So White did precisely that. He had joined Madsen in 1954 as a freshly-groomed, 21-year old engineer from the Royal School of Mines in England. He was promoted to shift boss, after proving himself as a miner, and eventually became shaft captain. Heeding the advice of his friend, in 1959 he applied for, and won, a position as engineer with Noranda Mines’ Gaspe copper operation. Back in those heady days of base metal mining, if any operation symbolized big, the 7,500-ton-per-day Gaspe complex did. He now presides over Noranda Inc’s Zinc Group. The job description includes overseeing the Brunswick complex in New Brunswick, the Matagami division in northwestern Quebec and Canadian Electrolytic Zinc near Montreal.
White works out of a comfortable, but quite plain, office in the middle of Toronto’s financial district. He commutes to work from the family home in Oakville. For much of his career, however, towns no larger than Murdochville, Que., (Population 3,000) were home. Their slower pace and quality of life he came to appreciate.
For example, in Murdochville, where the annual snowfall often topped 15 feet (yes, 15 feet) and the slopes spilled into the city centre, he took up skiing. He taught potter (he swears he has the mechanical technique but little artistic ability) at his basement kiln.
When in 1970 he was chosen mine manager for Noranda’s new Mattabi mine, several mines north of Ignace, Ont., near Thunder Bay, he became deeply immersed in community-building. Ignace was in dire need of a medical clinic, not to mention recreational facilities. The townspeople, White among them, pooled their various talents to build the clinic by hand. They then had something with which to entice a doctor. White fought one year to have school trustee elections re-opened because Ignace nominees had inadvertently faled to file nomination papers. “I ended up pleading the case with the judge,” White said. He also added his voice to Chambers of Commerce groups which would lobby the provincial government for needed changes to legislation affecting the north. Such is the life of mine managers in Canada’s northland.
White clearly has a soft spot for the north. “As far as I’m concerned that’s the essence of Canada out there, not down here,” he said during an interview in his Toronto office with The Northern Miner Magazine. He feels the mining industry deserves credit for opening vast stretches of the north. But before any self-indulgent backpatting begins, he also notes that mining has failed in one critical area. “What our industry has failed to do is attract other industries to the north. While a mine is operating, we should encourage the town to try to attract industry, to diversify while the town is strong. You can’t wait until the mine is near closure. It’s just too late.”
And in the absence of secondary industry, mining companies could, at the very least, prepare single-industry communities for less traumatic closures. The town of Atikokan, Ont., and the managers of Steep Rock and Calend mines did that very well, he said. Well in advance of the scheduled mine closings, the community established a development committee that sweet-talked a plywood maker into setting up shop and lobbied for a new power station. The townspeople also injected new life into the local tourism industry, White recalls.
At Matagami, Que., where Noranda owns and operates the Matagami base metals complex (including the Norita mine and Isle Dieu), the company backs an industrial development effort. The original mine, Matagami, is closed, and although the smaller Isle Dieu can still count on about seven years worth of ore and big exploration budgets to find more, extinction still clouds the town;s future. But a complete mine closing won’t be an unmitigated disaster, because the push for buffer industries let to the establishment of a lumber mill.
White didn’t hav etime to ponder closings back in the late 1950s and early 60s. At Gaspe, the mine was grappling with quite the opposite problem – how to scale up the operation. The drive to mechanize meant that miners were being given more specialized tasks, loaders were replacing slushers for mucking, and small dumpers were giving way to units three times the size. And White arrived practically in the midst of it all, eventually becoming equipment captain, a position that required huge dollops of tact on the one hand and firmness on the other to keep the production people and the maintenance department happy. He learned quickly that “maintenance is the Achilles’ heel of mining.” He was also an Anglo salaried employee in a predominantly French-speaking community. To make matters worse, a bitter strike two years earlier had poisoned the Gaspe work environment. But he dusted off his high-school French and, by his own account, became “reasonably proficient at communicating with the crews.” At Gaspe today, he says, they call him Jean LeBlanc.
The real culture shock, after 22 years of small-town life, came with his appointment as general manager of Gaspe (after being its mine manager for several years) and a move to Noranda’s Montreal office. “For me, it was a bit of an adjustment. My wife Margaret enjoyed the big city.” In 1980, he moved to the Toronto head office as a vice-president of mining. But even after all the intervening years as a head office type making only occasional visits to mines, White says he’s still a miner at heart.
“I view myself as a hard rock miner. I understand the physical work.” Over the years, White has seen mining change from the labor-intensive activity it once was to the heavily mechanized practice it has become. Now with the push to automate and remove as many workers as possible from the underground, mining is poised to take another leap forward, or so many people think. But while Noranda’s research group bellieves “manless mines” are possible, White thinks that, at the very elast, mechanics will still have to descend to the workings to fix or maintain equipment. And no one has yet developed an automated scaler, though apparently one research group is working on that.
“An old miner like myself has trouble seeing how we really can take the miner out,” he says, although he does envision big breakthroughs in such areas as continuous mining. But at the root of it all, “mining still isn’t all science, there’s a lot of art to it.”
If that’s so, then John C. White is one of mining’s more enduring artists.
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