortunate than in some of the other Canadian companies Because doing the 1980s and into the 90s, but especially in the 80s And the 90s the company was very concerned about two issues One that I spent a lot of time on was looking at software baitment from Sudbury. That was a major project in itself and took a lot of research and development effort at the the laboratory pilot plant and commercial scales So that that cushioned us From a lot of the upsets connected with the economy. It didn't it didn't Mean it didn't happen. It just meant it wasn't as bad as it was in many places And then in the 1990s Inco was very interested in growing more and new nickel projects and going into New Caledonia Expanding in Indonesia and once again That's a multi-year-type project. So the work continued as opposed to people who weren't involved in that who were more willing to Say well, we don't need to do the technology. So we were I think relatively speaking. We were cushioned But it still was happened and it is a cyclical part of the business and That's the reality Could you explain the Transformative history of Inco and then into CVR D. Inco and to valet All right, so could you explain the transformative history of Inco from Inco to CVR Inco to valet and Maybe also comment on how this this has become a trend with many Canadian natural resource companies Okay, this is a multi-part question for sure Well, why don't we why don't we go through the the second part of the question in the first place? Yeah It's not just a trend in Canadian companies. It's a trend in companies worldwide We can I made a we can think in the North American companies who have Which have disappeared since my career began American smelting and refining company was a vintage company from the vintage company American company from the early 20th century Basically went semi bankrupt if not bankrupt was bought by Grupo Mexico I think it's still called a soco or parts would have called a soco, but it basically does not exist American Merrill Climax big American company involved in mining Is somewhere I can't remember what organization it is, but it doesn't really exist Or Kennecott copper There's one vestige of Kennecott copper in Salt Lake City. It's called real tento Kennecott Which is one one one one operation one mine and one big mine one very rich valuable mine and and one smelter But it's basically part of real tento uh In Canada, I'm sure Cyprus mining was another u.s company that was reasonable size when I was in the school st. Joe minerals was another one Then come to Canada no randa Kaminko, which is now part of tech Placid dome, which is part of barrack falcon bridge Kid Creek, which is Well that most of that operation for one kid creek are just parts of that still alive Anyway, I'm sure if I thought some more we could come up with some more names. So it's just not a canadian trend It is a global trend the the companies have been Have been merged into what what what people call super major companies BHP billet and real tento And and valley are three mega mining companies. So it is a It is a north american It is a global phenomenon Driven by economies of scale driven by The cost of doing large projects that if you're going to do large projects, you have to have lots and lots of money Uh, the large companies are the ones that tend to have lots and lots of money And interestingly enough in my opinion driven by many of the environmental regulations and uh requirements that companies do lots of pre engineering before they do projects So if you're going to do a project a day of any reasonable size If it's a big project You will be spending five to ten years from the time you make the decision to do the project to the time the project actually gets done Doing all this time you're doing pre engineering. You're doing engineering. You're spending money. You're spending lots of money You may not get approvals It takes a lot of it takes a lot of money and Only companies of deep pockets can afford to do these types of projects Uh, everything has gotten bigger. So the smaller companies have by necessity Had been been been merged Conglomerated into larger companies. So it's not necessarily a it's just not a canadian phenomenon It certainly has has has hit in canada pretty hard Uh My graduate professor my graduate school professor when I saw him a few years ago He said who could imagine That an inco wouldn't exist And just unimaginable to him that inco wouldn't exist I would think that people would have said the same thing about noranda people would have said the same thing about Kennecott But it's just what's happened The um The valley takeover actually Probably had its origins when inco wanted was wanting to merge with falcon bridge and then With uh felps dodge to uh for the sake of getting bigger And then it became apparent that the company was in play And could be it could be purchased Valley which was really formed at the end of the second world war as cv rd Had made a boatload of money from the hour nor business Uh the hour nor business was peaking because of the tremendous demand for steel in china And the ever-increasing prices of hour nor So when when inco became available and Vulnerable it basically made a cash offer or or inco shells Um The merger with falcon bridge and and inco got into um Trouble in the european union concerning uh possibilities of um monopolies uh I'm sure there was some validity to this but it also was a possibility that there were people also protecting their own self interests In in keeping this from happening I believe the biggest concern was around the refineries because then between inco and falcon bridge Virtually all the nickel that would be suitable for making super alloys would be coming from the combined company Inco the the the group had agreed to divest itself of the christianson refinery which was the big value for In the falcon bridge agenda That still wasn't adequate so for the people so That merger was falling apart And then inco falcon bridge sought out to see if they could merge with phelps dodge To make a north american mega company Uh, I think that would have been a good combination What the shareholders at phelps dodge said no to the ceo because they wanted to get their cash money out of it Concerned that this would not generate cash. This would just You know cash for the shareholders. This would generate just ongoing Business because someone had to pay for it. So they wouldn't go for the deal and then of course Inco got purchased my valley falcon bridge got purchased by extrata, which didn't exist when I was a student and uh And phelps dodge got overtaken by freeport So that was that's kind of the summary of the business aspects from a From a technocrat working in a company at the time who didn't have too much involvement in it except to make a one night trip to uh Brussels to attend a meeting with A uo kratz and and talk about a little bit of things but anyway interesting times and uh so valley purchased inco And uh It sort of was a it obviously was a fate to complete And the uh ceo Of valley Came up to Inspect what he purchased And this was an interesting day. I want to make certain I get this story right. He his name was oh, let's see Hogea and yelly valleys from brazil, right valleys in brazilian company. Yes, and hogea and yelly came up And he arranged a meeting with the um with an entwinal office And I was in the mississauga technology center and we were listening in on the phone call And the meeting for him to address the uh The people was about four o'clock in the afternoon And he started talking and it got to be five o'clock in the afternoon And the inco lady who was moderating the call for the thing Try started talking about the fact that you know the concept that people should be That really the the end of the work day was five o'clock and One could hear The body language over the phone as to how this went over because While most the people working in Many of the people working in toronto Would be accustomed to coming in at nine o'clock or 8 30 and working and spending their day at Five o'clock. They would go home. They would even get on the long commuter train home or Go home to pick up their kids that you know at the at the daycare or the babysitting and and and there's kind of an accustomed And of course in brazil the world was quite different for the people working there People come in early, but it's quite common for people to stay at their workplace till seven or eight o'clock Many of the people who work at at valley and in Rio or other places would have Nanny used to look after their children So there was no need to get home and part of the culture was to this was part of their culture. So there was an immediate Media idea of a shift in culture between the two organizations very fundamental in in the world we live in because different Canada is a more egalitarian country than brazil at this point in time. So this so that you don't have the A quote servant class helping the people who are working in the industry so people do more of their own things And uh, so that probably summed up some of the cultural clashes that occurred in the two organizations in a pretty much nutshell a whole different view of life in uh in In how people work together uh the the In in canada, we are reasonably it's not always a case because when I worked in the copper cliff smelter We were talking about people smelter time because meetings in the copper cliff smelter Never started on time or very seldom started on time in the early 80s but generally meetings generally started on time but in brazilian culture they would tell you that In general the most important person for the meeting comes in last and uh So that the meeting really doesn't get started to the most important person there And I would say that probably continued for a while inside ballet canada That culture was and it that pretty well shifted though people Came to understand that the expectation is of a meeting starts at 10 o'clock It starts at 10 o'clock and everybody comes but in the early days There was this cultural divide between how a meeting is organized and who does what And and when they show up and and and like that and that created a fair bit of friction along the way uh the people who came The people who came were in general Well, well educated uh It's a lot of national pride around valley and the idea that A company from a developing country could could could could you know acquire A company in a in a developed country and there was a lot of pride that came into that and That was a little bit of a That that probably robbed a lot of people in canada the wrong way in in terms of the the pride that came along these lines the nationalism Coming into the pride uh My ex-boss in an effort to show pride uh Had the brazilian flag put on the same flag pole as the canadian flag that stayed for a little while until someone looked up and found out that is the Not the right protocol. You cannot you're not supposed to have two flags on the same staff. So Uh, let's see There was another interesting cultural difference amazingly enough I think there was a From a technology development point of view. I found that well Most the people I saw were generally Quite technically competent and well educated. They were also somewhat what I would consider to be naive about what can be done and uh, what What cannot be done very very Didn't have I thought probably not the depth of experience or depth of understanding that the people in canada had simply because of experience because many of them were quite young And and you know hadn't had a lot of experience It is a developing country a very young country coming to canada, which is actually quite an old country in many respects and so there wasn't the same degree of uh Let's call it savoi faya in terms of getting things done and understanding what could be done in terms of technology development A different expectation around labor relations a totally different um Different view of of course there's a different view of labor unions in brazil from what there is in in canada And uh more expectation that labor would be more More amenable to cooperation than it is in canada Of course There was the big strike and valley from I think 2009 to 2010 something in that that lasted about 15 months I believe one of the longest strikes in canadian history And actually uh This is not The most political thing to say to tom, but in my opinion Probably inco needed to take a strike At that point in its development uh The nickel prices of course went into the sewer And the early 80s came back in 1988 Sort of stayed reasonable for the early part of the 90s and got low In the later part of the 90s and then picked up a game in the 2000s uh I I think the I think inco management Was not Probably did probably gave away too much of money during these periods to the point at which too much of the resource was going into the uh Into the labor pool and that that would include staff as well as as as Ollie Walker. So it was probably needed to do something fairly radical to get the system more in balance. And sometimes I think in this world that takes a strike. It was my perception that INCO would not take a long strike because of what it would do to its balance sheet as a standalone company. Maybe this gets back to why you need large companies. But a large company like Valley could take the strike because it would have the money, it wouldn't marvel the balance sheet so much. So Valley was willing to take the strike. I would have probably taken the strike in a different way. I don't think the company went into the strike with enough inventory of very important products. Products that basically Valley was the only producer of. It had about six months supply when the strike started. It needed around one year or 15 months supply. It didn't have it. I don't think that culturally the right approach was taken to dealing with the unions. I think people misunderstood how important the labor movement is to Canadian society, and especially the society around Sudbury, where there's a long history of strong labor and movements and it becomes part of the culture and one has to be really careful when one starts dealing with people's cultural expectations and norms. So I don't think it was necessarily handled right. But I think the strike was probably needed. So that was another example of some, I think, some cultural differences coming to the fore in the world. And I guess two other points I make, one of them was from a very personal view. My personal profession probably did better under the Valley organization than it did under the Inco organization. Well, I got a promotion. I did well in that job. We were quite productive in this period. Valley was more interested in spending money on technology development than the Inco management had been. So we were able to find more money to do very interesting work and very valuable work. So that was what I mean. And I think the other interesting thing, and this is somewhat trivial but very important. Well, yeah, there's one other one. Valley was actually much more interested in having women in important roles in the workplace than the Inco management was. In fact, it was very, very clear that they appointed women to senior positions with the purpose of we're going to have a competent and diverse workforce. And that was much more so much more, much more apparent than it was with the Canadian management in place. We're finally one of the cultural differences that people don't think about is the weather. As far as I could tell, every person who came here from Brazil for much of the winter was cold all the time, or for much of the time. And if you were used to, well, I don't know, when I used to go to Brazil in July or June, the height of the Canadian summer and the depths of the Brazilian winter, the temperatures were roughly the same. So that's what you've been living in. And then you come to Canada, and all you see is snow, ice, and cold from months on end. I think it changes your outlook on life. It makes you wonder, you know, it has to cloud your thinking. I took a fellow to Newfoundland, who was a really good guy. I liked him a lot. And we went to Newfoundland in March, I guess, but there was a vicious wind coming off the North Atlantic. He emptied his suitcase, putting on his clothes. When he finished, he looked like a bag lady, because he was cold. So that had an impact on how people viewed, you know, how they felt about their lives, I think, and that impacts things. So I think he was a member of Provincial Parliament out of Manitoba, or maybe he was a member of Parliament from Manitoba, once asked me if Brazilians and Canadians have the same values. And he was asking it for a reason. I think that's a very interesting question. And my view, my answer was, yes. Canada and the U.S. and Brazil basically have large Judeo-Christian heritages, similar aims for their children. In some respects, Canada, I mean, Brazil is more socially conservative than Canada is. Same ideas about marriage, all the topics are quite similar. So the values, the underlying values are European, all the same. I mean, that's Latin, but it's the same. But how they expressed and how they actualized are quite different in terms of how you work, how you view yourself. Brazilian society is more stratified than Canadian society. But the people there were very proud when they talked about the number of people who had reached the middle class, internationally defined definitions of middle class as a result of the economic boom in Brazil during the 2000s and took great pride that large numbers of people were making their way into the middle class. So the values were the same, but how they expressed were different. How they worked were different. So that created a bit of tension. But lots of good things as well. Could you elaborate a little bit on not only with Ballet, but throughout your entire career about the presence or absence of women in the workplace? The answer to it is in the technology world, in the mining and process metallurgy world, there are actually not all that many women. And these days, people are very concerned about why that is. And I think there are many reasons. When I started working in the 1970s and 1980s in the workplace, you would find lots of pin-up girls, naked women, pictures on the wall. I used to have a very rude drawing on my wall. And the women who would join the workforce at that time would clearly have to put up with that. When I went to Sudbury in 1988, the manager of the smelter there, a man named Jose Blanco, a very, very good guy, had pushed all that out of the smelter so that all the calendars were gone. He was probably one of the exceptions to have done that by 1988. I don't think we really got civilized until the 1990s. But certainly not maybe the late 80s was when the civilization started. Had the same, interestingly enough, about 2005, one of the employees, a male who was working in a plant in Wales at the time called me up. And he was complaining about the naked women in the calendars in the workplace in Wales in 2005. So I don't know where Canada goes in the scheme of things, but certainly in 2005, they were still by up. And I'm sure they have gone by now, but it took a while to do that. One of the things that I did in my last few years at the Incovalley Technology Center was I appointed a woman to run the administrative part of the laboratory. She was almost my age, and she'd been a librarian for 30 years, but I thought she could do this job. And she did a very credible job. She did it for three years. And she told me that I had extended her working life by two years, because if she'd stayed in the library, she was going to quit. But I guess what I'm trying, and the other thing I did, and I think this is interesting too, in that timeframe, I started a program in the laboratory in which we did a lot of renovations and one of them was increasing the number of ladies washrooms. Because when the building was built in the 1960s, there weren't too many women in a, even in a mining research laboratory workspace. So it had very few facilities for women. There was no, there wasn't a real locker room for women. And it had not been changed in 40 years. So we put in more ladies washrooms. In Sudbury, there was a woman engineer who in the technical services building had to insist it on that she needed a shower. Because when you came in the workforce, it wasn't that. Her boss talked the smelter manager into putting in a shower. And this was probably in 1982 or 83. And it cost her $35,000, which would have been a ridiculous cost in that timeframe for a shower. But that was a type of facilities that were available for women. And so the number of women that I actually worked with in the workplace, you could probably count on both hands. And to, obviously, there were underlying exclusions, you know, cat calls and the like, the naked pictures and the like. But also I believe that women have self selected out of the mining world. I don't think it is just, it's not just because of all these, all these underlying social factors and like that. It's because somehow in the mining world, we haven't succeeded in in women have not found it very appealing. And I'm not going to talk about the reasons for women haven't been very appealing. I don't think it's a lot is certainly not a lack of ability or lack of, you know, getting things done when when they make up their minds to there's something in this in this endeavor that has not proven to be congruent with what the bin diagrams are not intersecting very well, in my opinion. I read an article recently that women are, you know, very big into engineering that is connected with sustainability or any sort of engineering that is connected to biological fields, I believe in the educational system, there are more women than men. And the mining, it is about, I don't know, something like 20, 20% perhaps, so maybe even less, I think it's less than maybe 17% women in the in schools in mining. And it's a real shame because we're not taking advantage of that part of the world's expertise. At this point in time, I do not believe it's because of overt exclusion on the part of men. I think it's more that there's not appeal there so so that women self select out of the endeavor. And it makes it difficult then to have a representative workforce. I would have liked to have more women to to to to work in areas of of authority, but not not allowed. Well, thanks for that answer. You briefly mentioned their interest, maybe it was more like in sustainable mining things like that. You actually awarded the Environmental Improvement Award. So could you elaborate on that? What kind of work have you done for improving the environment? The Environmental Improvement Award came from the work that I did as part of the Sulphur Darkside Abatement Project in Sudbury in 1988 to 1993. We talked about it a little bit before when I mentioned about the new copper process we developed. And the copper process in Sudbury was extremely important because the ores that come out of the ground in Sudbury have about equal weights of copper plus nickel. One is unable to completely separate the copper from the nickel and the nickel from the copper. And when we started the project for this SO2 abatement project, there was no real way to treat there was no good way to treat the nickel containing the copper the copper site the copper sulfide containing nickel small amounts of nickel. So we had to develop a new way of processing this copper. And we did this work starting in the laboratory scale in Mississauga in very one pound tests went through the the pilot plant tests at Port Colburn and then tested it commercially in Sudbury and we made it work and it had a tremendous impact on the operation. It saved a bunch of money relative to the options and before we put in the process in Sudbury they had maybe a hundred ground level exceedances of SO2 that would be high concentrations of sulfid oxide at the ground level and that they're committed to have a year about 100 a year so on average every third day except it only really occurred in the summertime. And when we completed this and that was predominantly from the processing of copper and when we put in the new project you process this number drop from a hundred a year down to about 10 per year and eventually went to zero per year. So that was a that was a major that was a major improvement in in the environmental performance from that part of the smelter to get rid of those ground levels and it was a fantastic experience to take something from the crucible up to scale up to the final scale. That's all for Batement Project. The largest sulfur batement project in the world at that time perhaps even still today was a was a was a very interesting time in a career for a fellow with his late 30s early 40s to work on and develop a new process troubleshoot the new equipment and the like and very very interesting work. Interesting partly because we were doing work at the commercial scale and then actually cooperating with a professor at McMaster University to do tests at the laboratory scale and moving things back and forth from the laboratory to the plant. So it was a good time. Looking back we'll just have a few closing questions looking back you can split this in two. I want to ask this it can be a tough question because it can be a very large question but what are you proudest of in life and we can ask what are you proud of stuff in life and what are you proudest of in life professionally? Well we can talk about the profession the process of in life in general is a tough question what are you going to be proud of professionally I am proud of the work I did on the sulfur batement project because that was a little technical challenge but the other thing that I'm I'm proud of and this is interesting because people don't I don't think people fully understand sometimes how things come into reality in in about 1996 it's 97 I initiated a project in Sudbury initiated meaning got approval for project the capital project in Sudbury that would increase the increase the recovery of nickel by about four percentage points and four percentage points of nickel in Sudbury at the time was about eight million pounds of nickel nickel was selling for about three dollars a pound in so that had been 24 million dollars and that's equivalent for small mine and be equivalent for small mine and we did that for capital of expenditure of a few million dollars maybe no maybe it's maybe five million or something like that but it wasn't really much and what's interesting about that was this was not only technical people who worked for me had developed a technical but it was also political and I'm proud of that because we had developed the technology we could not have just taken the technology to people on any particular day and said we're going to do it today we had to wait the right time for the politics for the time to be ripe to make the suggestion and we did that I largely did that and so so you're so proud because we had a a technical aspect we had a political aspect we managed to bring the two together we did something that created the equivalent of a small mine for very little cost and we also have to remember that we were actually throwing away a resource that was being thrown away partly for reasons people didn't know how to do anything better like this but we we saved the resource a real resource that that and and that's something to be you know there's shortages of resources in the world and when you can manage to do something like that for very little cost even if it's not a Nobel Prize winning work or anything like that and if it's that was probably 70% technical but 30% political but the 30% political was the true was the true enabler oh that's that's I think that's something that I'm proud of good and we'll finish with one of my favorite questions if you were to speak to someone much younger like you myself yeah like you yeah yeah yeah what's the most looking back at your career and your life what's the most important life lesson you could give them or piece of advice well I presume you're talking about somebody thinking about their career sure sure well actually it's interesting like before we came in here I was having a discussion with a young fellow on that who just finished his phd here at u of t and geophysics and I was asking him what he was doing he'd been working and he said he was working here in Toronto so what type what are you doing with geophysics here in Toronto I was like measure what the subways do when they go by so no he's working for a company out of Calgary so you know all the action for geophysics is not in Toronto the action is where oil is so and I said you should get you know I gave him a real gears about you know you should ask him why are you staying here well his fiance is a dentist she has a practice he likes the city blah blah blah blah blah and I said you know you gotta you gotta do geophysics where geophysics is being done not in a branch plant you're not going to go anywhere in a branch plant uh I joined inco because inco at the time had the best power metallurgy in the country I took a pay cut to come to Canada I mean a pay cut in real dollars not not in pure dollars I was making not not in equivalent dollars because I wanted to do this because it's what I wanted to do so I think that people yeah don't work in a branch plant do what interests you and go to where the action is and the other thing I tell young people is be sure that your your um your moral compass is aligned with the requirements of your job example we talked about earlier I've laid off 105 people that's not a lot for a lot of people who shut down major corporations but 105 people is not a trivial number either that I enjoyed doing it of course not um did I always approve of when we did it no we didn't always do it at the right time or at place but but other than being difficult and missing a few nights sleep it didn't continue to gnaw at me that I had to do this but I can easily see where people there's clearly nothing illegal about that we always follow the law in fact Incoe and Valley have both followed pretty followed Canadian regulations along those lines but there are many people who would say that I just won't do that and I don't think that young people starting a career should choose they should choose jobs that that they can do the components of the job and not bought all of their their center right or center malls I think that's if you do that you're just asking for trouble yeah well thank you thank you we appreciate it