 Okay, so we're about to begin an interview with Ian Thompson. We are in Vancouver and today is August 31st, 2015. The interviewer, as usual, will be William McCrae. So let's begin first just with a few simple questions. Could you please state your full name? That's it. Ian Thompson. I'm one of those without anything in the middle. Short and sweet. Short and sweet. Yes. I guess, I wouldn't say they lacked imagination, but they were quite content to just give me Ian Thompson. My sister is Julie, so that's the way we came into the world. That's good. And your age, please? I'm 69. 69. And where were you born? I was born in Kingston on Thames in Great Britain. Okay. And as a child, what did your parents do? My father initially was an officer in the British Merchant Navy, but then he left the sea and became managing clerk for a group of lawyers in the city of London that specialised in marine insurance and salvage work. Okay. So using the skills. He retired as captain of, well actually at the time it was the largest ship in the British Merchant Navy, it was the MV Trincula. And as a... My mother? Yeah. My mother was a nurse, but when I was young she was at home. Okay. She went back to work in my late teens. Okay. Yeah. As a nurse again. As a nurse, yeah. And you, as a child, what did you do for fun? What were your interests go to activities? Gosh. Everything. I don't know. I was happy and involved in childhood, I liked sport, liked being outdoors, I liked hanging around in my later teens. I took up cycling, I was competitive at a pretty high level, really enjoyed all of that sort of thing. I enjoyed music, I mean I grew up in the 50s and 60s, music was a big, big deal. Our local band was the Yardbirds. Ah, lovely Yardbirds. Yep. She's so respectable. And all of things like that, yeah. So it was good. Nice. So I had, you know, I enjoyed growing up by and large anyway. Yeah, good. I wasn't too sure about the prep school I went to. They were very fond of corporal punishment, which was not a good thing. Then I went away to boarding school and I'm still in close touch with the people I was at boarding school in fact. I'm going to a reunion in a few weeks' time. And what, academically, what were your strengths or interests from a young child to? I guess I was fairly strong across the board, but in England back then we went through this phase, this thing called O-Levels, which a series of exams you take at 16 and then you go on to sixth form or went on to sixth form and did A-Levels. At A-Level I did zoology, botany and geography. I was really interested in all of those. I actually wanted to do chemistry as well, but you could only do three. And chemistry was, I didn't like the teacher very much. Well, the teacher can absolutely affect a class or an entire subject. Yeah. Okay. So the science is really? Yeah. Pretty much. Yeah. And so tell me a bit about your university education. Okay. Actually, I wanted to be a vet that couldn't get in, didn't have the right combination of stuff, but I really liked physical geography. That had been a big interest. I loved the field work that went with it. We did a couple of field trips when I was in sixth form at school. I was fascinated by fossils, things like that, a lot of people. So I signed up for geology and I went to Kingston College, which is part of London University, and from there I went on to Imperial College of, Imperial College of Science and Technology, where I did my doctorate degree. So my first degree was in geology and my doctorate degree was in geochemistry. And what was your thesis? My thesis was, well, I did applied geochemistry. I was lucky enough to get into John Webb's department at Imperial College, which was a centre for applied geochemistry. At that time, there was a lot of innovation around the development of geochemical techniques for mineral prospecting and mine development, but John Webb was also very interested in the application of geochemistry in health and in the environment. And my thesis was actually, I looked at the regional geochemistry of black shales with particular reference to the incidence of hypochiprocess, which is copper deficiency, molybdenum-induced hypochiprocess in cattle. So I was looking at the way where molybdenum was distributed in the rocks, how it got through into the soil of vegetation and its effect on cattle, which in parts of Great Britain was pretty severe. I didn't actually work in the tiered pastures of Southwest England. My quest was to find out how extensive this was as an issue, and it turned out to be very much more extensive, and a lot of it at what was described as being a subclinical level. So cattle weren't doing very well, but they weren't dying. And we kind of unlocked some of that stuff, and it was kind of fun. I really enjoyed it, had a lot of fun doing that. And I was with a great group of people at Imperial College. And it even kept your interest with animals, too. To some extent. It really did. Yeah, no, no, we did the interaction with vets and soil scientists and all sorts of people like that. Yeah, it was good. And what would you consider your first job? My first job, I was hired, I got to work for Tony Baringer with Baringer Research. That was absolutely wonderful. I was in Toronto. I was hired out to Toronto. So right after your doctorate, you moved to Canada? Why? They offered me a job. Okay, for the job. I went for the job. Also, a chance to work for Baringer. Back then, they were one of the places to be because of their research work that they were doing. They were developing all sorts of things. Now, initially, I didn't do a lot of that. They actually assigned me to a project they had in Fiji, and I went down there and I was the geochemist. I ran the lab down there. In Fiji. That's not bad. No, it wasn't bad. It was a great place to get to learn some of these skills. But then I came back to Canada and I worked as a consultant, kind of a junior consultant. And I worked very closely on the development of some of the crazy toys and gadgets that Tony Baringer was developing in Air Trace, Surr Trace, Laser Trace. A lot of geochemical techniques for benign exploration. Yeah, that was pretty good. So that was kind of my first job. That was eight, nine years of doing that. Oh, and I got sent off around the world. After Fiji, I went off. I was in Brazil for a while. Down there on a technical exchange project actually was funded by CEDA and they were looking for a team of people to get involved in technology transfer and training down there. So we trained a group of people that subsequently became the leaders in geochemistry in Brazil. That's a wonderful group of people. Not a bad first job. No, it was a super first job. And doing all these things in aeroplanes and helicopters and all that. So it was quite fun. Oh yeah. But we build something in the morning and go out and fly and try and make it work in the afternoon. It was fantastic. Not bad. And when you moved to Canada, how did you find Canada and how did you find the work environment in Canada? I found Canada, well, this is Ontario in the very early 70s. I moved here in 1971. So it was a bit, it wasn't a culture shock, but certainly there was a cultural difference. Fascinated by, you know, you could only buy beer and liquor in the liquor stores and there was a policeman standing at the door and another one by the checkout. So you were made to feel very guilty about these pleasures. So that was kind of, that was, that was intriguing. But I actually enjoyed Canada a lot. Once I got a couple of years into it, there was no way I was going back to England. No way. No way. Well, I liked Canada. Canada was good. Very good to me. And so, I mean, this could be your first job or later on, but was there ever a job or a project that sticks out at you as being very dysfunctional in your career? Very dysfunctional. Well, you know, a couple of international projects that were pretty dysfunctional. Yes. I can think of that. Maybe I won't name them. Okay. Yeah. Sometimes things just don't work. Sometimes the people mix is all wrong and it just doesn't work. Get the right people mix. Something is will store. People personality-wise or people skill-wise? Both. Both. Both. And sometimes you can get, you know, both of them going wrong and just going, this is not good. This is not going to, there'll be tears in the water. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have anybody you consider a mentor early on in your career? Oh, several. Yeah. Yeah. Very good friends and good mentors. Early in my career at Barangers, it was Dick Clues. I had a great friendship. I worked for the Ontario Government for a while and Roger Barlow was a great friend and great colleague. At Placer, it was Joe Edie. And various other people were around them. I mean, really good, good, good people. In some other respects, actually it was Neil Hillhouse. I've got to say that Neil was tremendous help to me. Oh, various other people. Then in a broader sense, you know, sort of just understanding the industry and also I got very involved in the professional societies and that would be Don Mustard, great guy. Okay. Great guy. What organizations or societies did you join? Well, I was actually, I should go back. Peter Bradshaw has been a very important part of my life all the way through. He was, I first met Peter at Imperial College. He was, what was he at that point? He was post-doc and then a junior professor and then he went to Barringer. Then he went to Placer Development. I joined Placer Development when things shifted. Placer, a group of us got together and formed a junior company. Peter was part of that. He's been a friend and colleague for a long, long time. It was geochemists, right? And then also there are various other geochemists at Barringer. And so we were involved in the formation of the Association of Exploration Geochemists. That would have been about 1972. A little bit later, I got very involved through the Association of Exploration Geochemists with what was then the Canadian Geoscience Council, which was the collective of all of the professional, sorry, not professional, yes, professional. Not engineers, professional engineers, but the Canadian Geological Society of Canada and people like that. The Geoscience Council, I ended up president of both of those organizations. Then we went through the process of professional registration here in British Columbia. Again, that would have been in the 80s. And I got quite involved with that along with people like Chris Westerman in developing the eligibility criteria. I was on several committees around there. So yes, I've been involved with those things. And so when did you make the leap from Toronto to Vancouver? Because you had worked in Toronto at first, but then made a move to Placer? Yeah, that was in 1981. Yes, 1981. Does that sound right? Yes, it was the end of 1981. And what was your job for Placer? They hired me as their in-house geochemist. So I looked after geochemistry. I was kind of an in-house consultant, but I did a lot of work primarily with the group based out of Vancouver here, but also out of Toronto. And then I provided sort of in-house consulting to the United States, Australia, various other places. Any major projects or tasks that you did that stick out that are memorable? Yeah, getting involved with the Pogra and Missima. There's two big projects in New Guinea. Two big projects of Placer is at that time. I worked on both of those. Up in the North, we did some pretty amazing things here in Northern BC. We did stuff in Northern Saskatchewan. We pioneered some techniques in... Actually, I guess we did pioneer them. What were they? Well, I'd been involved. I joined the Ontario Geological Survey for a three-year time period. And we were working there, working with Stu Avril and other people pioneering or really advancing the use of overburden drilling to get through glacial clay in the Abitibi Belt to sample the glacial tills underneath. So we worked on that. And then with Placer, we did some pretty innovative advances on that technique, working up in the Abitibi, but across the border in Quebec. It was kind of fun. Did you like the... Because often I get a mixed answer. Did you like the lifestyle of always travelling and often travelling to places that were quite remote or not necessarily comfortable? I quite enjoyed it. Because I've had people in the field tell me both that they realised pretty quick that's not what they wanted to do in the field or that living in the bush was the best thing. I was very comfortable in the bush. I wasn't a total bush rat, but I was quite comfortable in the bush. So after Placer Dome, where did you go? Well, I think it must have been around about 1986-87. Placer development and dome mines merged. And at that point, Placer had made me manager of exploration. So I could see an awful lot of political mess associated with that particular merger. And so along with a number of other people who had similar feelings about that, we left and we got together and formed a junior mining company under the leadership of Neil Hillhouse and Lee Freeman. And then we went off and did our own thing for about 10 years. What was it called? Orvana. Orvana minerals. And basically what did you do? Acquire mines? We did an acquisition that eventually got us a mine. But we were explorers and we looked at this. Our role was discovery in advance and provide value added. And the model was succeed and then sell. We were technically very successful. What were the areas or minerals or both that you and that company discovered? We participated early in the life of Orvana. We participated in the search for titanium along the east coast of the United States. And we had a lot of technical success. We were not successful in finding a mine, but we found a lot of mineral. Other people were a little bit more lucky than us. You have to have luck in this. And then we went to Bolivia. And that's where the company ultimately had its most success. I actually found a completely new type of mineralization, which was very interesting. Very exciting intellectually. Unfortunately, it was not a great success from an exploration point of view because we ran into conflict on that one. That was a Peterson project at Chia Pata. But down in the low country, closer to the border with Brazil, another company made a discovery at Don Mario. And we acquired Don Mario and advanced it. And I guess I would say we turned it from a very good prospect into a mine. And I think it's still in production, not at a very high rate. It must be pretty nearly dead right now, but it went into production. And then you got really into more of the sustainable development, didn't you? Yes. And you're one of the founding members of On Common Ground in Vancouver. So could you tell me a bit about that and its story and your role in that? Well, it's more than On Common Ground, but let me go back to... Let me try and take you through this history as I remember it. When I was with Orvana, we had a really good looking prospect at Chia Pata, the Peterson project. It was a first class prospect. There was a lot of disseminated gold mineralization. We were very keen to advance that as quickly as possible. And unfortunately, the project ran into conflict, violent conflict. And we were pushed off the property. What could you elaborate a bit? You want the whole history of that one? Sure. Well, a bit more context. A bit more context. Okay. Well, the Peterson project was sitting on a hill, a small mountain overlooking a broad plane. The broad plane was an irrigation area. And the people down there were getting increasingly concerned that what we were doing was going to affect them. So they organized and they marched. And they shut us down. The next thing was to talk about all of these things and attempt another meeting. Another meeting was arranged at site. Things got out of hand. One person died. And that was kind of it for about 18 months. I was involved in, I had much more of a linguistic capability than most anybody else in the company at that time, at that particular time anyway. I was also a vice president. So I got involved in looking at what had gone wrong and getting us back on the property. Although most of that work was actually in the hands of a Bolivian counterpart down there. But my analysis of the situation to me was absolutely abundantly clear. We provoked that conflict. And I started to really think hard about the way the business was doing business. I said there's got to be a better way. This isn't right. I mean we're talking about now at a time when this whole Indigenous movement, this whole notion of a seriously significant role for civil society and local communities in development was kind of surging. This is right at the beginning of the 90s. This is 93 actually when all of this happened. And we're in Bolivia where there's a history of colonial alienation in the local population. And a cultural tradition of negotiation through confrontation which the company didn't understand. So that got me thinking about things. A year later I met Susan and she's a rural sociologist by training. She was in Bolivia. You'll talk to her about all of this. But she had started, she was down there trying to get a PhD done. She was down there a young single mother, needed money and started, and the mining companies were starting to twig to the need for some sort of social analysis. So she was doing that. And she and I teamed up. I hired her to do some work. It was more her Bolivian sidekick, Elizabeth, who did the work at Chaiapatta. But Susan certainly did some very useful work down there at Don Mario in the low country. And we started to talk about this stuff and we started to collaborate. And at that point I could really see, wow, there is a whole other way of doing these things. So I think it must have been, as it was a few years later, we collaborated on various things. We did a lot of talking about that stuff. And in 1997, at the strong suggestion of some mutual acquaintances, friends, colleagues down there in Bolivia, the two of us turned up at a World Bank meeting in Quito, Ecuador. It was one of the first of these sessions, think tank type sessions. And it was titled Mines and Communities. I wasn't at all comfortable with what was being said there. And Susan shared my thoughts. So I put together a position statement there saying, it's all very well to talk about mines and communities. But by the time there's a mine, there could be anything from five to 50 years of history of exploration and interaction. And in fact, most of the concerns positive and negative about mining are developed during that exploration phase. So what happens in exploration preconditions, a lot of what's going to happen at the mine stage. And that was accepted. There was a bit of a revelation to a whole lot of people. So it was written up in a paper, which was published widely, circulated, and it just brought this incredible response from a whole lot of people. It was like just taking the genie out of the bottle. Is it a good response? Oh, yeah. Well, actually it was a divided response. There was a lot of very positive response, which was very well taken on my part. But there was also a negative. There are a lot of people that didn't want to hear this. And there was a certain amount of, oh, Captain NGO and why don't you crawl back under your rock? You know, we don't really want to have to do this sort of thing. But that was the same year that Jim Cooney coined the phrase social license to operate. In fact, he'd done that just a few months. He coined that phrase in March. In May, in Keto, it was a phrase that World Bank people were using. And we picked it up as did other people. I said, yes, I mean, that says it. It's not enough to just have a legal license. If you do not have the support of the local population, you're not going to have a project. Now, the law and order people, the where is the rule of law people don't like this idea at all. But it's a reality. It's even more of a reality today than it was back then. So yeah, that was very much the turning point. Within a very short period of time, I parted the ways with Urbana because I was off on a different tack. And I got very heavily involved with the prospectors and developers association. I was already involved, but I worked very closely with Tony Andrews, who was the executive director then. And we started to pull this stuff into PDAC. Now they were already doing stuff on the environmental side, which became their E3. But they clearly needed to have something on the social side. So I wrote their first guide on community engagement. That would have been 1999 or something like that. And then the next big event after that, of course, was the MMSD project, which both Susan and I got quite heavily involved in. And I was also kind of the PDAC's person inside the loop because MMSD was really about mines. They didn't have the time, because it was a fairly condensed project. They didn't really have the time to look seriously at the exploration side of things. And they didn't really look at two other areas as much as they could, which was closure. They talked about after closure, but the actual challenges of closure weren't that well. And they completely missed construction, which is this period of social tension and pressure and occasions chaos that companies and communities often just look straight through. They're looking at the mine on the other side of it, not thinking about what's going to happen. Anything in nine months to sometimes as much as three years of sustained change and the arrival of lots of people from outside and all the other pressures that go on. Do you have examples of how, thanks to the new concept that you guys finally tackled, do you have any examples of how to prepare a community or what work is done before there is actually implementation of a mine or a new crew? Not enough. Still not enough, I'd say. Yeah, we've got some examples, but not enough. Just very recently, this has come back on the agenda. A couple of years back I was talking with insurance companies and people who do risk and things like that about the problems with the construction phase. And it's all sort of died off because the industry's gone into a bit of a slump. They're not really doing things very much at the moment. But just in the last few weeks, it's come back on the agenda and hopefully we'll be able to work with some other people. Maybe we can get the insurance people and the engineering companies and the others and the risk management people and the rest of it, plus the operating companies themselves to start to talk about this again. Because the industry is cyclical and mines run out. Eventually you're going to have to start having some new mines just to keep the world supplied with minerals. We don't need another super cycle to justify or to demonstrate the need for mineral resources. Absolutely. So when was On Common Ground officially established? Well, it was unofficially established in 1998 when Susan, Miriam, Cabrera and I came up with the idea of working together. But it was not a real sort of functioning entity until probably 2001 or something like that. I can't remember. I can't remember the exact incorporation but I think it was 2001 when we did that. And then it was substantially reorganized in 2004. And then of course Susan and I agreed to go our separate ways. Actually that was planned. We've been talking about that for several years because I'm a lot older than her. It's her turn to run this thing, right? I mean, Susan shouldn't mention her age but it's a lot younger than me. It might come out tomorrow. It's a lot younger than me, right? And I'm at a point in my life when I like to go back to being a bit of an activist because I still see that there's a lot of work to be done. There's a lot of gaps out there. And what would you consider on Common Ground's biggest achievements while you were there? Cheapest. There were a lot of them. I mean, we were very lucky. We got involved in some very interesting projects. Biggest achievement is... There could be many. Well, there are several things. I mean, we did some stuff early on that was quite innovative and very interesting. Like what? Well, we were getting companies to do due diligence work, things like that. In fact, some of the due diligence stuff remains some of the most interesting. I think we've had a long-term involvement with the San Cristobal Mine and that was part of the background that enabled identification of these normative components of the social license. This legitimacy, credibility, trust stale out of it that we came up with which has been challenged. But so far anyway, it seems to be holding together as a model. It seemed to be more people agreeing with us than disagreeing with us. I think Susan's biggest... And that would be on my side. On Susan's side, it's probably got to be the human rights study at the Marlin Mine that she led for Gold Corp back in 2010. Because that was the first human rights impact assessment, comprehensive one. It was done after the event, but it was published. There are very, very few of these things that have seen the light of day. So it was something of a benchmark right there and then. And then there's the things that I've done outside, under the umbrella on common ground, but kind of outside of it. And that would be the work that Susan and I did with the prospectus and developers association. There's lots of training programs and things like that. And then I created the principles and guidance. I've got to be very careful. I didn't create them. I was the scribe. I was the facilitator for creating the principles and guidance for responsible mineral exploration. And that came out of a workshop that Susan and I ran with Peter Bradshaw. He was involved in that. Tony Andrews from PDAC. We ran a workshop. It must have been in 2007. And what flopped out of that were these eight points. So they said, well, PDAC, what are you going to do about it? And Dennis Jones took up the fight, I guess, inside of PDAC. And later that year, we started what ended up being a two-year process of workshops and focus groups and a lot of interaction about, you know, more than 300 people, close to 400 people were involved in the process of pulling all of this stuff together. But I wrote it. I mean, that was very exciting getting that. And very pleased to have something like that. Okay, industry. Here's some guidance for you. But, you know, what was so very rewarding about that was that the process of doing it, this multi-party process, this stakeholder involvement in all the rest of it, I mean, I think PDAC was quite nervous that their membership was going to push back hard against this. But in fact, there was nothing. And the other thing was the expectation or the fear that there would be a blowback from the critical NGOs. Silence. And the same was true around Susan's work with the Human Rights Study. In this world, silence is almost as good as approval. Because, you know, there are plenty of occasions when people don't like what's going on. They're going to tell you. They'll be quite outspoken about it. So, you know, silence was as good as saying it's okay. So that was very pleasing. And on common ground, at least when it started, how did it basically, who would hire on common ground? And how did that work? We were hired, was it mostly by the mining companies? Yes, it was mostly. Most of the work's been done with the mining companies. We've worked for the mining companies. We've worked for commercial banks. We've worked for the international finance organizations like IFC, IFC World Bank. Inter-American Development Bank. EDC, Export Development Canada. We've actually worked for communities on occasions. So, yeah, I was going to ask communities to hire you as well? Yeah, we've only got one that I can tell you about. Now, we do a lot of work that I've got to say. I can't really talk too openly about some of things. And we did one project. That was actually a very satisfying project too, with a non-governmental organization. That was pretty good. The community we worked for was in Avahub. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. And so you just spoke about the standards and guidelines that you wrote. Do you have any examples of any of the concrete examples of social issues that you've seen or know that can arise from exploration? Well, there are many. Gosh. The most common one is a mismatch of expectations, which can create a lot of tension on occasions that can boil over. We've seen issues related to land, employment, information. Gosh, it's so diverse. It's really difficult to say any one thing. A lot does come back to finding ways of matching expectations. But the biggest problem really comes from a failure to interact effectively, to have genuine engagement, a sort of engagement that satisfies both parties. Companies by and large want to call the shots. They want to be in control. They are often reluctant to bring the other players to the table in a way. We used to talk about dad, which was decide, announce and defend. And dad should be dead, should have died long time ago. But it's still around, unfortunately. But I think the companies are getting better. If you compare the situation in 1997, say, at the end of the previous cycle, where we're at now, we're in another world. But there's still room to move because this is a social phenomenon. So everything is in motion. So it's not as if you can say, well, done that. Tick the box. You've got to keep moving. And today, having experienced in this field, how do you think the media and the general public, so never mind the specific communities that may be living with mining communities are affected by them. But the general public, how do you think they portray mining in the natural resource world today? Do you think it's gotten much better? Do you think there's still a big disconnect? Let's try and work our way through this. Because the professional, the Mining Association of Canada, in particular, run surveys fairly regularly to try and find out where things stand. Mining is in a better place in the esteem of public today than it was. It's no longer behind the tobacco industry. There seems to be a bit of ambivalence out there, quite honestly, because people recognize the need for the mining industry but aren't necessarily always happy with the way it operates. The media, of course, will always want to inform and entertain at the same time. I mean, it is a business for them. Well, there is a focus on where things go wrong, and unfortunately they continue to go wrong too often. The consequence of that is that the industry is measured not by its highest performing characteristics, but by its lowest performing units. We can argue whether that's fair or unfair. But yeah, that's the way it is with media. But I think the industry has actually improved an awful lot. And I would kind of describe them out there. We have some leading companies, large companies and small companies, that do exceptional things. They are sort of people you want them working around you because you know that it's going to work out well. You have a large group that I continue to call the dazed and confused because I know they've got to do something that's not always confident and sometimes not able through resources or timing or whatever to actually get it right. But they're heading in the right direction and then we've got a laggard group and some of them just don't care. Certainly there always has been a part of particularly the exploration industry that's simply in there to mine the marketplace and not necessarily to find a mine. They don't really care how they do it. As long as they can make it in the marketplace, they're going to be fine. Some of them are really bad news. Sometimes these conflicts are the result of bad luck but sometimes and too often their result are poor practice. And today, are you retired? What do you still do for work? Because a lot of people in this business tell me they're retired but they're not really retired. I don't want to be retired. It's far too interesting. It really bends my brain. At the moment, there's not very much going on. I don't think anybody in this business is particularly busy right now. As you were saying, it's pretty cyclical. It's certainly down at the moment. I do have some active contracts right now but I'm also busily writing a book with Bob Boutier looking at writing a book on the social license phenomenon. I get involved in various other bits and pieces. Keep me out there. You've got my business card there. I'm definitely available and would be very happy to help in any way I can. I don't think people ever retire in this business. No, like I said, it's a recurring theme. If I ask that question or it comes up that now they're retired, they're not actually retired. They're consulting or no, they're never fully done. They always got something and I've spoken to 91, 94 year olds and they're still retired but they're still working. It's a trend in this business. In your opinion, are there any events, people, inventions, contributions, disasters, anything really that you think must be mentioned when discussing the modern history of the natural resources in Canada? Are there any, whether they have to do with you or not, in your opinion basically? I've been talking about that a little bit recently. The 1960s and early 70s in Ontario were amazing because that's when the geophysical industry really blossomed. There was this very interesting rivalry with the Scandinavians around geophysics as a technique and some of the toys that were developed then, I'll be a little bit precision-scrolling them toys, they're still in use today. All that's really changed is the electronics that goes on around them and the same was true with geochemistry, the geochemical techniques that were developed in the 60s and the 70s. Those techniques have found a lot of minds and will continue to find a lot of minds and that time period was pretty important I think for the Canadian mining industry. I think the next kind of landmark would be late 80s, sort of inco-smoke stack and a few other things and the final resolution to a 30-year struggle over environmental matters. What's that, poor coal mine? Well, poor coal mine would be part of it but I'm thinking of a super stack up there at Timmins, which was a huge investment. Technically, they didn't have to make it and things like that. But there was also something of a generational shift in the industry at that time and a group of managers and executives arrived who stopped saying, what do you mean we have to do that? You're going to drive us out of business. This costs too much, et cetera, et cetera. They were pushing back continuously against the environmental legislation that was being built up. They just said, we're going to do that and they very quickly not only said we're going to do that, we can make money doing this. We can be more efficient doing this. I think that was a pretty important turning point and there's a great deal of, I think, justified pride in environmental performance as a consequence of that. That was part of the error that caused so much social problem in the early 90s and in the move into new markets, particularly into Latin America because the company sailed forth with, you know, we can do environment, right? Figuring that that's what was needed. But it wasn't enough. There was this social side as well. And right now there's sort of what working are, looking at things through the lens of the social license, which is the perceptions of the stakeholders, the perceptions of the communities about what is acceptable to us. Acceptance means we'll tolerate it. There's a higher level of approval. Approval, you say, that's good. But you want to at least be at that minimum level of toleration so you can do business. That's if you're the company. So that's what you're looking for. Now, everything with some rare exceptions that I've come across has said that the environment is a given. You don't actually get any brownie points for being environmentally responsible. It's expected. You get your brownie points when you go beyond that. You get the brownie points when you're not only environmentally responsible but you've set up a community monitoring committee that works with you and you jointly do the monitoring and all the rest of it and they can really believe what's going on and then sometimes it gets even more advanced than that. There are some situations where communities have taken over environmental sampling, right? Things like that. Then you get some brownie points. The real brownie points come from whether people feel that they're being respected, whether they're being included. These are issues of social justice that have emerged as being kind of the determinants and social justice has these two aspects. There is procedural justice which is how you go about doing things and you have distributive justice which is who gets what as a result of whatever's going on and you need to get the balance right on that. So the companies who put a lot of emphasis on philanthropy aren't getting the process side right. There are people who do lots of consultation but don't give enough wrong wording but who aren't really working out there on the distributive side of things. They're not getting it either. You've got to get that balance right. That seems to be where we're at right now and I think that's where we're likely to see the problems when the money comes back into the system. There's a lot of us, the social practitioners, the working contacts that I have in there. There's a number of us that keep in fairly frequent contact. We're really concerned that right now the industry has kind of taken a step back. They're feeling bruised and battered financially. They've got back on things all over the place when the money comes back into the system, particularly the explorers who many of whom they probably haven't been out on their property in a couple of years now. When they go back and say, hey, we're here, they may not in fact be welcome or they may well have to go back and rethink how they engage and rethink how they relate to things that keep moving. Expectations are shifting out here in communities. We see that even here in British Columbia where things are not static in any way at all. I'll end on just a couple of questions. One is what would you consider to be, what are you proudest of in life? Our children. Yeah, good answer. We'll go professionally to make it easier. Professionally? What are you proudest of? Well, several things. I don't know, I'm proudest of... That's difficult. I've been very lucky. I've been perhaps in the right place at the right time on a number of occasions. I've been involved in pioneering a few things, discovering a few things. I have real difficulties pointing to any one thing. Yeah, that's a tough question. It could be multiple things, though. We did some pretty neat stuff at Barringer. Being part of that team was very exciting. Very good. When I worked with the government, it was the overburden drilling. But we also... I've been so lucky in a lot of things. We did some work on Acid Lakes. And working with a guy called Mike Dickman, professor at Brock University, we developed a paleo-ph indicator. We could look at the history of those lakes and see that some of them actually had been Acid in the past. There wasn't just modern anthropogenic acidification. There were other processes in there. That was pretty astonishing stuff. That was really interesting research. At Classer, working at Porgra and Messmer, the stuff in New Guinea, that was eye-opening for me. It was really a lot of fun. With Orvana, Don Mario, that was pretty amazing stuff. But also working with them changed my life. So that was really quite something. Susan and I wrote a series of papers that have been very widely published, that are referenced at any rate. That's very satisfying. There's the work with PDAC, the Principles and Guidance for Responsible Exploration, and then more recently coming up with the stuff on the social license. So I've been very lucky. All of those things have been very pleasing. Pretty happy with your entire career. Yeah, it's had its ups and downs, but it's always been interesting. And that's the most important thing. I wouldn't want to retire. Absolutely. If I had ill health, I'd retire. If I was bored, I'd retire. Some people are absolutely thrilled to retire. I live on one of the Gulf Islands where there are a number of people who are very, very happily retired. I'm not one of them. I'm not retired. Whatever floats your boat. Last question, and I'd like to ask this one. If you were to speak to someone much younger, like a student, for example, what's the one piece of advice or life lesson you could give them? Be flexible. Don't be too rigid. I think even more so these days, being flexible and responsive and aware will enable you to deal with the things that are going to come at you. Good to. Is there anything else you'd like to add? I don't think so. I'm not sure where we've been on this discussion. Did it everywhere? Yeah, we've been everywhere. That's okay. I don't think I've got anything to add. Well, thank you very much.