Editorial True picture of a mining town

The image presented of mining, particularly on that most powerful of all mediums, television, is all too frequently a negative one, focusing often enough on hard issues such as accident rates, environmental damage, labor troubles, and so on. This happens not only on regular daily news shows, (as might be expected, given the nature of news), but in feature and documentary-type programming.

Once in a while, though, a television program appears that puts mining, and a mining community in a generally good light and we should, we suppose, be grateful for such small mercies. Just the other night, on the publicly supported TVOntario network, a half-hour program offered a constructive picture of life in the small mining community of Manitouwadge, in northwestern Ontario, just 30 miles or so northeast of the famous Hemlo gold fields.

Manitouwadge is home not only to the miners (with their families) who work at Noranda Ltd.’s Geco division copper-zinc- silver mine right at the town itself, but to some 300 more miners who commute to work at Noranda’s big Golden Giant gold mine at Hemlo to the south.

From interviews with miners themselves, as well as with mine management, local politicians, miner’s wives, and others, a picture emerged of a community that despite relative isolation and other natural hazards such as weather, is generally a happy place to call home, a good place, as several of the miners said, “to bring up the kids.”

There is in fact a sense of real community in such northern places as Manitouwadge that it would be hard to find in the big cities down south. Item — a Geco miner in the town as a hobby carves beautiful wood sculptures of miners and other mining subjects. The Geco mine manager presents one of these carvings to every man (or woman) at the mine who attains 25 years of service.

It’s little wonder that sometimes, when a member of mine management in a small mining community is given a promotion which will involve a move to the company head office, say in Toronto, the move becomes, for him, a hard one to make.

Public perceptions of mining could be vastly improved if the kind of TV journalism in the Manitouwadge program, reflecting the real pattern of life in Canada’s northern communities, were to be more widely practiced. .N4

** Editorial **

** Mining men won’t care **

Mining men, who have never been particularly known, as a class, for sartorial elegance, are unlikely to be deeply disturbed by news that Savile Row, the London area that has become synonomous worldwide with fine men’s suits, may be coming apart at the seams.

Suits from Savile Row typically fetch from $1,000 up to about $2,500 (prices not unknown these days as well, we should add, among some of Canada’s finest tailors), but we’ll wager very few of the garments from London find their way onto the backs even of our highest-paid mining executives, for many of whom the price at least would not seem unduly prohibitive.

No, the point is that men in the mining ranks seem generally to eschew the notion that they must compete, on the job, with the best in dress. Leave that to bankers, brokers, politicians, and tailor’s dummies. We’ve yet to hear of a mining man being selected among the nation’s best-dressed. We think it has to do with the grassroots, elemental nature of the industry, which leads people in it to a certain disdain for the showy, and the ostentatious.

Still, for Savile Row to go would be a bit like losing the Rolls. A little piece of England down the hatch.