 here we go okay so we are at the University of Alberta about to interview Mr. Eric Newell and we'll start with a few just opening questions so could you please state your full name and age please yeah my name is Eric Patrick Newell and I'm 70 years old I was born December 16th 1944 and where were you born I was born in Kamloops British Columbia it was during the Second World War and that but I grew up in Victoria British Columbia and went to the University of British Columbia for my engineering degree okay and actually you said you grew up during the Second World War do you are there any moments you remember no I was only one years old okay yeah yeah and my dad my dad was stationed in Kamloops and that's why I was born there but we returned to Victoria one year later when I was one year old so beautiful city yeah I've never been to BC yet yeah well I was kid my friends in Ottawa it's like Ottawa but with good weather snow yeah right this winter was brutal yeah that a cold winter yeah so as a as a child what did your parents do my father was a banker with the Royal Bank of Canada for 45 years but my mother and my mother stayed at home and she raised the three children my two sisters and myself and did you ever as a child have an early passion or shown early passion for the eventual field you would get into so not really no might be probably because of my father being in the banker in that I always thought I was trying to decide whether I wanted to be a charter accountant or a corporate lawyer and and I had fortunately I had an American uncle uncle George who was an electrical engineer and he asked me what uh what's what subjects was I interested in and I answered it wrong I said well I can't make up my mind whether I want to be a charter accountant or a lawyer and he's he said I didn't ask you that he says I asked you what subjects you like and I talked about math and science and of course I wanted to go in business uh my own and that and he says well you don't have a choice I said jeez uncle George which one is it corporate law or charter counseling neither one says it's engineering and and he explained how he taught a engineering course he was a consultant engineer but he taught a course at university of Washington and they followed his class 10 years later and all the different fields they got into and uh and he said that he says you shouldn't shouldn't pick a don't try to pick a profession pick what you're interested in it's like you picking history over engineering it's a great choice yeah and so uh it was sort of a little bit by good luck and I ended up going into engineering chemical engineering and yeah bc so that was in was it in high school when your uncle kind of yeah it was just uh just finishing grade 12 and uh and the way it worked in uh in British Columbia at the time you you couldn't go directly into engineering you had to do one year of art general arts and science and then then for your engineering course it was a five-year program in bc I guess that's when you think about it though it's uh it's probably good I mean it helps a lot of really confused uh young adults I mean just like uh kebek has suggest yeah exactly yeah I have a year to yeah it's a big help that way yeah that's right it's also why I'm a big fan of co-op programs too where young people get to go out in the workplace and kick the tires so to speak and uh test drive different careers and because it's all about finding out what your passion is about for sure and um when you finally made it to university you started directly into chemical engineering yeah yeah again you took one year of general engineering and uh that would have been second year university and then you made a decision in second year and I chose chemical and uh but it was interesting I graduated the only decision I made uh was I'd never work in the oil and gas industry so again I wanted to either work in pulp and paper or or chemicals and so my first job was in georgia pacific in bellingham washington it was a uh a pulp and paper plant plant with it with a chemicals division and they were a great employer but I got a fellowship to go to britain the uh affluent fellowship which enabled me to go over to britain I did my masters at the university of Birmingham and in the same uh even while there I did it in it was sort of like uh um somewhere between an industrial engineering and an MBA it was a business school but they the brit's uh british government had put this program to place in place because they wanted to enhance uh britain's competitiveness and they they the affluent fellowship was designed just for Canadian engineers and and they wanted people who they deemed would rise and at some point remember their experience of britain they would buy british so they were not looking just for marks they wanted to see student leadership and of course I'd been president of our fraternity and I was president of all the engineers at UBC and I was very active on the big student council so I had that kind of broader interest set the appeal to them so I did my masters there it was one year and then I worked a year and a half in London for a consulting firm creamer warner my boss was knighted for his work Sir Frederick Warner we were the consultants that led the program that cleaned up the river Thames it was a 15 year project and I was there in 1969 and that was the first year that the fish came all the way down the river so it's pretty exciting and that's where I started to get interested in in other areas and traditional what a tradition a chemical engineer would look at it was in interested in pulp paper chemicals and and so I Sir Frederick tried to get me interested in the environmental area which he did but at the same time I had some friends that I met who were working with Imperial Imperial oil had decided they were going to computerize all the refineries across Canada and they were looking to form a group because this was new field and those the kids today would laugh William had it because you got more power in your blackberry than you had in the computers in those days but but it was a new area and it was and so three of us Kamma Calpine Bron Breneman who ultimately became CEO of Petra Canada myself we were hired out of Britain to come to Imperial oil and the three of us and one or two others we were signed and we want to spend the next seven years going across the country computerizing put in process control computers in the Imperial oil refinery so it was it was a fascinating experience did you guys know anything about computers and program well we were learning and but we so probably the advantage was we knew more than our supervisors so most jobs you get you know you work six or eight years and you aspire to replace your supervisor well none of them have done it so we had to do all the aspects of it like right from the beginning of talking to the refinery finding out what they would want a computer for specifying the function going out for contract I relocated I lived out of my car for seven years I spent one of the nice assignments was I met my wife along the way in New Jersey we got married and Jersey girl yeah and and then I worked initially on our Dartmouth refinery on the East Coast and then I worked on the Montreal refinery and in that job I was sent to San Diego we lived two years in San Diego and designed right from the ground up a brand new computer scheme for controlling all the oil movements and gasoline blending and all of that and then would have to follow up and install the computer do all the training of the operators it was tremendous experience and I can't imagine how many mistakes we must have made but none of no one knew so consequently we were always taking on more and more responsibility and and and and of course if you had a lot well and the opportunities come your way and so it was I was always treated extremely well by Imperial oil and I had an exciting career with them but the best thing that ever happened to me was when I got sent to Syncrude in 1986 so would you say we'll get to Syncrude absolutely but would you say your job with Imperial oil was your first official job or first official yeah yeah it really was a parallel I would think of it that way even though I'd spent the initially my first employer was Georgia Pacific and I had some other companies I worked in in the summers you know but the Georgia Pacific one was only four months before I went off onto the fellowship so and then I had the job with a consulting firm in England that was just for a year and a half so the first sort of what I would call longer term commitment turned out to be Imperial oil and but when I joined there I started to get this view I was traveling a lot and I was young and I was single and I enjoyed it so I really didn't think of I was signing up to work my life with one company and it was funny one I can never tell in the meantime I went back to Sardinia I started in Sardinia Ontario at the end of 1969 and and I was doing the Dartmouth I was assigned the Dartmouth refinery and they had a research and development project within Exxon and Imperial is his own 69 plus percent by Exxon and so I was loaned to Exxon in New Jersey to develop a committee computer system for Dartmouth refinery as a research project and that's where I met my wife and and so I so I was I was getting really interesting work and I can remember waking up one day and said I've been now with this company for five years and I wasn't even thinking of leaving and so and so I switched and then I you know I started to think more in the in terms of this is a long-term career but you know Imperial oil and a lot of the industry the mining industry and that is if you if you're willing to be flexible and you're willing to move and live in different places it offered a great career opportunity for young people like myself and and so we took advantage of it and as I said we ended up in San Diego for a couple years and then in Montreal and then I finally came back to Toronto and you know I think it was 1976 and it was the first time I'd ever been in the head office and here I'd worked for the company for seven years and and I made a fundamental shift I I actually requested them to change my career path and I wanted to get more into the strategic and business planning side and so they put me into a corporate planning group which was a small on-call service group to the board for people they deemed to have high potential and and that opened up some more paths and I then went into more of the planning and strategic strategy development for the again the refining side of business not the upstream man and until it was time I became in 1980 79 80 around that time frame around the Iranian oil crisis I've got the my first really big promotion I became product supply manager for all of Canada for yes and we we're caught in that thing where you having to buy crude oil and I you know I I did make mistakes and I you know if people remember back to 1981 things like the economy suddenly the recession came in suddenly you know the Iranian crisis was on and that you know people were learning to live with you know lower amounts of energy so energy man was falling off the national energy program was brought in by a pair of crude oil the prime minister and everything conspired and all of a sudden the man fell off the thing but because we were so concerned about where crude oil was coming from we used to actually have the buy the crude right out of my office in Toronto because you had to make decisions quick well I got I got trapped with a million barrels of crude oil on the on ships out in the ocean and and we had to work it off so I didn't make every decision right now I was respected the senior imperial oil manager because this was a this was a type of a job which should do occur in a few industries where you have to make big decisions you have to make them quick and you can't be right all the time you better not be wrong too many times but and I but I was wrong and they stuck by me and we worked it off and then from there they decided because in our industry and I mean our industry I mean all the mining and everything we we truly understand in our hearts the importance of safety and and operations and you know what one of my bosses said well it's time for you to now you're you're getting ready to move up even higher in the organization it's time for you to get understand things that are really important they're called safety glasses hard hats and safety and but he he he sent me out to Vancouver to run we used to joke at Imperial it was a refinery run by kids because I was when I became refinery manager I couldn't have been more than 35 or 36 years old and that was a big responsibility but I Bill Keo was my first boss vice president he was man of few words and he brought me up in the office and he all he said to me he says you're going to be running an explosives factory act accordingly and I've never forgotten that it's all Bill said no well if you ever wanted to know why safety is important to us you know that gets it brings it home and then we have you know as you operate large things that it would be interesting to hear old mine managers talk about some of the things that they you know near disasters or disasters they have to have to live through in their time you you learn about the importance of operation and and imports of safety and and key issues like that which you know sometimes people tend to poo poo but believe me they're at the heart of our industry and they always have been they always will be from there I was lucky I it was a tough time we were the refineries running was a smaller one we actually had entertained a plan that was considering shutting it down and I I had a new boss and I asked him I said this was totally counter what a lot of companies did I said this is a huge decision I want to involve the employees my employees in it and and I'm not trying to scare them but I just want to involve them in because you know we should have some say in our destiny it was one of the most interesting experience of our my life is I worked with the union and first the brought in all my supervisor made sure they were aware then brought the union talked to them about what was going then went out and talked to all employees and I you know I said look it's it's a tough world out there we yeah we could roll up the prayer rug and say you know it's we don't stand a chance because we had these big refineries that were running less than full and Edmonton a chance to bring product down to the Vancouver market area and the you know the you know the smaller refineries weren't going to survive but he said you know it's a tough world we could just give up but I said you know why don't we all pull together and make it the toughest decision Imperial I'll ever made to try to stand we're going to do everything that was right and we without going at all the details we came a very high performing refinery and the economics weren't there the refinery lasted another 10 years and and and you know people when I did that to explain to people about the chance of shutting the refinery down I knew we had to expect that people would leak it and would get out in the community and cause all sorts of problems so we're ready for but you know William in two in the two-year period nobody talked about I asked employees not to I said this is our business we're a family and they stuck by it was so it was quite an exciting experience in my life so I I learned there you know the power of the employee if you and and if you particularly if you get them to think and act like an owner of the business you know they'll work with them but you gotta yeah but you gotta respect what they can offer and they they offered a lot and and a lot of the reason we were so successful is because of ideas that came right from the shop floor and and that and so we I went from there and I moved back to Toronto and 1990s where was the I was in Vancouver and Coquitlam Port Moody Refinery and and so in 1984 I returned to Imperial Oil and really the position I became a division manager which is a very senior position in the and the only other positions higher in Imperial would be in Toronto so we actually thought we'd bought our last house my wife and I and by this time I had three little kids and the only thing I had left to do is to go do a two-year assignment down New York or Connecticut with our major shareholder Exxon get my what's we called it our ticket punch you know the major shareholder always wanted to know the individuals who were reached the senior executive level in Imperial but the world changed and if you remember 1986 Saudi Arabia they they opened the valves and flooded the market with crude oil the crude price drove to less than $10 a barrel you know we think it's low at 55 today yeah you know all the time I was it's incurred it was a lot lower than that so it went down below 10 and the world changed and there was also it was understood the world was changing from other ways because one other interesting thing I was given a job they pulled me and Alen Perez Alen ultimately went on one of his jobs was he was headed up CPPI you know Canadian growing product institute Alen was a brilliant young we were both about 40 years old division manager level him from marketing me from refining and the president said took us out said I start with a blank sheet of paper and redesign full vessel petroleum Canada hold downstream right from values right on up and they lent us we had a we knew there would be big changes to the regional marketing so they gave us the manager Jacques Badard who is a manager in Quebec work with us we need to crank some numbers so we had a controller was about to retire Ray McPhee and they gave us part-time organizational effective consultant and so we redesigned SO petroleum and and changed the whole nature of the company I won't go into a lot of that but but what I did too in the process I designed to weigh my own job I didn't have a job again and so I helped with the transition we did a lot of really innovative things to prevent getting into a layoff situation I I have a strong aversion to layoffs but big organizations I think you should try to work with the people you got to be flexible and as long as they're flexible look at different careers you can do a lot and I learned that initially in a period that we applied it in in spades at Syncrude but but the the upshot of redesigning the SO petroleum and designing way my job was and again the world had changed so we didn't have the big infrastructure within the Exxon so this business about go getting your ticket stamped was going to go by the wayside and and so I ended up being sent to Syncrude on loan 1986 yeah because well because in pure oil loan 25% of Syncrude it's Syncrude's a big mega project joint project has had it started with four owners but I've seen it as many as 10 owners it goes up and down and the ownership structure can change but Imperial was one of the originals and has always been there big big supporter of it and I initially was there as vice president of finance and men for a year the vice president operation retired I replaced him two years I ran the operation for two years and then the president and CEO retired and so I replaced him became CEO of Syncrude in August in August of 1989 and it was at that point because I was still pretty young you know I would have been it would have been 44 I guess and I was taken over a CEO of one of the largest corporations in Canada and so I'd be there for some time and and so it wasn't my decision that totally because as I said it pure oil was so good to me as a employer and but I resigned from pure became a Syncrude employee and but the transition was smooth and we lived and we moved from Toronto to Fort McMurray and when 1986 just an interesting side point tell you how much I moved when in 1986 Fort McMurray was my 15th city in 20 years wow I was going to ask you what out of all your if you had to pick a favorite city what would it be oh there's or a couple yeah a couple well San Diego was a lovely place to live in so too right in the early 70s and we lived right near Tory Pines golf course there you know near La Jolla and it's just beautiful the climate everything another one before I came I I always loved London England I just fell in love with my year and a half there but but but we lived seven years in Toronto and lived a bit Montreal and Vancouver all over and what my wife was she grew up in New Jersey but she she almost became a nun she lived a lot of her life in a convent but I always tell people that she made this is not to become a nun before I got down to New Jersey I was not running around convents looking for dates you know I wasn't but hey I should Kathy I've been blessed with my wife because she was always very flexible and we moved and we always wherever we moved into a community we made the church the center she's singing the choir and we get involved in and initially I used to get involved in a lot of stuff that well when I started up with children I'd get involved in things I could do with my kids and and as I they got older and didn't want to have play with the old man all that much anymore and I got involved with the lots of other not-for-profits but but yeah no so that's that was really my story we got there we're 15 city in 20 years it was culture shock for my my kids because they thought of Toronto of any place was in this home but but you know everybody there in Fort Murray there's about 35,000 people but virtually all of them come from different places the average age of this town was 22 yeah we had no grandparents and and so people were from everywhere else and so they were very welcoming from out east yeah a lot of 25 percent of our employees for from from the Atlantic provinces and and I can assure you when your children move well you move well and that that helped and then we went the other extreme we lived 17 and a half years in Fort Murray we loved it I raised our family living in the north is probably not everybody's cup of tea but if you like the outdoors and you like communities everyone in the mining business knows that how great it can be to live in some of these small communities so so I felt blessed to be there and retired at the end of 2003 and came back to Edmonton and we've lived here ever since why Edmonton well Edmonton there was a few reasons one of which I had become very involved with the university I'd chaired the board of governors I was on the board from 1996 to 2003 when I retired and came down here I became chancellor of the university from 2004 2008 so I had very strong ties that way because you're right we we never lived in Calgary or Edmonton and Fort Murray was the only place Alberta was strange for someone in the oil business but and I love Calgary too so I don't want to sound like I chose Edmonton because it's better in Calgary but it was more familiar and of course your children and very important and two two of my children my daughters live here and and we were starting into the grand grandchild age and now we have six of our nine grandchildren live within 10 minutes drive so we're not leaving and my other three grandchildren just to complete the story here in Chicago where my son worked he went there as a computer engineer is now a banker working with Northern Trust but yeah like your father yeah like my father so the full cycle there so so there you got it my whole life story or a career story um you clearly were a leader for many parts of your life but did you have or when you were younger or throughout your life a mentor or someone that really yeah in your professional career that really kind of yeah I think I think I first of all I've been very blessed with the people in my life the support I got and you know you start with your parents and and my dad was when a 12 kids went through depression couldn't get through school my mom was she was the most relife in an orphanage and had a very tough life but to my parents education was everything and they they really worked with me and my two sisters to make sure we got into education and and and we strove to take advantage of that so you know so that that's quite unusual because usually if the parents haven't gone to university for example it's harder to for young ones but I was very lucky that would say so I don't feel like I was we were poor or anything like that we had a modest suffering but my dad and my mom instilled some very strong values about education and also my dad's case about how you treat people and and he always said it doesn't matter he says technology is going to be so important so in the world it's really important that you think about that and all that but he says it will never replace personal relationships you know I think that's true it's a privilege right so so that was probably a very valuable piece of advice instead of values that but in terms of where I go I always tell a funny story of uh how picking engineering and and that was a that with my uncle George who was an engineer and I thought I wanted to be a charter accountant or a lawyer and he said no no he says tell me what subject you like and what do you want uh like don't tell me jobs and when I said I like math and science and I like business and all that he said I didn't have a choice and I said well good which one is it the corporate lawyer or a charter accountant he says neither he says it's engineering and and make a long story short that got me into engineering so that was a pivotal point but I think uh I think the assignment I had after my my uh did my masters in Birmingham with my boss Sir Frederick Warner he was a different kind of guy he just died a year ago two years ago I think at the age of a hundred and he was still teaching in university in his 90s I mean the guy he also led the investigation of the big Piper Alpha disaster in the North Sea he uh he what he was night one of the things he was nighted for was spearheading the cleanup of the River Thames where we worked with 15 different agencies or nine different government agencies over 15 years and he did he was president of the British chemical engineers a lot of those things and but he was so good as the first boss he he would just throw him and let you sink or swim in a way but but always with the backup and he he always he tried to drill him he says Eric and and and other he young people of my age I was about 22 at the time I guess he said don't look and do the same job everybody else is just I'm trying to look at areas where there's you're working on the boundaries and and he gave me two really good example one that he was trying to get me interested in because he was so successful in back in the 60s 50s and 60s if you looked at engineering in the area of uh environmental in that the big engineering field was civil engineering not chemical but but Sir Frederick saw the magic hey wait a minute things like cleaning up the Thames we use that we developed uh for the day it was very sophisticated hydrodynamic model and kinetic model because a lot of chemical engineering principles could be used and a lot of the improvement of the cleanup of the Thames was not through structures it was relocating sewage plant effluence to take advantage of the tidal mixing of the river or the or the power plants because you don't if you heat up the river it's going to use up the biological oxygen uh the faster you know and you're going to get into the anaerobic conditions which caused all the stink around Westminster so they they did a lot of that then after that you start getting into the structures and that so he he and he developed a whole different approach on environmental here we were actually working we had clients that were on both sides going into the regulatory process both on the industry and on the regulatory or environmental side and he predicted that was going to happen in in uh very accurately that would happen in North America and so he said that would be a really good area take your chemical engineering plus your environmental background and he was going to help me he actually was going to set me up with a consultant he had in Cleveland Ohio but I I came up with but he got me thinking and there was a better one and that was with Imperial oil where again we were looking at process control computers for all refineries well that was traditionally electrical engineers job it was all lead lags and the fancy instrumentation that but the magic of process computer control is how do you apply it to the process to make the process more efficient that's where you get value out of it and that's chemical engineering so so that's so that's why I always puts the freighter way up there he got me to think stop thinking and become a financial yeah get outside the box and so that's why I I was either going to go down the environmental path or I was going to go down this process control computing and I went to the ladder that got me into imperial for seven years and but you know if you look at my career so much of us have been back in the environment area so it so it's a it was a great piece of mentorship about young people don't limit yourself don't get into a narrow box and we now call it lifelong learning but you know he was such a wonderful mentor and and he gave you the responsibility and if you made a mistake he was there to back you up and I knew I'd really blown it once because I came back and did his office he's very British you know and he had he'd sent me out to some client and I must have really blown it because his answer to well you know Eric is from the colonies this that would explain everything he was very much your British gentleman but he was a knight he was a knight yeah so you can't get more than that and so you know you go through your career and others said I've had a lot the the fellow I replaced the CEO for Sinclair Ralph Shepherd you know he was great for me and Jim Carter and we were a very young executive team and we owe a lot to Ralph and his guidance and leadership so so I've just been very blessed good and looking back again this could be any job were there any dysfunctional jobs or organizations that you worked with or had to work with oh dysfunctional that's uh well we well we did in a way maybe I'll turn that around because I think one of there's a few things that we want to talk about in terms of the oil sands that the broader in the in the industry one area was that we work very hard at and we were quite successful in the end although I will always say we made every mistake in the book and that was our effort with the Aboriginal people first on the employment side at Sinclair you know we we end up being the at one point certain the largest or one of the largest industrial employers of Aboriginal people in Canada and when we started in there our first mistake I like to talk about our mistakes was we thought we were in a hiring program and so as fast as we had hired these young people this is before I got there this would be back in 1978-79 when you were still with Sinclair yeah but Sinclair started up so this predates my time at Sinclair and because we thought we were in a hiring program but as fast as we hire them we'd have to fire them and when you think about it bringing some young people in from a small northern community of 200 250 people and throwing them into a huge industrial complex like Sinclair is not exactly a formula for sex whether Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal and so the first lesson we learned is we we had to get into a development program so sorry you were saying as fast as you hired them you had to fire them because well they just couldn't adapt to the environment and it's a it's a very different environment for them and and it just just wasn't working so we realized what we had to be into a development it's not just the hiring and so we did a few things one we got a native affairs advisor that helped us look at the world through the eyes of the Aboriginal community we worked with we at Sinclair in the oil sands in Fort Murray we worked with five First Nations and six Mady locals over an area that's as far north as Fort Chippewine about 200 kilometers to north and John V and Anzac in the south about the same distance south and so we had a native affairs advisor to help understand and work with the communities we worked then directly with the chiefs we got we need because you need role models sometimes so we got the chiefs that in in the early days Sinclair got them to hand pick a few good role models and and we bring them into workplace that way you know they would do well and then others would be able to come and and we did the other thing we did if we put all our supervisors through cross-cultural training to get them to really look at the world differently look at through the eyes and to this date it's broadened at Sinclair we put all uh Sinclair puts all our managers through diversity training so that deals with all sorts other issues gender and and other ethnic things as well as Aboriginal so it was we were probably leaders you know the company would be a leader in that area at the time and that helped but you know I always come back that the absolute critical thing for us was the education we had to get the education level up and we did all sorts of innovative things we created the general worker program because today and and legitimately today you have to have at the minimum grade 12 to get on a job in the workplace and worksites in the oil sands industry and and that's right but in those days we didn't have any average was grade 12 so we take them in a general work program grade 10 we worked with the college they developed the grade 12 equivalency course GED which people forget started out as an aboriginal program it's now not it's for everybody uh and then the idea was any anyone we brought in the work course as a general worker an aboriginal they they had to get their GED and if they had good performance good attendance uh you know uh you know not any problems then we guaranteed them a job and that's how we did that for some time until we started to get some critical mass and then we we kept on uh over the years uh one of the other areas so that uh I think is not well as well understood as that should be is uh is uh what happened with aboriginal own businesses um when I got to sincured in 1986 or when I became CEO in 1989 we did have some aboriginal business it was about three million dollars a year but believe me William it it was a good business it was subsidy they weren't uh one was with good fish and they were doing washing our gloves and overalls and all that and we could have got it done for half the cost with anyone else at the time good fish ultimately became a great success story but at that point it was not weighing and Jim Carter who you've already interviewed and he's very well known the mining industry and Jim and I worked very very closely at all these types of issues we said you know uh we knew how entrepreneurial uh uh aboriginal communities are because we had this Ocar program where we used to we still do it to this day we fly uh employees in from Fort Chip in the summer to clean bitumen off the uh tailings fonts and that and when they yet zeroed in on an objective it's amazing how successful they were so we thought why don't we try to we should be doing a better job of capturing that uh entrepreneurial talent and so we started working on how do you create companies and and we without warning of all the detail we we actually have people who help them write business plans and that and we had uh a number of really good aboriginal entrepreneurs that deserve a huge amount of this credit too and a couple of really notable ones are one is David Takaro and David Takaro David uh um he was a young guy we've known him he grew up in his first nation Cree from Fort Chip and even when he was going to school he had a pizza business so this guy was always an entrepreneur yeah and so he somehow managed to buy out this company called Negan which was an earth moving company that the the band sort of co-owned and and we worked with David to get it to be really competitive and start him small and growing and David uh who's uh been picked as one of Canada's top 40 under 40 he's just amazing he created uh what was became known as the northeast aboriginal business association Nava and that's like a junior or chamber of commerce for aboriginal businesses and and they would help other young aboriginals form business and they would work with the oil sands to create them and and um and uh Doug Gloskey was the other one and Doug was uh uh he's a methi Cree and and located Fort Murray and him and his wife Carol started with absolutely nothing I think he owns nine company now he was just inducted in the business hall of fame uh but one of his big ones was Clearwater Welding and I can tell you he could compete for safety and productivity with any other uh non-aboriginal company that worked on our workplace so and Doug did a tremendous amount of training and development of of youth all youth but aboriginal youth in particular and he now took over running of uh Nava northeast aboriginal business association so here we were just to fast forward on the numbers back in the early 90s you know virtually nothing 20 years later we got I think they have over 200 members in Nava now over 200 aboriginal companies last year they did 1.6 billion dollars of business with the oil sands companies and that when Jim and I started because we're anal and engineers we had to have a target we pulled a number nobody was doing it so we pulled a number out of the air said if we could ever get to 30 million dollars a year nobody would question our motives you know and uh it would be so over the top and so right away we were in it initially for the wrong reason hey we thought this was philanthropy uh last year Sincere did 186 million dollars with aboriginal business we helped create the only reason you're doing that is because you're getting very competitive supply and services so it's very much a win-win and and I think that's one of the big lessons uh and the big values that our industry right across country you look at what chemicals down you look at uh you know what James Bay and other places like that I mean uh you know we have our problems with our aboriginal community you know they're we still got a long ways to go maybe but you know the mining industry just shines in some of the examples of how how we've brought the education levels up the standard living and and and got them involved in the business and we just got to keep going down that path um how present or absent were women in your workplace yeah women sacred uh yeah we it was uh um you know this is a tough issue because it's definitely a male dominated industry and and uh you know we had uh we we tried hard we thought we were trying hard we worked hard with the university we always try to get women at female engineers we are trying to get more women and non-traditional roles like in the skill trade so I think we were well motivated uh in in a number of areas but you know uh today we've you know we've had some women reach vice-president level and we have some managers but I would to be honest I don't think we quite got there I think we had a bit of a glass ceiling and we still have to manage that uh closely William what what we did when I was there is uh for any position we always wanted to pick the best person uh but we'd insist often that identify who would be the best female even if not qualified just so try to break through because we obviously when you have that sort of ceiling there's got to be some sort of systemic stuff going on now so that so that's an admission that you know it didn't get as far as I wanted and I'll take a lot of uh flat for that uh there was some good examples so and and one I think you talked to Jim Carter about was the bridges program and uh again this comes back to uh we need to in order uh uh to survive as an industry back in 80s you know 89 there in early 90s we really had to uh prove the safety reliability and also get the cost structure under control and at Syncru we actually took our workforce from over 4,700 down to uh less than 3,300 and we did it without any layoffs it's almost unheard of it took several years but uh and we totally redesigned the way we redesigned well we had a lot of uh we managed attrition you know we had one if we finally had to have one big early retirement program in 94 it was but uh up until that we'd managed attrition we took some areas we thought we're done better with uh outside contractors we outsourced them and then we redeployed workers we always redeployed though we didn't didn't didn't just jump to layoffs and then said against layoffs uh when you can get people to be flexible so we we had to get redesigned the way work was done so we had to go to our employees and say uh and so how are you going to get people to redesign the work so you can get rid of employees well the the deal was this I said I can't guarantee your job security but I can guarantee your employment security but you have to be flexible and not just think of your own job be prepared to do it and if you do that uh you know I can make you that guarantee and I but you know the business you are the ones who have to redesign how it works on so what I wanted to say we didn't have 4,700 underutilized or lazy people that enabled us to get down to 325th we had to redesign the way it worked with that the other issue we faced and this was with getting back to the women side uh was we knew where the job growth was the job growth was going to be in mining equipment and as the mine got bigger you need more trucks you need more bumps and seats and and that and uh and as we expanded the thing we're going to need more skilled trades people we could see that coming that demographic was happening already because young kids weren't coming into the trades and yet they were about to retire so that was a great opportunity where the jobs are going to disappear though it was in administrative areas because of computers and different ways of doing things where were our female employees well to their highly concentrated in the administrative areas so so we had a choice well we could fire those people go hire more drivers and trucks and that and we said well why would we do that why why shoot good employees so again Keanu you still always wonder what the hell would we come up with next but the bridges program we actually set them up they had designed a two-week course we took women who were in administrative roles all their lives go in and they because one of the big barriers of taking women from that kind of a role and putting them out into into a male dominated workplace they don't know the jargon growing up even though i'm not very handy i knew what a conrod was or a piston whatever well if you don't know the jargon you got two strikes against you and so unless you're very extroverted you'll shrink away so so we knew that so for two weeks they built bird cages and they learned all this stuff then we had a program where they would then job shadow they could pick the career and and finally go right to the point where they would we'd let them work a 28 day work cycle with a team they would be part of and all through that period they at any point the woman could say i've had it it's too big a change i want my original job back back at the home front the the job that was left vacant they were not allowed to fill it on not even on a temporary basis they had to redesign the work in there to backfill for that person so that was also how we forced the uh work redesign in the system and by the way there was none ever has to go back i was going to say most you know and 20 in the end 25 percent of our drivers of the 410 trucks were women and uh when we got one of the employer of the year awards mclean's phoned me up and uh i made the point you know they're not all spring chickens you know these women in fact my son-in-law's mother at the age of 54 after spending her whole career in administrative roles is now driving 410 truck and they said oh she could interview well marie they call her mother out at uh site of my son-in-law calls her hitler but she's outgoing irish woman and and the whole article was about marie and her truck and she was great but uh you know even to this day her and i will go into grade four classes and five classes and talk to the kids about what it's like and they they want to talk to her more and they want to talk to me they want to know what's it like to drive that big truck that's the size of a 747 plane so so yeah so on the women's side you know some big challenges still working it's a great area and was there any what let's say with that the bridge program was there any adversity met with the guys on the in the fields well we had uh well you we have um uh the whole issue of diversity is alive and well there because uh first of all the oil sands being up north it wasn't we hired from all over the world so in many respects it's a very multicultural community and and that's good in there in the education level so in many respects it's a model but you do run into that will you man and that's why i i mentioned our uh cross-cultural training which started off just as aboriginal today is diversely wide that we need to be open to we're all different individuals first of all that's the biggest difference but you know we need to respect those differences and make sure everybody can sort of reach their full potential in the work environment that's the ideal and and the day you get there is the day you don't need any special programs it's just the way you work and so so i'd have to say probably not quite there yet but yeah but there's so those areas and uh within again you've worked in many different jobs but with throughout your career were there any social uh problems like uh alcoholism or drug use or things like that there were kind of a trend in certain jobs or certain uh yeah uh well substance abuse it was always a big issue at the it is a big issue at the oil sands uh areas and uh something you have to manage uh i'm not trying to say it's any necessarily any worse but you are up north and uh you know and people have got good money and uh those issues uh happen and and you just have to be prepared to manage it and uh and we had to hit it hit it head on and uh and so initially uh we had static but for example anytime there's uh an incident immediately there's some there'll be some drug testing and all that and then you know so there's any reason but uh we uh we have it uh uh some companies have actually gone to random testing and critical jobs uh i'm not sure whether Sinclair's there today they we didn't get there during my time we always uh felt we didn't that that wasn't necessary go that step but we did do a lot of training with our supervisors and how to deal with it and and maybe how not to deal with it when it was a problem it was need to bring in the medical people and uh and that so yeah it's uh that and the other area that was uh that you need to really manage uh carefully and differently is uh long-term disabilities because uh when people go in long-term disabilities uh uh manager with who's got control of a tight budget and that is not very going to be very uh open to bringing back someone who can't not fully productive and yet doctors and that will tell you the best thing you can do is get people back in some form into the into the workplace so atrophy doesn't take place and it may not be where they normally would work and so we used to manage that we had a team of general manager levels and and and they would have to take all the long-term disabilities and we'd find out what was the best thing to do so i think Sinclair has actually uh uh excelled in that area yeah do you want to talk about the national oil sense task force sure yeah um the other the other thing that happened uh in coming to um there was a period of time where the oil sense was really on everybody's radar screen you know we had Suncore, Great Canadian oil sense started up at 67 then in 1978 Sinclair came along and started up but then we went through a long period where we had all these mega projects they kept coming up but that nothing got built you know they go on the shelf and uh and we had and the reason for that is we had this mega project mentality and i would say both governments and uh industry had this mega project mentality and by that i mean we thought the because the financial risks and that was so great with these things they're huge projects relative to anything else and uh and uh you know the the economics were uh you know tight you know high cost and simple of getting the oil extracted and that so we all thought that you had to have special royalty terms or or uh tax terms you know uh or handouts government participation or whatever and and so and and so that's often why it would fail and then as we moved out in time we got to 1986 so we went through uh that we had the fall collapse of the crude oil prices and that created a new era where we had a really sharpener pencil and we had to become more and more inward focused which we did at Sinclair and Suncore and SO down at Cold Lake we were the three big operators and we really zeroed in on how to make the operation more reliable how to get the cost structure and control that's when we got on to all this work redesign and everything so we get the costs down because what people forget is all through the 90s even after 80s 60s all through the 90s price never was 21 to 25 dollars a barrel it wasn't even going up with inflation and inflation was riding at four percent a year because I remember our thing was it was we had offset inflation for about four percent a year and our cost structure every year and we got half of it by increasing production and getting the divisor effect cost for barrel by put more barrels through the cost doesn't necessarily go up so that was one big but the other thing was an efficiency like workforce redesign and and other other efficiencies so so in that period while we're so focused people forgot about the oil sands and then we had these mega projects that people were trying to develop but they they started to fail because governments if you all recall all of a sudden we realized we can't be running with big deficits in 1993 Ralph Klein came in on that you know eliminate the deficit in Alberta but it was already happening in the federal government level and and so there's no way the industry was going to get handouts so we were talking about the Alberta Chamber Resources which is a great industry association it's it's made up of all the resource industries in Alberta and it does some incredible stuff so we were talking about this one day and we said you know without really knowing what we were talking about we said we got to create a national oil sands task force we got to get oil sands development going again everybody's forgotten about it and and the reason is because nobody you know there's going to be no handouts so we got to figure out a way to do this that doesn't require handouts but we need to gauge all the players government industry technology providers academia environmentalists if we could aboriginals you know so so we had to create this thing so it's a little known fact but we actually worked with George Miller who is the executive director of the mining association of Canada and Sinkford had a very good relationship in there especially through Dennis Love who was head of our mining at the time and so we we inserted in his report because as a provincial association we could not get on the energy mines and ministers being that was occurring that it was 1991 September 24th it was in Halifax and but the mining association as the national organization did get on there so we put in there that we uh recommendation that we form create a national sands task force and and it got passed but unfortunately the conservatives were in at that time and jake up was the energy minister and i always admire jake because the easiest thing for a politician is just well yeah we'll just take another study and uh you know push it off the side you know put it on the back burner and you don't get flat uh but his but his folks that were there didn't understand what we were suggesting they came back said jake watch out here comes the oil sands guys again with their handout they're going to be coming after you for big handout well it was absolutely not the case and through i got a lot of help from jack shields rmp working with jake i'm finally over a lapse time of two years and probably about three meetings with jake i convinced him that that's not what we were trying to do we wanted to create the national oil sands task force to avoid the fact uh you know of governments having to come in and and do them because two things that happened one one is there was no investment coming into the oil sands because you know that that soft item called investor confidence a very loose loosely understood thing but you definitely know when you got it you know when you don't we had no money coming in and i'm convinced it was because investors they understand they're willing to accept risks of market like good price things like that but they don't think the fiscal term should be at risk or the regulatory thing and here we were doing you went in and negotiated them on a project by project basis and we know the governments are not dummies they they would ratchet out any upside so capital by this time was starting to move around the globe as easy as sitting at your pc so it's going to go where it gets the best treatment and it wasn't the oil sands so that we didn't have that the other part was uh as i said the governments they couldn't afford the handouts and all that so uh you know because they were trying to solve their fiscal challenges so so we created this task force we called the mother of all collaboratives because i think we had 70 uh 70 people about 35 organizations were involved in this thing and uh we did we identified first of all a very exciting vision using technology how we could develop this row uh resource we could triple the production you know but it would take us uh because we came out with the report at the middle of uh 1995 it took us two years to develop this vision for canada for the oil sands and energy and and we identified we but here's the barriers that we overcome and we had about eight areas and we had task force for them so we came out but we one of the things we did right about that task force in the chamber was uh instead of talking about how we're going to make imperial oil more profitable or shall people really don't care about that but they care about jobs they care about uh tax and royalty revenues to governments that you know enable the social programs that we value so highly as canadians so that's how we dimensioned we got everyone turned on and we said the vision is it and we had some substance this was we could triple production but it probably takes 25 years and it would cost 21 to 25 billion dollars and i i used to get the cold sweat saying that well you know because that time nothing was going in and sounded so grandiose but but we did we captured the imagination we uh um we uh came up with a fiscal regime for example uh uh that quite simply we formed a task force with uh natural resources canada finance canada alberta uh energy alberta finance the industry and um we said we got to come up with a regime that does a better job of sharing the upfront risk in return for a fair share of wealth on on payback you know to the government okay it's simple that was language well uh once you get people galvanized on the vision and that what's potential it was amazing how fast the barriers fell by that report came out may of 1995 by november ralph kline the premier alberta announced the generic royalty regime that really was the major thing and and the following fall by now the liberals are in and paul martin and we had a lot of help from ann mcclell and she's my hero in the federal government when she was minister natural resource canada and paul's my hero on the finance side they came through in the march of 1996 with the tax changes to it and so once you set the environment right so what happened well it proved we weren't very visionary because instead of it taking uh 25 years we triple production in eight years it's now five times the production level we didn't um we didn't spend 21 to 25 billion today uh since then 140 billion has been invested in projects that have been completed or underway or planted in the oil sense become one of the biggest success stories in canadian history and uh it all started because you know we we had to try to figure out how to get it going and not live off government hand it's going to kill that mega project mentality and really band together so here we are looking ahead now uh i always say it's technology that got us to where we are today but it's going to be technology it's got to take us to where we need to go to tomorrow so where do we need to go tomorrow well a big challenge is facing canada right today first of all there's a huge world energy man out there the i a 35 growth in energy man by 2030 whether we like it or not it's going to depend on fossil fuels we for decades to come so we're blessed with these great resources uh but it won't just happen we have to if we're going to develop that the oil sense to its full potential to meet rising world energy demand and to get the tremendous there's tremendous socioeconomic benefits to this country from it but we have to do it in a sustainable fashion so the challenges we now have facing us are uh environmental in nature and i'm currently chairing uh the canadian council academies uh expert panel on technological prospects to reduce the environmental footprint of oil sands development but i can tell you this the big issues are we got a the big global issue is how can we reduce our greenhouse gases so that canada and alberta can meet its climate change targets climate change is a big issue it's with us today if we don't live up to it it's not that we're going to destroy the planet but we won't have the credibility and they'll find ways to stop us and look at whether it's pipeline approvals whether it's low carbon fuel standards they'll find a way so the global so the global greenhouse gas mission is well with and the biggest issue regionally locally of the whole issue around um it's the mining side of the game it's the tailing spawns uh how to get to a drier landscape faster how to treat water return it to the environment how to reclaim the land more quickly so i'm very bullish uh i know if we get people all working together uh we'll solve those challenges and so i think canada uh is a wonderful uh it's got a wonderful future in oil sands and and in other resources we're a resource-based economy we should never be ashamed of that the cim is a tremendous leader for us they should be proud of uh all the leadership they've rotted over the years and uh and there are many stories such as the ones i've told that uh uh i hope you can get out there because i it's such a valuable exercise if we don't if we don't do the such things as a sorrow history we'll lose all that it's not that we'll lose the facts or the the numbers but what we'll lose is the stories that went behind uh the incredible success that our industry's had that's part of history that's part of history yeah those stories we'll uh no we're running short so we'll just the last question uh for you i thought you could probably pick some of that out for your 30 minute clip uh 32nd clip coming in further yeah for sure but um maybe i'll yeah let's do a little one at the end okay yeah i'll stop and start it just uh it's easy edit um but last question official question before that uh if you had to speak to uh someone younger like me or yeah children or students what's the most important uh lesson or life lesson you could you could tell them uh my most important thing for children is uh try to find out what you're passionate about don't worry about what the job title is find out where your passion lies what what really interests you and then from there try to pick you develop your career path along the way and and i've heard the say if you if you if you end up working if you end up uh doing what you're passionate about you'll never have to work a day in your life but it's true i i form careers the next generation we work with kids all over the province and and that's what we're doing and we run workshops we put 40 over 40 000 a year kids through career workshops in the classroom but we also run workshops at night for parents you know we're in last year we're in 514 high schools 302 communities and and we're we're messing we're getting out there is hey look don't don't try to tell your kid where to go or especially this i'm not andy university but you know you know we say you know it's uh not not every job requires a university education uh some do and we're not against universities but every job requires to get a good education so listen to your teacher stay in school and and why don't you come out we'll try to get yeah and we're trying to get kids in the skill trades and and the other generic area we work in is health services we develop 200 career pathways in health and and so we create internships where kids uh while they're in grade 11 and 12 they can actually get out in the workplace and test drive a career and and they find out whether they like it or they don't like it and it's uh and it's really really good because this once they find out what their passion and get in the the stories we've got from our tremendous well thank you very much okay for the interview yeah hello my name is Eric Newell I'm the former CEO and chair of the board of sincred Canada limited and Chancellor Emeritus at the University of Alberta I just like to talk to you briefly about the importance of the CIM's legacy project this is where the CIM is going to interview a number of people of a long history in our industry and and develop an oral history and you know it's so important that we not lose the stories we can always sort of track down numbers but you know Canada's got a tremendous resources natural resources industry and and there's so many good stories that need to be told uh this this legacy project is very important I would encourage anyone who gets the opportunity to tell some of their stories don't don't be bashful step up we need to we got to be proud of our resource-based economy and what's been achieved over the last almost 150 years now as Canadians in the the resources industries