For a long time, Canadians have been known, almost universally, as hewers of wood and drawers of water, a phrase which encompasses our supposed economic dependence on our natural resources — including of course the mining sector.
We don’t totally deny the efficacy of the old saw, and in the mining business we’re pretty proud of it. We learn now, however, that it wasn’t some long-forgotten Canadian who came up with the phrase itself, but that it comes from biblical scriptures, occurring in fact in Joshua 9, 21.
It’s a pretty safe bet, of course, that the biblical scholar who orginally penned the phrase had absolutely no direct knowledge of our woods and water, but somehow the phrase has come to mean something uniquely Canadian, as though we ourselves invented it.
We can’t take that particular credit. But we can take credit for the fact that we’ve done a great number of very good things with the resources the phrase refers to.
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