Editor’s Note AN IMPRESSIVE RECORD

Elliot Lake was a boom town in 1956, the impetus for which was essentially the United States’ need for a secure supply of the yellow powder that had so convincingly and tragically ended the Second World War. Uranium was also to launch the entire world into the nuclear age. As a four-year-old who had just arrived with his family in Elliot Lake, I didn’t know any of this then. But of new mines and the boom towns they spawn, I was to learn a little.

From my father’s telling of it, I learned that boom towns meant that hundreds of thirsty miners for the sake of a beer would line up, more or less patiently, for hours outside the sole tap room. I learned that the unions hired big men for “important union drives” and that companies would hire even bigger men, apparently for the same job. It was all rather confusing in those days.

Of course, these are childhood recollections. As I grew older, I came to understand that each new mine has a far broader effect. As politicians say, it has a “positive impact” on a nation’s total production of goods. By that they mean that as a nation we can sell more goods outside the country and earn more money from our trading partners, which is good for the country’s earnings statement. New mines also keep more citizens gainfully employed earning taxable income, and that eventually should improve the national balance sheet. There is also infused into the life of a country a sense of prosperity, security, and optimism, which on a financial statement we could list under the non-economic, but no less substantive, heading “goodwill.”

In the coming year and the one just past, the mining industry will have fulfilled its obligations in terms of the accounts I’ve described. When we last counted, something like 32 new mines had either crushed their first run of commerical ore or were readying sites for that historic moment.

Some of the newcomers are quite small and certainly won’t support instant towns like Elliot Lake. But it’s all very strong evidence that mining is prospering and, with it, the nation.