 This is Anna Adamek in Toronto. It's November 10, 2017. Could you give me your name and tell me where you were born? John Brzezinski, and I was born in Genia, Quebec. And could you talk about your childhood? What were your hobbies as a child? What were you like as a child? I am the sixth of six children, the youngest. My parents moved to Canada in 1964. Just prior to where I was born, my father was an electrical engineer. He fought in the Second World War. He was originally from Poland, left Poland during the war, ended up in England, subsequent to the war. He and my mother married in the mid-fifties. They had my five brothers and sisters. He was working for British Hydro at the time and then was recruited to come over and work in Canada. He was one of the big iron ore mines in Northern Canada. So I was born actually in a mining town. I grew up in New Brunswick. Can you give me the place? He worked for Quebec Cartier Steel, which was a division of U.S. Steel in Genia. Genia was a mining town or purpose-built town for the mine. He was in charge of all the ballmills and running the operations there. They moved to New Brunswick just after I was born. Effectively, I grew up in Muntin and went to the local high school and eventually went to Mount Alsby University after I got out of high school. My hobbies as a child were largely sports, all kinds of things. We spent a lot of the weekends out on the Fundy Coast and the different places in New Brunswick. There's a lot of geology to see in New Brunswick. Lots of exposed coastlines. So it was probably one of the reasons I gravitated to geology. So did your parents encourage you to study science? Yeah, I was supposed to be a doctor. My father wanted to be a doctor. His dad was a doctor. My mother's father was a doctor. My mother was an x-ray technician during the war. We had a lot of uncles who were doctors and medical people in the family. The reason my dad was an engineer was because he couldn't afford to go to medical school in England after the war. He was forced to leave home. So he always wanted a doctor in the family. My elder brothers and sisters were all biologists. I started with a biology pre-med degree and after the first year decided that I wanted to be a geologist instead. My dad found out when I graduated. So was that when you became interested in geology? Yeah, it was my second year of university. I took a few geology courses and it was something that interested me a lot more than studying biology. And it progressed from there. So Mount Alison, that's where you started your higher education. Why that university? Initially because they had a football team. I played a lot of sports and it was about an hour away from where I grew up. They had a good geology department. I was to learn later. But it was a combination between the sports and the pre-med program they had at the time. I could do a three-year degree as opposed to a four-year degree. I had quite good marks when I left high school. So it was a way of getting out of university faster to go on with the medical degree that was initially the plan which I changed after my first year. That's really interesting though. I'd like to explore it a little bit. Did you feel like you were pushed into it? No, not pushed into it, but it's parental expectation. Being the last of six and not having a doctor in the family yet, my sister Susan became a veterinarian. My sister Ann Marie was on the verge of getting into medicine when she decided to get married instead. She married a geologist, coincidentally, a fellow who still teaches at Western. I was one who was supposed to be the doctor, but it wasn't as if my father was forcing me to be one. I just knew that that was something he would have liked to have seen, but I think in perfect hindsight he's quite happy with the path I chose. So you did go with your passion? That was your passion really. From there, Queens University. So again, why Queens? Queens was the second degree I took, and the particular course I took was the Minnex course. At the time there were two universities in Canada that were offering the... it's an advanced mineral exploration and economics course, Queens and McGill. But they don't take students fresh out of their first degree. It's more of an industry course where the requirement at the time was you had to have been working for at least six or seven years before they would consider you, and the course was largely funded by industry. So they were looking for people who were already working that didn't have to get a lot of initial instruction on what exploration was about. The Minnex courses are looked at by a lot of the companies that sponsored the courses as a way to provide additional education to some of their staff who they think will be rising up the ladder in their companies. For instance, the mineral economics portion isn't widely taught in a lot of the universities. So to have somebody like Brian McKenzie teach you about why you're actually looking for the deposit from a dollars and cents point of view was very revealing. In the first time for a lot of exploration, you all have to actually understand how a corporation looks at why they're spending money doing exploration for a certain commodity or in a certain country or with certain parameters. You mentioned Professor McKenzie. Who do you consider your mentors? Mentors. Yeah, I suppose I've been a couple of long-laid doctor. David Mossman was my thesis supervisor at Mount Allison. He was the fellow who was in charge of the economic geology course. And he really got my interest going in ore bodies or deposits. There are a lot of different directions you can take as geologists. Many end up as on more of a scientific bent. I really like the idea of looking for ore deposits and he was certainly very keen on teaching us about different mineral exploration techniques and different mineral deposits around the world. Queen's, who was Dr. Bob Mason, who ran the Manics course. Jay Hudson, who ran the structural part of the course, who eventually went on to work with Barrick. And Brian McKenzie, in terms of the math behind what works as a good mineral deposit, what doesn't. From a pure work point of view, there was a man named Bob Schaff who I worked with in my first job between the two degrees. He was a former longtime Maniconda employee and eventually ran Kennecott Canada as their president here in Canada. Very old school. What type of pencil you use when you're doing a map and how sharp the tip has to be and the military preciseness of your notes and that type of thing. Economy of words when you're writing a report. Don't write a 50 page report if there's nothing to say. Make it two pages and move on. So early on as a formative instruction as a geologist, I'd list those people. And you mentioned the choice of industry versus academia. So can you talk a bit more about that? You chose your career in the industrial setting versus academia. Sure, yeah. It's, I guess, more pragmatic and practical than anything. I mean, there's a lot of science behind the study of geology. A lot of it I found very boring. I didn't really care about conardons or, you know, micro-possils or all these things play into some aspect of what you're looking at. And I'm not trying to make light of the different branches of the science. But, you know, going out and finding an ore body is a little bit like treasure hunting. It's a different aspect of things. You have a definite starting point, a definite ending point. One, coming up with an idea about what it is you're looking for, how you might find it, organizing the program, doing the program, successfully finding something and then determining whether you can make money by extracting it or not. It's a very methodical program to go through from start to finish. We were very lucky at Osisco. We did exactly that. We took it from concept to pouring gold bars. And so it's... We'll get to that. But first, what was your first mining job? My first mining job was a summer position working for an antimony miner based in New Brunswick doing soil sample. Basically walking around on a grid taking soil samples and doing geophysics IP and nag work, again walking around with equipment and taking readings. Do you remember your first days? Yeah, sure. I was in Nova Scotia, Hance County. The company was actually extracting antimony from a deposit in St. George, New Brunswick. And they'd taken an option on a Nova Scotia deposit that we were exploring. So I went down and met up with the guys down there. It was pretty much what I expected. We had an extensive amount of field experience when I was at Mount Aid because it's a school on the east coast. We did lots of mapping projects and saw lots of rocks and walked around a lot with backpacks and things. So it wasn't very different from what I knew from training at Mount Aid. The fellow I worked for was on the Hemlow Discovery team which was kind of interesting because it was in the news a lot in the early 80s. And he had one of the first Apple computers which we were using to enter the daily field data on. So it was all kind of interesting and new. You also work in quite challenging environments, South America, Africa. Could you talk a bit about those jobs? Those first prospecting jobs, a brother? Sure. And that was all subsequent to my graduation from Queens which is again one of the things that the MINIX program was very good for. It more or less prepared you to look for any type of deposit in different global settings. You got to meet lots of people from other companies who'd worked abroad. I'd spent about eight or nine years working in Quebec and coming out with my master's degree I was ready for a change. And so it was, I guess, the early 90s. The industry was quiet at the time. There weren't a lot of jobs around. I put out a number of applications to different companies and one of the first ones I got back was to work in Central Africa on a diamond project. And they told the people I had no experience in diamonds and I said, well, there's no problem. It's like gravel deposits. Which company was this? A company called United Reef. And I was pretty sure it wasn't exactly looking for gravel deposits but I thought, okay, this is an entryway into Africa so I took the job, told them I'd stay for a year and I did. And that led to my next eight or nine years of working in Africa. I more or less worked right across the whole central part of the continent. I went from the Central African Republic to another job in Ghana the next year and then to Burkina Faso and then to Mali. And from Mali we were working in Guinea, Mauritania, the Côte d'Ivoire, and then eventually went over to Tanzania. And from Tanzania that was pretty much the end of my African experience and I came back to Canada in 2002. In Africa you worked on prospecting and exploration. Did you also work on relations with communities? Was that part of your job? Yes, it certainly was. From the time I was working in Quebec I was a project manager level geologist. By the time I started working in Africa I was running projects starting in the Central African Republic. By the time I left I was the country manager in Tanzania so it worked across a lot of different levels on different projects with different sizes of staffs. For instance in Mali and Tanzania we would have had somewhere between two and three hundred staff members. About five percent of those would have been expats and the rest would have been local geologists, government geologists and local labor force. So we dealt extensively with the communities and village chiefs and different government levels from the ministers right up to meeting presidents from time to time when we were looking for concessions. When did you come back to Canada? Left Tanzania in 2002 which was about the same time that my business partner Sean Rusen was leaving Niger. And that's how we got started on Ossisco. Sean had been there about 13 years and their company had just signed a joint venture with Semaphore and so he'd come back and was looking for something new to do and so was I. So creation of Ossisco. You told me how you met Mr. Ralsen and you were joined by Robert Warez too. How did you? Can you walk me through the creation of Ossisco? And it's Ossisco exploration and then Ossisco mining. It was Ossisco exploration which we then renamed Ossisco Mining Corporation and then that company was sold and the current company is Ossisco mining. It started as a... I'll come back to it. Let's start with people. Let's start with people and how we started the company. When Sean left Africa he met up with a couple of people that he'd worked for or worked with in Africa back in the late 80s. It was Norman Storm and his dad and at the time they were looking at oil and gas projects in Kazakhstan and working with a very small group based out of Germany. Sean knew that I was just leaving my job and so we went over to Germany, met up with the guys and we started looking at different projects in Kazakhstan. Can I just ask you, did you work in English or do you speak several other languages? I speak French as well. It's from my time in Quebec and my time in Africa. Most of my time was spent in French, what were French West African colonies. You mentioned moving through those different countries. There is German that comes in. There is Russian that comes in. My dad speaks English, French, Russian, Polish, German that I grew up as an Anglophone and learned my French in Quebec and in West Africa. So unfortunately all that would have been very useful for me to speak Russian and German along the way. I more or less just listened to other people speaking. So let's go back to Kazakhstan then. So we started really with a private fund based out of Europe called Eurasia, Eurasia Holding that we set up to do the work in Kazakhstan. And the initial idea was in early 2002, 2002, 2003 there really wasn't a mining business to be had. It was quiet on all fronts. There wasn't much investment going into gold companies or copper companies or any mining companies. We looked at oil and gas businesses being not so different from mining. Sean had a lot of experience in drilling and I obviously had a lot of experience as a geologist so I thought okay, it's geology and drilling and we'll go figure it out. So we raised some money as a group and started acquiring some oil and gas projects in Kazakhstan. Then in early 2003 the price of gold started to move a little bit. I was offered a project that I'd worked on historically. In Quebec it was one that Bob Wears also knew. My first encounter with Bob Wears was back in 1985 on one of my first jobs leaving Mount Ellison. So I knew who he was. In Quebec it's a small place and most of the geologists know each other. So when we came back to Canada to start looking at gold projects we got together with Bob Wears and he coincidentally had the Shell Ocisco Exploration which he had acquired from Andre Goma. Andre was a very well-known geologist at the time who ran Virginia. I'd had some success in discovering a couple of deposits including Eleanor. So Bob acquired the Shell for him. It had a number of insignificant properties and Sean and I approached him with the idea of using money from the fund that we just set up in Europe to finance going to look for gold deposits in Canada and Brazil. But we had a very specific concept that we wanted to apply. I'd just spent eight or nine years in Africa and Sean the previous 13 and largely what we were doing in Africa was as the countries were opening up in the 90s they were more or less forced many of them to change their mining acts to allow majority foreign ownership. This was after the collapse of the Soviet Union who used to sponsor a lot of those countries. So in order to get the new funding from the World Bank and IMF they had to change their mining codes to allow new companies to come in and do exploration and many were successful in finding new deposits. But in a lot of cases what the companies did was they were really just going back to old colonial deposits that hadn't been accessed since a lot of these countries had gone independent in the 60s. And finding old mines where high grade had been mined out and they left the lower grade material and the hanging walls and the foot walls and so in the 90s a lot of companies just went in there redrilled these deposits and came up with multi-million ounce deposits that were lower grade but because they were oxide they were easy to mine inexpensive to mine and very profitable. So there was a whole wave of new exploration and discovery and rediscovery in Africa at that point not different to I guess some of the plaster gold rushes in the late 1800s. But it was a one-time event because once you go and find those oxide deposits and mine them out then they're gone. Now we weren't trying to apply that concept to Canada but it did occur to us that there were lots of old mining camps in Canada where they'd mined out the high grade and probably some big low grade deposits sitting around in Canada in hard rock. So when we got together with Sean and I with Bob the idea was to go and look at these old camps try to find big bulk tonnage low grade deposits in hard rock that we could possibly mine. There had been a number of significant changes engineering wise in terms of the size of trucks the size of sagnals particularly 38 foot sagnals, 41 foot sagnals so we were looking at it from a unit cost point of view if you could find something with enough tons you could work with a lower grade and most Canadians in the mining business at the time weren't looking at low grade deposits because everybody knew you needed at least 7 grams to have a mine that was viable. And so when we started the company we started looking at some of these old camps one of the first things that Bob Wiers did was he wrote a small algorithm to run through the Quebec Digital Database which was one of the most advanced at the time it was a pretty simple algorithm if the length of a piece of drill core is X to Y and the grade is A to B give me a list and he developed the list which we then systematically started going through and by the time we got to the third one that was the Canadian Malarque deposit that had just come up in a bankruptcy sale and we successfully bid it for about $80,000 not being certain that it was what we wanted but once we got it we went up and we looked at the drill core and we realized that at the same time it was also a porphyry deposit Bob had had a lot of experience in porphyries at places like Murdoch though with Miranda he re-logged all of the Gaspe Copper core and so as far as people that we knew that knew porphyries Bob knew what a porphyry was and we were very surprised to see that what a lot of people had considered to be a typical abitibi deposit was anything but and so we knew we had something special from the beginning but the biggest problem we had was there was a town sitting on it and so again it was an asset that people hadn't considered to be viable it was one even if they thought it was viable they didn't want because of the complex issue of how you move a town off the deposit so I guess because we didn't know better at the time we had set no limitations on what we thought we could do which is probably the reason that we achieved successfully putting the mine into production it was a huge undertaking for a company that really was just a shell when we started did you work with sociologists, urban planners or was it mostly mining people? I kind of made it up as we went along again you can imagine the three of us sitting around having gone through the first couple deposits on our list we probably spent two or three million dollars of our group's money at that point so I think it's just for us to find something everybody always assumes you're going to go find an ore body right away we came upon malarctic and it took us a while to really figure out how big it really was when we acquired the property there's a neat story, Bob got a phone call from the bankruptcy trustee saying what do you want me to do with the data? and Bob just offhandedly said well just send it down to my office in Montreal and the guy kind of said are you sure? yep and a couple of days later a transport truck showed up with 30 years of mining data all the daily production records it was something like 40,000 files and boxes and filing cabinets showed up and it was lucky that Bob's office at the time was an old kind of a unit warehouse type thing that had a little office up at the front so we managed to store all of the boxes and things in the back we ended up hiring a bunch of unemployed gels to digitize the four, five or six thousand drill logs that we had at the time there were many more it took months and months and months to digitize all of these paper files that went back to the 1930s we had to do a lot of conversions from penny weights to grams per ton and eventually a model started to emerge of what looked like a very big cohesive deposit there were gaps in the information where there weren't any existing drill holes and that's what we designed as the first program we really wanted to know if we were going to spend time on this or not so we designed a longitudinal drill section across about a kilometer and a half of the deposit vertical holes down to 400 meters and if they came back with golden then we knew that the game was on and pretty much all of them came back better than we'd hoped so we knew we had a big deposit but then back to your question do we engage sociologists and people at that point we knew if we were going to be successful in this we had to move the town we weren't a big company by any means at that point but we were very familiar with the people or I guess the way the people in the small towns would think we'd all either grown up in small towns or worked in small towns in Quebec in the course of our careers so we took the simple approach we just went door to door and we met with all the people in the southern neighborhood and said well look we've just done a bunch of holes here that tell us that there might be something here and before we spend any more money we really need to know that if there is a mine are you people interested in moving or relocating and we got a very positive response from the people in the town so we went back to our group in Germany and asked them for more money and that's how we started the program so actually this is something I wanted to ask you about because you are starting it around the time that there is an economic crisis in the U.S. especially that came, that came, yeah so how did you secure funding? Well when we started again the initial money came from our group in Europe Eurasia I think at the beginning owned something over 50% of Ossisco exploration and the initial drilling we did was in the spring of 2004 so we continued our drilling we put out our first resource in 2006 and proved that we had a sizable deposit I think that initial resource was about 4.5 million ounces or 4.3 million ounces from that point we started marketing in places like Toronto and New York and our shareholder base grew we hired the engineering team from Cambior who had just been acquired by I Am Gold but we were lucky enough to get the top engineers in the process of that sale to come and work with us we were successful in raising more money we raised another $150 million I think in October of 2007 so when the financial crisis hit in 2008 we had an advanced deposit we were working towards feasibility we'd increased the size of the deposit to something over 8 million ounces but when the feasibility came out in the fall of 2008 just in time for the financial crisis it was telling the market that we now needed to go find a billion dollars to build the mine and there probably wasn't a billion dollars in all of Canada at that point in terms of liquid cash so of course our share price crashed down but fortunately we had raised that $150 million the previous October it was a rare window that opened up on Halloween Day it was open and shut before the day was over but we managed to do a significant financing and at one point during the financial crisis we were trading pretty much at the cash value of what we had in the bank and our 8 million ounce deposit was being discounted to zero so our thinking at the time was that if anybody was going to try and steal the company from us that would have been the time but every other company in the business was facing its own problems at the time so we were lucky to I guess that there weren't everyone else was preoccupied with their own issues at the time there were lots of covenants on debt notes that were almost being tripped that people were more concerned with so there wasn't a lot of focus from the seniors on trying to go out and do M&A in early 2009 just about three or four months after the peak of the crisis our show price had rebounded back to about five and a half dollars and again a financing window appeared and we decided at that point to book for about a two hundred and fifty million dollar financing within about the first fifteen minutes we had three or four times the demand we upsized the deal eventually we took in four hundred and three million dollars directly and another hundred and twenty million dollars two hundred and twenty million dollars with a short term warrant that we had attached so the financing we did that day in February just literally within three months of the financial crisis amounted to about six hundred and forty three million dollars over the balance of 2009 we completed a total of one billion and fifty million dollars of financing and suddenly we were one of the only companies out there that was fully financed to build the mine we did it almost entirely with equity it was a small piece of debt with the Canada Pension Plan or CPPIB and twenty million dollars with the FTSQ one of the Quebec Pension Funds but the rest of it was entirely done in equity and no junior mining company had ever done that before here it was we had all the money to build our mine the town move had started about that time and we were ready just to go and start building just to go back to those early days early 2000 did you find that Briex had any effect on what you were trying to do was the discussion still going on or was that over? Yeah, no not really I was working in Africa when Briex happened and a lot of people everybody in our business is watching what was happening with great interest I know a lot of the people that were involved in the story not obviously in the scandal but some of the people who were on the ground as consultants some of the people that were working for Freeport I know some investors that went over and saw the project that type of thing so I've had lots of background on the story over the years really I think the only thing that changed was the implementation of things like 43101 there was a lot of loose reporting at the time I remember just prior to the Briex scandal happening somebody putting out a a press release estimating a resource based on a soil geochemistry anomaly in Ghana which was really getting to the far reaches of insanity in terms of what people were trying to get away with at the time so it's made certainly the technical standard of reporting a lot more responsible in one sense it's kind of shifted the the potential focus of any blame on to the geologists which I'm not certain is entirely fair but you know certainly it's made it a lot tougher for people to perpetrate direct frauds in terms of how it affected the business in early 2000 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 just as we were getting going really the business works in cycles so that happened at the end of the previous mining cycle and it was time for the next cycle to come on so I don't think it had a direct effect on what was happening in the early 2000s okay so the mine is established the community is moved you observed that change in the community could you talk about that employment that changed how many? when we showed up in Malartik in the fall of 2004 about the time that we were making the acquisition just afterwards the town had something like 40-45% unemployment they were slowly selling off their municipal assets like the golf course and the hockey rink and things to pay for the winter snow removal and the towns weren't allowed to run a deficit budget but because a lot of the mean industry had shut down the dormitory saw mill had shut down in town the last mine had closed a couple of years before the grocery store had burnt down the part of the town that we were hoping to move was called Petibi Beirut Little Beirut so the town was really in a tough position and I know when we put out the press release announcing that we required the project it took about 15 minutes for the mayor to call us and welcome us to come up and start work up there so generally we had a very good reception in the town and again when we realized that we would have to move a significant portion of the town the response was very good there were obviously some people who were concerned and that really in the whole it went very smoothly we actually committed to moving that portion of the town before we had our own feasibility study in hand we knew at the time that if we started to move homes in order to facilitate our work that we couldn't move a third of the town then run out of money so what we did was we guaranteed the town that if they were in agreement that we would move that portion of the town entirely and guaranteed to do it whether there was a mine or not one of the issues facing parts of that part of town where the old underground workings came up in places to 10 meters from surface there was a woman who came to see us one day and said what are you guys doing near my house I can hear rocks falling and we said well we're not actually doing any work over there right now but we'll send the drill over and see what's happening and a little while later somebody went out and the drillers were all standing around and we said well what's going on and we said well we drilled underneath our carport one of the drills and after 10 meters it broke through into 100 meter void and so that was the first house that we bought and moved that house off but there were a number of houses there were actually streets that had fences across the street saying you know danger of cave-in and I get the intersections and things where they'd subsequently gone and put up a tall 10 foot chain link fences to stop people from driving on the ground so the issue with a lot of the homeowners down there faced was that they couldn't sell their homes if they wanted to so it wasn't as if we came in and we're trying to force people off their land this was part of town where they never should have allowed homes to be built because as the mines progressed over the years from the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s people had a tendency to live near the head frame it wasn't as far to have to walk in the winter time that type of thing rules and regulations weren't what they were today in terms of where you can build but the net effect was in the 80s and 90s in the early 2000s if people had wanted to move they couldn't have because there would be no legal way that they could sell those homes to somebody else I said well yeah sure you can buy my house but there's a giant hole underneath it it effectively puts the value of your land to zero so what a lot of people were doing was just throwing the keys on the porch and letting the banks take the homes and moving on so we gave people an opportunity to move to an area that didn't have mine workings underneath it or to purchase their homes outright it was a very intricate and detailed plan in terms of how we wanted to treat that part of our project and it literally was a separate project we wanted to make sure that if we were going to move 100 or 200 or 300 homes obviously some of the people wanted to move away but if we were then just to go and I think the ratio was about half and half, half decided to sell and half wanted to move but it didn't mean that we could only move now out of the 350 homes we had to either move 150 and rebuild another 150 but we wanted to make sure it was a net sum balance or positive for the town so in the cases where people sold their homes and moved we still moved the homes if we were able to and if we couldn't move the home we would rebuild a new home you see because if we'd done anything less than that it would have been removing homes from the tax base which meant that the tax burden would have been on those remaining people in the town and so we wanted to make sure that everything that we did had no negative effect it had to be at least neutral but hopefully positive everything that we did when we chose the area for the new subdivision it was where the golf course was it was the best place to put it and we needed two of the holes so we rebuilt two new holes of the golf course as well and so on and so on so it was we were very conscious of being the best possible corporate citizens in terms of how we handled that move because we knew that this was a town where we were going to be operating through the course of the history of our company and the life of that mine and we wanted to make sure that we had the best possible relationship with the town it already emerges in your answers but could you talk about the culture at Osisko innovation culture corporate culture how would you define it yeah we weren't following anybody's book we weren't trying to emulate anybody we were always just trying to do things in the best possible way really the company and the group has worked from I guess my best way to put it is with a horizontal management structure we have different positions in the company presidents and vice presidents but really what we do is we sit around as a group and decide how we're going to do things and everybody has input on things if we have somebody who objects strongly to something then we'll find a different way to do it it's been a very good way to work from a group sense because we're using everybody's experience to the maximum there are no rash decisions where somebody says well I'm in charge of this so I'm just doing it that way it was all well considered and all agreed to 2014 Guard Corp tries to take over Osisko could you give me your thoughts on that that event? Well it was only the second time that Sean's called me at six in the morning the first time was when we had a mill at the fire or sorry a fire at the mill and I got a call just shortly after six in the morning and Sean's not nearly riser so I knew something was wrong and the second time I got the call I thought okay well it can't be the mill again but he called me to say he just got off the phone with Jeff Janess who told him they were launching a bid for the mill it was a long hard fight and we weren't surprised that somebody had decided to make a hostile attempt for the company we knew that the Canadian collective mine would be a big cash spinner for a long time it was now the newest largest mine in Canada and after I guess five months of bitter fighting and the deal went through with Agnico and Yamana the way the role is working in Canada we couldn't stop the sale of the company there is no just say no defense in Canada and typically what happens the minute somebody launches a hostile attack 20 or 30 or more percent of your company ends up in the hands of the arbitrage traders out of New York who then just try to engineer a higher sale so we knew that we would be forced into a sale at one point but when Goldcourt gave up and finally we'd effectively won the battle but lost the company so it was a bitter victory the initial bid had been 2.6 billion the final sale was about 4.3 billion so we did the best that we could for our shareholders but it wasn't a result that we were hoping for so Assisca royalties grew out of the sale to avoid a double vote for the white knight suitors Agnico and Yamana we had to extract enough value from the deal which ended up being the stubco Assisca royalties with a valuation of about 500 million and so we started business the next day now as a royalty company a number of things besides the 5% NSR for Canadian Malartic and 2% and the other properties we had we took out about 157 million cash and tax pools an equity portfolio which was very important subsequently and some properties and then we had to decide very quickly are we going to really be a royalty company or are we going to be a mining company we were lucky in that we kept a lot of the top people in the company top engineers, top resource geologists top explorers that type of thing so we were able to quickly rebuild while we were separating a royalty company from other assets we took some of the members of the teams and put them into things like my elbow Bob Wears who started the company with Sean and I took over that project Marban which was a satellite deposit Canadian Malartic spent the next year and a half drilling that off to a new resource looking his teams ended up in Falco which was basically an engineering project going to design the horn 5 mine and some went to O-Ban and so on and so on after the first year in 2015 we decided to use O-Ban as a platform for the new O-Sysco mining and then draw all those people back and the issue we had was as a royalty company you can't have a large staff, you can but you become an abnormal royalty company typically a royalty company will have a staff we had about 93 so in order to not look like we have this giant GNA we put those people into the other companies and came up with what we called the accelerator model where with our own companies they would trade a royalty or sell a royalty to O-Sysco royalties in return for the cash which then allowed them to go out and do exploration and develop deposits so taking O-Ban which had 10 million of cash and an 8 million dollar market cap in the summer of 2015 again it was a down cycle much like 2003 when people didn't care about mining like we had started in the original O-Sysco we employed the same techniques and philosophy that we did when we started O-Sysco I we were looking to consolidate mining camps but this time instead of just O-Sysco I initially it was the Malarctic camp for O-Sysco I with O-Sysco II we focused on the Malarctic camp on the Windfall camp on the Garrison camp on the area around Kirkland so there were four or five areas that we were hoping to take a nucleus property and then do the claim acquisition around what we've done in Malarctic was we bought the first property from bankruptcy and then we spent the next year consolidating that whole camp knowing that if we were successful with the open pit model we'd need all that ground our assumption with the second company was that we probably weren't going to find another Canadian Malarctic but that we would find ideally two or three or four deposits that in aggregate would end up with the same half a million ounce a year plus or minus production profile that we had with O-Sysco I the idea was to rebuild the company we were just forced to sell we were very lucky with the acquisition of the Windfall Deposit in that it very quickly turned out to look like something very different again but like Canadian Malarctic people had thought that that was a fault related, sheer, hosted, full deposit what we showed people in the course of our work was that it was an Archaean gold only for free they weren't supposed to exist there was no pre-existing literature to our work and so that old ad is you'll never find what you're not looking for it was very appropriate it's widely recognized as an Archaean Corp deposit we think it puts to bed a lot of the argument between the two schools of thought in Canada that many people over the years have thought that things were all structurally related to these big breaks and then you have the older school where's the granite guys they had to be an intrusive that was responsible for it the actual Canadian Malarctic porphyry is cut by the Cadillac larger lake breaks so geologically it's very simple to say the porphyry was there first it brought gold into the system some of these other deposits are obviously remobilization and reworking of that gold that was brought in by the intrusives what we found with windfall again it was supposed to be or was widely believed to be a typical Abitibi quartz vein fault related deposit and it's a porphyry hosted sulphide gold system it is related to a fault but it's not located in the fault so again a double adage a double metaphor here one you're not going to find something you're not looking for because it was a porphyry deposit and we're looking for porphyries it's also not where it's supposed to be a lot of the exploration historically in northern Canada has been focused on these main breaks and people know that if they're too far away from the major faults they're wasting their money so they typically wouldn't spend a lot of time exploring away from the faults the windfall system is actually between two fault systems so it's in an area where people wouldn't have looked for it typically and now what we found is we have an extensive porphyry system so far it's over three kilometers long it's all interrelated to one phase of the porphyry system which we've defined we've been drilling based on the porphyry model for over a year with almost a hundred percent success with the drilling so if you look back in the last 14 years we've defined two new styles of mineralization in the avatity as a company we had one world class deposit with Canadian malarctic and we're hoping that windfall should be our second world class deposit you have a number of awards you had a number of awards you had a prospector CEO of company is there one contribution or a set of contributions that you are the most proud of? yeah I think we're probably one of the only groups certainly one of a very small handful who are trying to recreate a company in Canada over the course of my career since I graduated in 1986 from Mount Ellison I've seen the demise of companies that you would have thought would have been around forever like Noranda Falconbridge, Kaminko Inco all of these great long term huge Canadian corporations just disappearing in a bad market for a variety of different reasons our goal when we started was to actually go out and start a mining company and produce gold it goes back to the small foundation investors that we had in our group a lot of the money came out of Germany and from small German families who have a long history of running small companies for generations in their family and when a lot of the initial investors wrote their checks they said okay well here's my check call me in five years or seven years when you're pouring gold and it was pretty much the extent of it they fully expected that we were going to go out and find a mine and go into production typically in our Canadian mining business probably 95% or better of the companies had no intention of ever being miners but we were genuine from the beginning about wanting to go out and find gold and produce gold which goes back to why when we were forced to sell the Cisco one back in 2014 it was a bitter defeat because we knew that we had that essential ingredient to create a big company is a cornerstone or a class asset every big company has one it's gold strike with Agnico it was La Ronde and so on and so on the Canadian market was going to be our cornerstone asset now again we hopefully have that asset in windfall and the intent is still to go out and recreate a Canadian mining company so we've been quite successful in terms of creating value for the shareholders over the years that the first company was taken from a million dollar market cap to a four billion dollar sale which we literally returned to our shareholders in three short years some of the parts of our group are now worth about five billion so we're actually bigger now after three years of reconstruction than we were after eleven years of initial work so we've created about a total of nine billion dollars from three guys who started back in 2003 with an idea and we're having a lot of fun doing it we've defined two new types of deposits in the Archean which are now exploration models around the world for different companies we saw a lot of companies follow on our success about tonnage low grade mining in other parts of Canada and other parts of the world using our same model I suspect other people will now go out and start looking for windfall style deposits in other parts of the Archean and Canada and around the world so quite proud of that it's a business about making money for your shareholders we've certainly done that our awards and things are nice but we didn't go out setting out trying to win awards it was really to build a fundamental company and at this point it feels a little bit like nation building what are your thoughts on the culture of innovation in Canadian mining industry today yeah our business was largely gutted from sort of the mid-80s on as mining and it's a famous quote by and I think it was Trudeau or certainly one of his cabinet ministers mining is a sunset industry to have a government take a philosophical decision at one point and decide that it's no longer an important industry for your country shows you politically how they think about the business very untrue everything is made from one form of metal or another or something that's mined you know the what happened as a result of a lot of that where a lot of people started not taking mining courses a lot of universities sat down their programs it happens in down cycles regardless but the funding went away for a lot of things like the GSC and the provincial geology groups so that resulted today you have a lot of people who are 26 and a lot of people who are 56 and there's a gap of geologists there's a gap of engineers there's a gap of corporate leaders for companies who actually have the experience necessary to run good fundamental mining companies so what we're seeing is a lot of people coming into Canada and I think we're going to need a lot more for a while in countries like or continents like South America where Canadian money was being spent in the late 80s and through the 90s and early 2000s where people were actually getting the benefit of that knowledge otherwise we're going to have to see a large uptick in funding to Canadian universities and programs to create the next generation of geologists and engineers and corporate leaders to run mining companies because I don't think mining is ever going to go away from Canada I think if anything one of the things that we've proven as OSISCO there's a lot of mining potential you just have to look at the problem differently and as metal prices go up lower grades become more viable changes in technology allow for different mining methods and again make some things that in the past might have been viewed as being uneconomic, economic really I think we've only scratched the surface in terms of the potential for finding new mines in the country one of the numbers I like the most is in the last cycle over 52 million ounces of gold between Quebec and Ontario discovered better in production now and this is after everybody left in the 90s saying well there's been no more mines in Canada we don't need to be here anymore we're talking huge companies like Barrick and everybody else they effectively left Canada because they thought there was a lack of potential and now what we're seeing is a flood of all of these senior and intermediate miners coming back to Canada companies like Barrick who haven't spent an exploration dollar in Canada in 20 years we have them as a partner now on our Can project we've seen companies like El Dorado and Alamos who formerly were working in places like Turkey and Greece coming back to Canada because of geopolitical problems overseas Canada is a really great place to go do exploration you don't need a visa to go to Manitoba or to northern Quebec you don't have to pay expat salaries in the US dollars you don't have to have rotational staffs and there's huge potential so I think the future is very bright for Canadian exploration but it takes that entrepreneurial thinking and thinking outside the box breaking down paradigm not looking for what I want to look for for the first 100 years of Canadian mining history so exactly what's your advice to someone who wants to enter that industry you don't have any preconceived notions about what it's about you know the one thing that we very successfully did as a company was ignored all the rules in terms of thinking what we were supposed to be looking for or what scale of mine that we could conceive of building raising a billion dollars three guys who nobody knows in the company that nobody knows how to spell you know people were confusing us for a Japanese sushi restaurant at the beginning of Cisco you know without knowing it's the name of the lake where they found the horn mine but we just ignored all the conventional wisdom as to what you couldn't couldn't couldn't do we did everything very well I think we redefined how you deal with things like moving a towel your relationship with communities we're trying to be on the forefront of everything and be as socially responsible and as sustainable as we can but you know really it's a business about people the mining business in Canada is about potential it's a huge country I think there's a huge potential to find lots of new mines but it will take lots of entrepreneurial thinking and don't ever let anybody tell you what you can't do because I think amongst all we've proven to a lot of people that there are lots of things that we went through a whole corporate history to date with people telling us what we couldn't do and then we just kind of turned around and we went down big deposits and raised the money to build them built them and they worked and what are you proudest of in life not just related to your career proudest in life of not being a doctor that's a very good answer yeah you know it's one of the decisions that I have absolutely no regrets about making but it's a very interesting business to be in you get to see all corners of the world if you want to but particularly all corners of the country and it's a fascinating business to be in it's wealth creation at its you know rost form and you know we've over the years employed hundreds if not thousands of people and you know seeing that new wealth creation and not only for shareholders but for those individuals working within the group and reinvigorated small towns and added to the wealth of the country that's been the most exciting and important part for me is there anything guys that you would like to add to I think we're just starting you know we're we're obviously fairly well known as a company right now but I think we're just on the beginning leg of ultimately what we hope to achieve here you know we're our ultimate end goal is to create one of these great Canadian mining houses that has sustainable and long life like the Narendra's and Falconbridge's and Minko's and Minko's have passed well thank you very much thank you for your time