 Alright, so beginning an interview with Mr. John Fleming, we are in St. John's, Newfoundland and the date is November 27th, 2015 and the interviewer will be William McCrae. So to begin, could you just please say your full name? John Michael Fleming. And your age please. I'm so before. And where were you born? I was born here in St. John's and although this is just where my mother came to give birth, my childhood home was really on Belle Isle, also known as Wabana, which isn't too far from St. John's. So that's where you grew up? That's where I grew up, yeah. And what did you do as a child? What were your go-to activities? My go-to activities, Belle Isle is an interesting place. It's an old mining town, it was an iron ore, a submarine, iron ore mines that are since long, but it was also a very rural place. And right in the vicinity of where I lived, there were sort of humorous horses and people rowing things, building things and whatever, and I went from one to the other and hung out a lot at a sort of a general dealer kind of grocery building supply place, which was quite near where I lived. And just helped out there and did whatever I could to be close to the horses. Right, so explored, helped out. And what did your parents do? My father was a pharmacist and he had a drugstore around Belle Isle. He didn't call themselves pharmacists and they were drugists. And so he became a drugist before Confederation, of course. And so the rules changed for him a little bit after Confederation. My mother was a stay-at-home housekeeper. And we lived quite near the store, so we just walked everywhere. And so you said you lived in a mining town. Was there an interest for that kind of thing early on in your life? I can't say that I was particularly interested in mining, but mining dominated the town. It was the Waban iron ore mines, which are well-known in mining circles. It supplied iron ore to the Sydney steel mills and also to places like Europe and operated from 1895 up to 1966. And so I grew up in the middle of that, so certainly knew about it, knew a lot about it, but I didn't and I worked there after I graduated for a year and a half. But until I went into geology, I really didn't have much interest in the mines at all. What were your interests academically as a child? Oh, they reigned all over the place. I don't think I was particularly interested. So I can't say that I had any one favorite subject. And from high school into after that, what were your plans? What were you thinking of doing? I didn't particularly know, to tell you the truth. I came to St. John's to go to high school. I went to a boarding school here in St. John's. And when I graduated from there, I went to university at St. Francis Abbey in Nova Scotia. In my first year, I did just a general liberal arts program. And switched to geology in the second year. It wasn't anything I thought a lot about doing beforehand. And switched to geology, I guess, mainly because a friend of mine who was also from there, I was doing geology and it seemed like an interesting thing to do. So I said, oh, you'd better try. So really, you hadn't had previous interests necessarily in geology? I can't say that I did. I was very young. We were all young graduating high school now. I was only barely 16 when I started university. So you're kind of learning what you'd like to do. So did you specialize in anything in particular? If I can say to a specialized in geology, I specialized in petrology. Petrology of volcanic rocks primarily. And that's what I did my master's thesis on. But I quickly became an armchair geologist because I went to work for government and became sort of an administrator or manager more than the geologist. What would you consider to be your first employment and your first official job? My first job in geology, I mean? Sure. Well, it would have been a summer job. I worked for the Geological Survey of Canada in the field. I worked both here in Newfoundland and I worked in Quebec in the Northwest Air Force. My first job after graduation was back in my hometown and working for the Dominion Steel and Coal Corporation. There were just two geologists, the senior guy and myself, and we did all the geology for the mine. Can you tell me a bit about where you, as a summer student, the areas where you explored as a geologist? As a summer student, I worked... My first job was working in what's called Sandy Lake West Half Sheet, which is in Central, Western, Newfoundland. And this was working for Dr. Ward Neal, who was well-known in the geological circles, who was then with the Geological Survey of Canada. Subsequently, he became head of the geology department at no more than university. My second year, I worked for the Survey. I was in Quebec in the Eastern Townships, working for a guy who was a prophet at McGill. And just, let me see, after I graduated, I guess, after I went back to university following my job on the island, I ended up doing geology again, doing a masters, and I had worked for somewhere in the Northwest Territories. How was that? That was good. That was quite different. Way up in the barren lands and very isolated, but quite interesting. I asked this question to geologists, especially, because I often get two types of geologists. You have the ones who... They say their entire life, that's what they love to do, is to be out in the bush, never be at the same place, never have a stable office. Or the opposite, say they've tried the bush and it's enough for them. They want more of a stable location, not necessarily in those crazy temperatures and stuff like that. What's your take on it? Well, I guess I ended up in the latter group, not because I didn't like going in the bush or anything, but the latter is certainly more conducive to family life. And early on in my career, I went to work for the government in the geological survey there, and we were a growing, just a small group, that grew into a rather substantial geological survey. So I quickly became involved in the work of just establishing that survey and organizing it and getting going. And so in the process, didn't do a whole lot of fieldwork after that. So how did you start working for the government? Again, it was just a matter of convenience at the time. I had just finished the coursework for my master's degree, and I still hadn't finished my thesis. I was getting married, and the job came up in the department of what was then called Mines, Agriculture and Resources at the Newfoundland government. So it seemed like a good idea, so I went to work there, and 30 years later I left there. And what was the position when you took it? I was a staff geologist, and did all manner of geological work that came up. But as I said, it was a fledgling geological survey, and it was an interesting time in Newfoundland because things were changing politically dramatically, things were changing economically, and it was an opportune time to think about re-establishing the geological survey. There had been a very active survey in Newfoundland for the previous hundred years or so, it started in 1867, but had gone into remission, if you will, at Confederation because under the terms of union between Newfoundland and Canada, Canada was responsible for geological surveys. But it quickly became evident that the geological survey of Canada wasn't going to be doing the geology of the province in sufficient detail to be able to support mining interests, for example. So it was necessary to really start to do things here. And so a variety of interests came together, as I said, and there was a huge political change when the government of Joseph Smallwood finally gave way, and we had a more business-like government established, and they were very interested in doing things that were going to diversify the economy of the province. So the whole thing led to an effort to re-establish the geological survey, and that's what we did, and we were quite successful at it. Do you remember roughly when that was re-established? Yeah, fairly precisely. I went to work for the Newfoundland government in 1966, and the Smallwood government finally fell at the end of 1971, I think. And in the interim, we were very active, our little group, within the Department of Mines in sort of planning what might be done and what could be done. At the same time, there was a developing interest in the government of Canada in regional development, and they established the Department of Regional Economic Expansion. And it was that department, which is called DREAM, that provided most of the funding for the work by ourselves and the Geological Survey of Canada to really get this thing going in Newfoundland. And it established a full-fledged, fully-functional geological survey eventually, which is still going quite strong and doing good work. But provincially, more of that. Provincially, yeah. It's funny too. I mean, I'm no geologist, I mean, I've heard Newfoundland has some of the, I mean, some of the most interesting rocks and lands in the world, some of the oldest, right? Yeah, some of the oldest in Northern Labrador, and not the oldest rocks, but getting there. Yeah, some. Yeah. And so there's quite a variety, because Newfoundland, the island of Newfoundland, is part of the Appalachian Belt, the Appalachian-Gelderonia Belt, which stretches all the way from Texas to Scandinavia. And whereas Labrador is entirely a part of the Athenian Shield, where a whole variety of free-cambering geology. And so it's, yeah, it's geologically, it's a very interesting place. So can you just take me quickly through your career, your 30-year career in the government? And then maybe I'll stop you here and there. Well, as I said, I started working there in 1966. I worked for the Mines Branch, or Department of Mines, or various iterations of it. It was Mines, I wrote some resources first when I started. But it became other things, natural resources, Department of Mines, whatever. And I was in that department until 1989, that was. I started in the, what was called the Mineral Development Division, which became some mineral resources division, I guess, eventually renamed the Geological Survey. I became director of that division, director effectively of the survey. Then I became assistant deputy minister of Mines. What year I don't remember. I then became, I moved from there to the energy branch and I was deputy, or assistant deputy minister of energy for a while. And involved in things like energy conservation and a whole lot of things like that. And then I went back to the Mines side of things as deputy minister. What kind of responsibilities did you have as deputy minister of Mines? Well, I was responsible for holding, it was then a department of Mines, Department of Mines only. And so I was responsible for the whole department and working with the minister and the premier at the time. And then the government changed again in 89 I think. And that's when I moved to the department of environment and became deputy minister of what was then called environment and lands. And I was there until I left the government in 1996. Can you tell me a bit about the energy conservation portion of your career? Well, there were sort of multiple sides to energy at the time. Our offshore industry were just getting going. It was just exploration at the time. And primary responsibility for that was hived off to a separate institution called the Petroleum Directorate. And what we had left in the department was an energy branch that was responsible for everything else. There was a great interest at the time, both in the province and again federally, in promoting energy conservation, sustainable energy development, that kind of thing. So again, it was a federal provincial agreement that we spent a lot of time administering energy conservation, and I forget the exact title of the agreement now, but we spent a lot of time and a lot of money looking at alternative energy sources. I remember we put some money into peak development, promoting greater levels of energy conservation, the residential sector, the business sector, and government. Have you seen that change throughout your career? Especially the residential or the conserving energy from a user perspective? Oh, very much so. Yeah, there was very little bit interest then. And one of the personal developments out of that was in the early 80s. Early 80s. I was wondering if I got my ears screwed up. No, I haven't. No, I'm sorry. I was 80m of energy sometime in the early 80s, and my wife and I ended up building a new house. We had already built one house, and so we decided to build it as our 2000 house, which is one of the things that the department was promoting. And so I guess out of what I learned as a person working in the field I learned the benefits of doing that, so we're still living in that house 31 years later, and it's paid off immensely in terms of energy costs. Yeah, I mean, it is the highest use of energy in Canada is heating and cooling. So you get that done properly. It'll save a lot of energy and money in the long run. In industry, of course, there's been a sea change in people's use of energy and the costs involved just drive that primarily. Okay, and you mentioned other sources of energy. During your time, were there any sources of energy that were truly developed? I can't say that it was. Newfoundland is not a particularly good place to develop alternative sources of energy. We did, as I mentioned, we tried to promote the use of peat as a fuel, which had a limited degree of success, but the peat bogs that were eventually turned into sources of fuel have since become sources of horticultural peat and a material for absorbing oil in oil spills. So it had economic spin-offs, but not in the energy area that we anticipated. And a different question here altogether, but throughout your career, can you think of a period or even a specific project where it didn't go as you wish or it was quite dysfunctional? Well, I guess my first job and my first permanent job was with a slightly dysfunctional organization because the iron ore mines in Bell Island had been experiencing some difficulty for quite some time. These were underground mines and submarine mines. At the same time, they had the huge open pit mines developing in Labrador and in Brazil. They could produce ore much more cheaply than we could on Bell Island. So Bell Island was really seeing its, the Bovana mines were seeing its last days. It finally closed in 1966 and this was about three years after I left here. So it was an interesting place to work, but it was, I think you would see the writing on the wall. So it was a little dysfunctional, as you said. Because people could kind of see the end. Yeah, yeah. And a lot of people were very nervous. It was a big community. Bell Island on one stage was 14,000 people. And it's probably now about 3,000 people or 4,000 people. And so the closure of the mine was quite traumatic. An interesting side effect of that was after I went to work for government, we hosted the Mines Ministers Conference for the first time, I think it was in 1976. And the Mines Ministers Conference was a rather large affair then. Each minister would come from all the provinces with a large delegation that included their own officials as well as people from the industry. But the theme of the conference that year was the social effects of mining. And so we took them on all to Bell Island to show them what a former mining town looked like. So it was interesting to go back to what was my hometown and the place where I worked for a little bit and show all these people what that looked like. And we actually held a series of talks in a hall that was about 200 yards from what was our family home. And it was called the CLB Armored. And we had some talks in there and drove people around and gave lunch. Anyway, it was a good lesson in the social effects of mining. Yeah, I know, feeling pretty sad to go back to a community. Yeah, it happens a lot while we were mentioning the Atlantic provinces. But I mean, it happens a lot in the natural resources world, period. Have you joined throughout your career? Have you joined any professional organizations? Yes, the standard ones. I guess I'm a member of the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy. Also a member of Geological Association of Canada. And I've been a member of the Prospectors Developers Association and whatever. Have you played any roles? Yeah, I played a role in not the Prospectors Developers, but certainly CIM and GAC was active in, there was a local branch of the Geological Association of Canada here. And I served on the executive of that and organized things. We've hosted the national meeting of the Geological Association of Canada and the Mineralogical Association of Canada a couple of times. And I think I chaired the committee to organize the first one in 1988. And the same with CIM. There's a very active CIM branch here, been active since the early 50s. And I chaired that so maybe four or five years ago, I guess, it has an annual meeting. That's one of the noteworthy ones. You can talk to people across the country and a lot of people will enjoy having come here from the CIM, Newfoundland. Yeah. Completely different question here, but you might have a neat perspective considering you've grown up in a mining community, basically a community that's dependent entirely on mining and then working in the government throughout your career. But do you believe there's a disconnect between the general public and the natural resource world in Canada? Somewhat, I think. Mining is a hard sell for a large portion of the public. I kind of like to refer to mining as kind of the, it's kind of the seal hunt of the industrial world. You know, the hunting of white coat seals, which was an established industry here for many years, has gotten a bad rap from a lot of people. Very hard for urban people to understand. And I think the mining industry is somewhat the same way. The industry, mining industry is mostly remote from urban populations. People don't know very much about how it's done. They know it digs big holes. They hear about the disasters. And they don't often hear about the very positive aspects of mining and mining exploration. And so I think it's a constantly an uphill battle for the industry to make itself heard in a positive way, to let people see it more for what it is, not just see the negative sides. Do you think companies in the industry play a big enough role, in that job of expressing that to the public? It certainly become a hell of a lot better. Companies have become much more adept at, well, every company these days has to have, before they can operate, we need our social licenses, which means we have to establish a positive relationship with the public that we're dealing with in the immediate area. And so companies work, most companies work very hard at doing that. And whereas I think historically, companies paid very little heed to that. And they weren't awfully different from the rest of heavy industry in that respect. But whereas a lot of people might learn a lot about manufacturing of various sorts, they're not exposed to mining a whole hell of a lot. So it's constantly an uphill battle, I think, for companies to establish those positive relationships that they need. But it has improved enormously. Companies have become a hell of a lot better at doing what they need to do. Yeah. And if you look, Beth, you just mentioned the social responsibility, the license to operate, social license to operate. That, I mean, is kind of a given now with every single company. You have these almost departments or people that are hired specifically for sustainable development and things like that. Yeah. You also have the laws that have changed, you know, government. They have the laws of change, and they're changing even now, becoming more stringent. So back to a bit on this topic, you became a consultant. After I left government, yeah, I became a consultant, which for some people is a euphemism for unemployed, but managed. In this industry, it seems like the first stage of retirement. Right, yeah. But not real retirement. Right, yeah. But as consultant in the national resource and environmental management, can you talk about a few of the big cases you've worked on, a few of the interesting cases? Well, I did, environmentally, I did a couple of projects for the Canadian Council of Ministers of Environment, which proved to be interesting. That's an organization that I had worked with as a Deputy Minister of Environment, including hiring a new Executive Director for the organization, which led me to use my rather limited French and to interview people and so forth. But so that was quite an interesting thing to do, and to find the right person that sort of was able to hit it off with people from all these provincial and federal jurisdictions. In the, on the mining side of things, or the geological side of things, I did some work for the Department of Mines again and looking at the Geological Survey and making forward plans, and we convened a large meeting of the survey and its users to talk about the survey and what it might do and what it should do and so forth. Now, while working as director of the Promises Geological Survey and Deputy Minister of the Department of Mines, were there any rules or regulations that you worked on or you saw go through your department during your... Oh yeah, big time. What are the impactful ones? Well, another change, I mentioned that at the time that we were trying to re-establish the Geological Survey, there was big political change in the problems. And one of the huge changes that came under that was the total revamping of all of the legislation with respect to exploration and mining. Before that time, the province had tended to rely on giving large concessions to fairly... to individual companies to explore. And that made the province very beholden to a few large companies. So what we did in the early 70s was to scrap that system and put in place what would have... a system that would have looked more similar to what was going on over across the rest of Canada, involving... putting in place a claim-staking system and all of the... that didn't exist yet? There had been provision for claim-staking, but it really wasn't used very much, and we had to totally re-design the system. And I was involved in that. I didn't lead that particularly, but I was certainly involved. It was a very interesting combination. Enjoy the meetings with industry. We, for several years had this CIM Youth Land Branch meeting that I mentioned. We would have an annual meeting when we'd kind of get together with the industry and take our links for what we were and weren't doing. And I really enjoyed those meetings. They were really a lot of fun because we were making a lot of progress. But the industry always has concerns and they would give us help for a while. Yeah, because you can often be... It was a very positive relationship overall. Yeah, because you can often, I guess, you can be seen as the good guys and sometimes the bad guys. Right, yeah. And then eventually we changed not only the claim-staking system, the land system, but the whole taxation system changed. There had to be special provisions put in to deal with these large concession holdings that I talked about. And so by the end of, or by the mid... By the end of the 70s, the whole system had been totally changed. And it's been really interesting since I retired from government. I've gotten involved in exploration myself through a small exploration company. So it was really interesting to look at it from the other side and really nice to see that it's a very workable system from both respect to both the government and from the point of view of companies. And what's the name of this company? It's Quarterstone Capital Resources. And what do they mine? Well, we don't mine anything. We're an exploration company, so we're called a junior mining company. What are the target minerals or deposits you look for? Well, at the moment, we don't have any interest in Canada at all. We're entirely active in South America, primarily in Ecuador. But we started the Newfoundland, had numerous projects here over the years that obviously weren't greatly successful over when we would still be here. But anything that you can make a dollar in, essentially, we'll... But it's primarily gold, precious metals, and base metals. And having worked for both and with both the government side and the private side or the industry side, what are the big differences between both? I hear often also another big difference is having worked in or with academia versus industry. So are there big differences whether they're conflicting or not between the two sides? Between government and industry, yeah. Well, I mean, yes, yes, huge differences. It's a totally different atmosphere. When you're working for government, your primary role is to advance games of whatever government is in power and to make sure that the legislation that's in effect is administered completely and fully and efficiently and competently. Whereas in industry, of course, your role is to try and make sure you're a particular company, is making money, essentially. But we were able to, when I was with government, we seemed to be able, and I think we're still able in Newfoundland, to work cooperatively with industry. And so it very seldom ended up as an antagonistic kind of relationship. It was more a very cooperative working out problems kind of relationship. One thing that surprises me when I'm having left government and working in the private sector is the kinds of things that are hugely problematic for companies like ours. I once thought that the geology of things was the most important factor. And of course it is in the sense that if you don't have favorable geology, you don't have deposits. But the influence of politics and markets on what a company can achieve is immense. And I wouldn't have expected it to be so important before I left government. Do you have an example of looking at your, the small company now? Well, right now, all small companies are experiencing a hell of a problem trying to raise money. There's no risk money out there. It's very difficult to come across. And lots of companies like ours are going under. It's very difficult just to survive in this atmosphere. So you can have a very attractive deposit that would be very attractive to normal economic circumstances. But in this environment, it's not worth a hell of a lot because you can't raise money. Here's a loaded question, but again, no wrong answer. But that's a question about how you see the natural resources in Canada. And that's, in your opinion, are there any events, people, inventions, disasters, anything whatsoever that you deem important, that you deem it must be discussed when talking about the natural resources in Canada or its history? Well, I would tend to focus on the things that I am familiar with. Absolutely. In terms of the operating industry, I'm sure that there are particular events that affected the industry's approach to having safety, you know, events like changes in steel mill technology that saw huge changes in the iron ore industry. I think that the establishment and operation of geological surveys is a, is an extremely important element of the industry. And here in this province, we've certainly seen the benefits of having and maintaining a strong geological survey that has paid enormous dividends to what, to the province that had to go the long way. Thank you. Last question before our closing questions, but that's the question of women. Often there aren't as many women in the natural resource industry as men, but that has, however, changed with time for the better. How absent or present were women throughout your career and how and if that changed? It's changed enormously. Early in my career, women were almost absent, certainly absent from levels beyond like secretarial jobs and, you know, the lowest support job. I think when I worked at DOSCO, for example, my first mining job, I worked for secretaries. I don't think there were any women. The same in the government when I went to work there. But that has changed enormously now. And in geological circles, I think that women outnumber men at the university level, and the person I went to work with was a field party involving females, or sometimes now entirely female was unheard of. And now, thankfully, it's quite common. Yeah. I know you now have, I mean, in terms of university in general, there are more women graduates, but especially in the STEM areas, there are more and more women. So this question also could be brought by, I can split it in half. What are you proudest of in life? And we could say in life and also professionally. Well, I guess I'm proudest of my family, my kids, and I've had the opportunity to help a few young people along the way. And I've really enjoyed doing that. And I think that's something that I feel that I've been quite a positive for them. Professionally, it would be my work with the Geological Survey. We were able to, I thought I was involved in a group that was able to see, as I said that we established for the Geological Survey, and that's something that is was still the test of time is, I think, something that I'm quite proud of. And if you were speaking to someone much younger, like a student, for example, what would be the piece of advice or life lesson you could give them regarding their career or if they're thinking of the natural resources or not? I don't know if it doesn't pertain to natural resources particularly, but I think the most important thing I think for young people is to try and understand yourself as well as you can. Understand, know yourself well. And know what you like and what you don't dislike. And I think too many of us end up doing things kind of willingly because we're just not sure where we're going, you know? So I think it's really important, too, for young people, for kids to learn themselves first and then they can decide from there what career paths are most appropriate for them. And is there anything else you'd like to add? Anything to share? No, I don't think so. I think I've had a very rewarding career that I got into somewhat accidentally. Maybe I didn't know myself as well as I should have, but it's turned out very well for me. I've done some interesting things and still enjoying it. I feel like most people who love their careers it's often accidentally, so it's not a bad thing. Yeah. I like my favorite quote, I guess. There is one from Teddy Roosevelt that says, do what you can with what you have and where you are. Don't spend too much time wishing that you were somewhere else doing something else. Work with what you've got. Well, thank you.