Governments, companies opt for commuter mines

Nobody wants wilderness mining towns anymore. Workers prefer flying or driving on weekly or biweekly rotations from southern centres to wilderness mines. Mining companies are glad to be rid of the costs and extracurricular responsibilities associated with town building. Governments see “commuter” mines as a means of northern development without the social and political entanglements of boom-bust communities. Even environmentalists and native groups should view favorably such temporary, rather than permanent, encroachments.

Always a mixed blessing, single-resource towns brought economic benefits and established settlement beachheads in wilderness territory. But the beginning of a new wilderness town inevitably marks the beginning of its end, an end usually expected within decades. Pierre Berton in The Mysterious North calls the single-resource north the land of feast and famine and notes that the “frontier is sprinkled with tragic monuments to these burst bubbles in the form of ghost towns.”

A recent example is Pine Point, a community in the Northwest Territories that went bust a few years ago when its economic base — a zinc-lead orebody — was mined out. In total, 2,500 residents were uprooted. Little remains of the town, the only “tragic monument” a few buildings and the street grid etched in the ground.

Mines with a commuting workforce and no permanent on-site settlement are a different matter. Orebodies will still be finite. Workers will still be rendered jobless by mine closings.

Rusting remains of industrial society will still dot the northern wilds long after the last ton of ore is crushed and trucked south. But fewer ghost towns will haunt the north.

And the benefits of industrial activity will be more widely disbursed. Add to the list of advantages reduced environmental disruption as well as better opportunities for northern, particularly native, hiring, and it isn’t difficult to appreciate why governments and companies have taken a shine to the long-distance commuting option, or LDC, for short.

“LDC mines are certainly on the up in this country,” said Tom Pugsley, who is in charge of developing a nickel-copper orebody for Falconbridge Ltd. in the northern Ungava area of Quebec. This deposit will probably come on-stream with a commuting workforce.

LDC mines attract workers from diverse southern sources. This urban distribution varies from mine to mine. The Saskatchewan LDC uranium mines of Rabbit Lake, Cluff Lake and Key Lake draw all their labor from Saskatchewan. This is not the case with LDC mines in the Northwest Territories. The more northerly Lupin, for example, has 240 of its 444 employees calling southern Alberta home. But some workers commute from communities in the territories, as well as from towns and cities in British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and the Atlantic provinces. A more widely dispersed labor market holds for Polaris on Little Cornwallis Island.

This creates a problem, however. A worker might earn his money in the Northwest Territories and yet his home province, say Alberta, collects the income tax and property tax, and benefits from that worker’s spending. No solution has yet been found for this irritant.

In addition, the LDCs tend to acquire the bulk of their labor, supplies and services rather distant from the resource. Dubbed the “flyover” effect, it enriches established regional and urban centres — Edmonton and Vancouver, Winnipeg and Montreal — at the expense of northerly centres. “The LDC mines, on average, purchase less than half as much of their supplies and services locally than do traditional mines,” says a study conducted by Keith Storey and Mark Shrimpton of Newfoundland’s Memorial University.

Even Lupin, with its Yellowknife road link, buys only 23% of total supplies and services in the territory. The comparable figure for mines near Yellowknife is 35%. As well, LDC mines are “mostly supplied from Ontario and Quebec.” Lupin, for example, buys 31% of its supplies from central Canada. Polaris and Nanisivik, because of their Maritime link to central Canada, are not exceptions.

Worse still, LDCs have led more than a few northern families to migrate south. At Polaris, Shrimpton and Storey discovered that in the nearly half-decade of operation up to June, 1987, 54% of employees originally residing in the Northwest Territories had re-settled in the warmer, more hospitable south. “Evidence from a survey of Polaris workers suggests that current trends will result in further declines in the number of miners living in the north, and an increasing concentration of them in major urban centres,” the study says.

In Saskatchewan, some native workers found their higher income levels a source of friction within the original community. (If it isn’t jealousy over the larger pay packet, it’s a sudden warming of relations from even distant relatives.)

Mining families are also induced south by the undeniable fact that northern communities cannot compete culturally and socially with the larger, southern centres. This “particularly perverse and unfortunate policy outcome,” Shrimpton and Storey note, is all the worse because “some of the best educated and motivated residents” are permanently vacating the north. Brian Goffin, manager of the Northern Affairs Secretariat for the Saskatchewan government, concedes the realities of de-population and the flyover effect, which short-circuit northern development, “but come shutdown time (at a single-resource town), there’s no question commuter mines are superior.”

A similar attitude prevails in the Northwest Territories. The Pine Point closure seems to have been a watershed. After more than two decades of operations, the Pine Point mine on the south shore of Great Slave Lake was shut down. The 2,500 people who had called Pine Point home left, many frustrated over the closing, and the territorial government was helpless in preventing a complete abandonment.

“You can’t even call it a ghost town,” says Bernie Scott, socio-economic adviser to the territorial Department of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources. “We don’t need any more Pine Points.”

It seems the conclusions drawn by Shrimpton and Storey are inescapable: A decline in the number of northern communities and the northern population generally. The remaining population will “consist of the residents of small native communities and of administrative and service centres, some of whom will commute to LDC operations. Economic activity will increasingly concentrate in urban Canada.”

Still, there is a role for government policy in directing LDCs toward social ends. For example, where mines have closed and threatened the future of a town, LDC’s can tap such skilled workforces. Elliot Lake, as a declining uranium mining centre, is a prime candidate for such treatment. New LDC mines in northern Ontario, when they are developed, could be encouraged to designate Elliot Lake as a labor commuting point.

Government will also continue to encourage local northern, primarily native, hirings.

It is clear that LDCs are here to stay. Only if a huge, long-life ore deposit is found — of the magnitude of the Thompson, Man., nickel orebodies — will mining companies even begin feasibility studies with full settlement in mind. Mining companies will tap lesser orebodies using the LDC labor option. It makes sense in today’s world: it is less polluting and disruptive to the sensitive northern habitat; it is less intrusive on native communal life; it smoothes the boom-bust curve; it is less costly.

In short, LDCs satisfy nearly everyone’s needs.

Olav Svela is the editor of The Northern Miner Magazine.