Mining booster Mort Brown retiring

For a person whose burning ambition after high school was to forge a career in forestry, M.R. (Mort) Brown has done well for himself — in mining.

At 80, The Northern Miner’s soon-to-retire publisher emeritus is a life member of the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum. He is an inductee to the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame. He has “scooped” other reporters on some of the biggest mining stories in the country. Pine Point, N.W.T., for example, was first written up as a truly big, rich find by Brown. He was at the heart of the infamous Windfall Mines and Oils scandal in the mid-1960s, his testimony at a provincial royal commission toppling a provincial cabinet minister. He has railed against many another politician through the editorial pages of his beloved Miner.

As well, Brown has exhorted readers never to sell gold short, never to vote NDP, but always to have faith in the next big swing in metal prices. Mort, as he is called by everyone who knows him, began his career at The Northern Miner in 1949. To land the post as the newspaper’s field engineer required nearly a decade-long write-in campaign from Little Long Lac, where he was the district ventilation and safety engineer, to The Miner’s owners in Toronto.

“The Miner was recognized by everyone in the mining industry,” Mort says. “And it was something to get on that staff. It took me nine years.” Being The Miner’s field engineer back then meant twice-yearly tours by train, car, plane or whatever else provided transportation to Canada’s remote mines. “We’d travel however we could,” Mort recalls. “Every night I’d pound out a story on my small, portable typewriter. I mailed them off to Toronto every single day.”

Mort’s beat included 15 mines in northern Ontario and points west and north of it. Sometimes the news stories caused ripples on the stock markets. In those days, The Miner was the only newspaper reporting on mine operations and exploration.

“If your story got in The Northern Miner, your stock was pretty assured to get a run,” says Murray Baigent, a former broker and friend of Mort. For example, the Couchenour mine was a perennial hand-to-mouth operation. But on one visit, Mort discovered it had lucked out on some high-grade ore to the point of shutting down the crusher because “the screens were clogged with so much gold,” Mort recalls. The stock rose on the news. But the company’s head office was not amused to first learn of the windfall, like everyone else, in the pages of The Northern Miner.

That monopoly on mining stock news was possible because companies in those days weren’t required to report routinely to shareholders or regulatory authorities, which were virtually non-existent anyway.

All that changed, however, with the Windfall Mines and Oils scandal. A junior with ground near the Kidd Creek find near Timmins, Ont., in the early 1960s, Windfall had drilled the prospect. However, assays were slow in materializing. In the meantime, the stock soared in price. When the assays did come out, they proved disappointing. Of course, the stock slumped — crashed is more precise — and a royal commission was convened. Mort was subpoenaed and when he took the stand, the “press guys” from the Toronto Telegram and The Toronto Star were “about half asleep. But then the judge asked me how I could write a bullish story (which had appeared a few weeks before the disappointing assays became public) when I didn’t have the facts.

“I said, `well sir, I did talk to the mines minister before I wrote the story and I got the distinct impression that he was bullish.’ As soon as I mentioned the minister, those guys from the press just jumped, both together.” The next day the headline blared, “MINES MINISTER INVOLVED IN SCANDAL,” or words to that effect.

Once the royal commission findings were out, junior mining was radically altered. Among other things, companies now had to report publicly any material fact that might affect stock prices. “It drove junior mining out of Toronto,” Mort says. A lot of juniors wound up in Vancouver and on the Vancouver Stock Exchange.

The nature of reporting in The Miner also changed. No longer was it the exclusive information conduit between the mines and the mines’ investors. But The Miner more than survived and is, after 77 years, still considered the “Bible” of the industry.

Mort was named editor of the newspaper in 1978 and he followed the editorial policies set forth by his predecessor and mentor, John Carrington, although Brown believes his approach was “more news conscious with regard to the stock market.” Says Carrington: “Mort was a little more promotional or enthusiastic.”

This doesn’t surprise anyone on Bay Street who knows The Miner and Mort Brown. He was and is an inveterate market follower. From the early days, Murray Baigent recalls, when Mort wasn’t in the office tapping the typewriter keys he would be snooping around the brokerages.

“If Mr. Pearce (the owner) wanted to find Mort that’s where he’d be,” Baigent says.

Another long-time broker, Mary Gallagher, remembers that Brown “made it his business” to prowl the brokerage firms. Says Glen Telfer of brokerage firm Moss Lawson: “He knows everybody in the business.”

Even today, with what geologist and friend Ivan Christopher calls Brown’s trademark “boyish enthusiasm and remarkable energy,” Brown follows the market closely.

“I’ve never seen a man more optimistic,” says Baigent. “He can have one stock going up and ignore the other nine going down.”

Mort’s optimism for Canadian mining is being tested, however. “Why look for a mine in Ontario when you have to post a huge bond to close it even before you get the financing for the shaft?” he asks.

“If governments aren’t careful in this country, mining will wither and die.”