Settling Placentia when Toronto was trees, Basque fishermen described it as insulace corte realis, or “harbour within a womb of hills.” The depiction was apt. More than 100 years later, in the early 1600s, France and England fought for control of the community, situated on Newfoundland’s southern coast, because of its commercial and geopolitical importance to their aspirations of gaining sole supremacy over North America.
By 1660, Placentia — then called Plaisance, meaning “pleasant place” — had become France’s garrisoned New World capital. Its populace included a governor, a few priests and hundreds of sailors, soldiers and fisher folk of Norman, Breton and Basque persuasion. Circumstances, along with language and customs, changed drastically when France signed the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, ceding Newfoundland and Labrador to Britain. Most of the community’s liviers fled to Cape Breton and beyond. Plaisance became Placentia as Irish and West Country English merchants and their sharecroppers filled the void. Generations later, their social conventions, mores, and manners of speech have evolved into distinct traditions and colloquialisms.
“By North American standards, this town is ancient,” says Placentia Mayor Fred Whelan. “And, through everything, there has developed a resilience among the people — and I suppose among the rest of the province — that’s tough to beat.”
Many a Placentian’s clapboard abode huddles among other structures on a partially forested, triangular sand spit at the end of the Bay taking the town’s name. The loamy land straddles an inlet serrated on both sides by promontories clad in conifers that lashing gales, laced with ocean brine, have twisted and stunted. A Newfoundland name for that flora is “starrigans.” “Skinny sticks of spruce and var [fir] dat, once rinded out and dried, makes fer wunnerful kindlin’,” says Chesley Hicks, an old salt who has mastered the woods.
Half a millennium of experiencing feasts and famines, along with peace and pitched battles between England and France, has made Placentia too old, too wise to complain about growing pains. On the contrary. Since reeling from an economic nosedive, the small town of 4,400 inhabitants is revelling in business and subsequent employment prospects being spun from the development of an open-pit mine near Labrador shores containing proven nickel reserves of 30 million tonnes grading 2.8% nickel, 1.7% copper and 0.14% cobalt. The find also has, respectively, 54 million tonnes and 16 million tonnes of indicated and inferred mineral resources — resources yet to be determined commercially viable — with average grades of 1.53% nickel, 0.7% copper and 0.09% cobalt in the indicated tonnage and 1.6% nickel, 0.8% copper and 0.1% cobalt in the inferred tonnage.
Through wires sagging between telephone poles and spanning 150 km from Placentia to St. John’s, optimism buzzes from Whelan’s soft voice as he surmises the mine’s effects on his municipality’s future. “There’s been a fair bit of activity this year,” he says. “Up until this year there wasn’t much activity, but the feeling and the atmosphere in the town has improved a lot, and I have every confidence this mining venture will help put Placentia on track again.”
Newfoundlanders and freelance prospectors Albert Chislett and Chris Verbiski discovered the nickel deposit at Voisey’s Bay in September 1993. Diamond Fields Resources, a mining company based in Vancouver and searching for diamonds in the Labrador wilds, had contracted their services. They were flying over Voisey’s Bay (named after Amos Voisey, who set up a trading post there at the turn of the 20th century) and noticed, from their chopper, how a setting sun’s rays, refracting from a land point, made it glow rust-coloured. The outcrop turned out to be a huge geological knuckle of nickel, among the highest grade of its kind in the world. The two geologists staked claims over an area of 5,000 sq. km. To pay the cost of that endeavour, Verbiski, at the time, said, “We cleaned out our bank accounts and took everything we could on our credit cards.” Containing copper and cobalt as well, the ovoid, shaped like a bowl with surface dimensions of 800 metres by 350 metres, and extending underground to 125 metres, made them rich, and Diamond Fields richer when that company put the property up for sale. The move enticed
Even at more than 3,000 km distant, the mine, expected to start functioning by November 2005, should make the economy of Placentia and the surrounding area rebound from bust to robust. According to Lorelei Roberts Loder, the local chamber of commerce has been preparing and making the area more attractive for companies that may want to open or expand enterprises there. “There are a lot of things ongoing,” says the organization’s president. “We have about five or six committees formed, and between 35 and 40 individuals in the region are involved in those committees. There’s a large network and quite a lot of work being done.” Placentia’s tax base is expanding too and includes an accord with Inco that will see the firm pay the town $500,000 in total over five years. The company also contributed $350,000 to a capital works program for Placentia. The provincial government and Ottawa are each matching that sum. Says Whelan: “With that arrangement, we now have the funding to do a million dollars’ worth of work.”
Placentia has had its share of commercial surges and slumps. As was the case with most outports [coastal-based communities] in Newfoundland and Labrador, the region’s prospects plummeted in July 1992, when then-Federal Fisheries Minister John Crosbie declared a moratorium on Atlantic Canada’s northern cod fishery. Over the next five years, various catastrophes resulted in about 1,500 layoffs in the Placentia area. In 1989, a phosphorus plant at nearby Long Harbour ceased functioning; then two fish processing businesses went under as a result of the cod harvest moratorium, and a few years later, the U.S. abandoned a naval base it had built during the Second World War at Argentia, a deep harbour on a peninsula about 4 km northwest of the town, but still within Placentia’s municipal borders. The U.S. eventually sold the 38-sq.-km facility to the Argentia Management Authority, which transformed it into an industrial park.
“Our amalgamated town had a population of little over five-thousand; now it’s down to, I think, about 4,400,” says Whelan. “An awful lot of people left this area, but the chamber of commerce here is working hard to reverse that trend.”
Draped by a star-strewn, frigid fall night, remnants of a period past prove, with haunting tenor, his point. Yellowed grass shudders as a breeze shuffles across hilltops overlooking an outskirt of the region. On the banks of the ocean, a scattered old salt box leans boarded up. Boats lie bottom-up, their paint peeling and backs broken.
Fortunately, nickel mining in Labrador’s remote northern frontier will come on-stream within a year and, absorbing $3 billion in capital investment throughout its 30-year lifespan, will generate much-needed commercial activity and hundreds of jobs in Labrador and Placentia. The mining is expected to give an $11-billion boost to the provincial economy.
“We fully anticipate there will be significant spinoff in commercial operations, owing to the demonstration plant under construction here right now,” says Ken Browne, general manager of the Argentia Management Authority, “and we have an exceptionally good opinion of Inco and Voisey’s Bay.”
To get approval for the project, Inco signed an agreement in June 2002 with the Newfoundland and Labrador government, stipulating that the company establish in Voisey’s Bay, by 2011, a full-scale,
$710-million commercial concentrator employing 400 full-time staff, as well as an $800-million hydrometallurgical plant in Argentia for processing the concentrated nickel. Inco subsidiary Voisey’s Bay Nickel Company (VBNC), overseeing, from construction to operation, all three phases of the project, has budgeted $100 million for building a 5,000-sq.-metre hydrometallurgical demonstration facility in Placentia and another $50 million to determine, in a 2-year trial at the facility, whether hydrometallurgical technology works. VBNC must reveal to the Newfoundland and Labrador government test results by mid-2008. If failure ensues, Inco has to scrap the hydromet idea and put in place, by 2011, a pyrometallurgical refinery that is not so environmentally safe. The refinery does have a more appealing projected price of $700 million, but it would need 50 fewer hires than the 400 required for hydromet operations. “We’re sort of in a no-lose situation,” says Browne. “The deal negotiated with the province says that if a hydromet plant will not be commercially viable, a refinery will be created in Argentia.”
Rather than using furnaces to blast nickel from other elements clinging to it, which is the conventional pyrometallurgical method, hydromet cooks concentrates in chemicals and water and at a high heat until waste separates from the desired product. “It’s liquid-based versus fire-based; hence the word hydro,” says Robert Carter, public affairs manager for VBNC. The mine could begin producing as early as seven years before a system is ready for Placentia. In the meantime, the company will ship nickel concentrate from Labrador to Manitoba and Ontario for processing. However, VBNC has to replace the amount of commodity extracted over that duration. Once the ovoid is depleted, the mine and mill concentrator might be expanded, allowing the exploitation of the remaining nickel deposits to commence in 2018 (provided Inco considers it feasible). “The underground mine development will begin to occur around 2018, and that assumes we’ve been able to convert what the mining industry calls resources into reserves,” says Carter.
VBNC’s managing director, Phil Du Toit, explains the discovery’s copper supply: “We have two streams of copper. One stream is copper-in-concentrate. It’s actually getting separated in the primary concentrating process up at Voisey’s Bay. That copper would be sold as copper-in-concentrate to the market directly from our Voisey’s Bay site for other copper refining companies. You also have an element of copper in our nickel-grade concentrate. That copper will be processed by us, because it’s tied up in the nickel [sulphides] and will be separated in the downstream processing. That will be sold as a final copper product.”
Mining cannot begin, though, until construction of the mill is finished; that phase of the project is six months ahead of schedule, which means the hydromet facility will be complete six months earlier than anticipated.
“During this summer, the peak construction in Argentia was more than four-hundred people,” says Mayor Whelan. “Not all of them were with Inco. One company alone had about a hundred and fifty on the payroll.”
At its height, construction in Labrador and Placentia amounted to nearly 1,500 strong. Entrepreneur and Placentian Ed Maher is involved in several joint ventures concerning the nickel mine development and has been kept “extremely busy” for the past few years. His company, Maher’s Contracting, partnered with a structural steel firm called Metal World, which recently fabricated components for the mill in Voisey’s Bay. “It’s a big project; about 3,500 tonnes of steel,” he said prior to finishing the job. “We’re constructing the structural steel part of the building and the siding part of it in a modular form in Argentia, then shipping it by barge to Voisey’s Bay.”
Maher’s ancestors might have been among the first to arrive at the harbour after France handed it over to a British man-of-war. Like most of his tribe, tenaciously remaining in the many small towns and villages dotting Newfoundland and Labrador’s coves, bays, inlets and fiords, Maher sees the punts turned over and the houses left to act as whistles for the wind. “But it’s all in how you look at things,” he muses. He may be right. A spirited lot will always find a way, broken backs be damned.
— Wesley Reid is a freelance journalist based in St. John’s.
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