OBITUARY — V.N. Harbinson

Canadian mining has lost one of its best-known and most respected promoters from the heyday years of junior mining with the passing of V. Noble Harbinson, who contributed in no small way to raising this industry’s status to international prominence. He was 75.

A remarkable money-raiser and dealer, Harbinson was chairman and chief executive officer of no fewer than a dozen junior mining and oil listings on the Toronto Stock Exchange at one time.

“A prodigious worker and great deal-maker, he was always striving to find and develop mines, with a level of success and disappointment generally associated with that industry,” said Richard Hogarth, a broker with Cassels Blaikie & Co. who served on a number of Harbinson’s boards.

A chartered accountant who graduated from the University of Toronto in 194l, Harbinson practised with a senior auditing firm for 15 years. But with oil being his first real love, he soon acquired control of three Calgary-based junior firms during that period, which he merged to form Sarcee Petroleum. That company quickly made waves on Canada’s oil patch, striking oil and gas within Edmonton’s city limits and discovering a gas field in northern British Columbia — as well as three separate gas fields in eastern Alberta, from which it received the first production cheque issued by Trans Canada Pipelines. Little wonder that Sarcee was soon gobbled up in an amalgamation with giant Husky Oil, a company with which he retained a close association for some years.

His first mining venture, in Ontario’s Red Lake gold camp, was with the Durham brothers who, in 1946, formed Parvus Mines and Durham Red Lake. The latter was subsequently reorganized to Consolidated Durham Mines & Resources which developed a highly profitable antimony mine in New Brunswick — the only one in Canadian history.

In early 1950, he staked several hundred claims in Manitoba’s Bernic Lake area, which he sold to Chemalloy Mining and Tanco Mining and on which orebodies were subsequently developed. Tanco remains Canada’s only producing tantalum mine.

During this period, Harbinson founded Noble Mines & Oils and acquired control of Share Mines & Oils, Dominion Explorers, NBU Mines, Cam Mines, Tex-Sol Explorations, O’Brien Energy & Resources, Onaping Resources, Homestake Explorations and Joutel Resources.

Control of Noble was recently sold to strong Chinese interests, which renamed it “Noble China.” Dominion Explorers was one of the first mining companies to be listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, and is still very active. NBU acquired a base metals property in the Sturgeon Lake area, which was brought into production by Falconbridge Copper as an open-pit mine at 1,200 tons daily. O’Brien went into the geothermal business in Utah, the second successful driller in the U.S. It also launched a deep, but unsuccessful, gas play in Michigan.

In a gutsy move in 1971, Harbinson acquired a remote gold property in the Keewatin district of the Northwest Territories and formed Cullaton Lake Gold Mines which he brought to production with Inuit financing. Here, howsever, he ran into problems galore, eventually turning it over to Corona interests. “He was certainly a classy gentleman, highly competitive and always ready to gamble on new ideas,” remarked Richard Nemis who for years had a close association (Central Crude, Noront Resources) and who likewise sat on many of the Harbinson boards.

An ardent fisherman, Noble spent most of his time in recent years at his prestigious lodge on a 3,500-acre spread at Bow Lake in Ontario’s Kinmount area. But he did pass on his mining and exploration enthusiasm to his younger son, Hugh, who heads Queenston Mining and Joutel Resources, the latter typically engaged in a major exploration play in Cuba.

— The author, Maurice R. Brown, is a former publisher of “The Northern Miner” and a member of the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame.