Ryan Land leaves Vale after 8½ years to ‘pursue the next chapter in my career story’

Ryan Land has left Vale after 8½ years.

Land joined Vale, becoming manager of corporate affairs for Manitoba Operations, on May 9, 2011. He spent most of his time with the Brazilian mining giant working in Thompson, with his role growing to include managing organizational design and human resources. He was transferred to Sudbury, Ont. 14½ months ago in September 2018 for an expanded role with Vale as manager of corporate and indigenous affairs for Ontario and Manitoba.

He has also served as chair of the aboriginal relations committee of the Mining Association of Manitoba since April 2013, and as a member of the aboriginal affairs committee of the Ottawa-based Mining Association of Canada since October 2018. He has been a member of the aboriginal relations committee of the Ontario Mining Association since October 2018. As well, Land has been a member of the Manitoba liaison committee on mining and exploration since last June.

Land arrived in Thompson originally in August 2009 to become principal of R.D. Parker Collegiate.

In a public Facebook posting Nov. 14, Land says,”I am officially leaving Vale to pursue the next chapter of my career! I am taking this step without knowing what (or even where – though our first choice is Sudbury as we are thoroughly enjoying it here and the kids are thriving) is next. Even though it was time for a change, it is bittersweet for sure as I am so grateful for the opportunities, challenges and growth that Vale afforded me. I’ve worked with amazing people and from the beginning the company (and a key leader or two – they know who they are!) took a chance on me and allowed me to influence outcomes, innovate and become a champion for the success of others. No regrets, and also no idea what’s next. Yikes!”

Land ends his brief post by wryly quipping, “Another of my favourite quotes is by Emily Dickinson who said ‘The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.’ Soul ajar. Hopefully the ecstatic experience covers the mortgage!”

Land posted a similar public message on LinkedIn last week to his one on Facebook.

“As some of you already know, I have left Vale to pursue the next chapter in my career story,” Land wrote. “The move from educational leader to corporate affairs at a mining company was an enriching, challenging and ultimately rewarding career pivot and I am so very grateful for having had the opportunity. I worked with, for and alongside so many remarkable people and the last (nearly) 9 years provided me with a real chance to grow, stretch, collaborate, influence outcomes, build meaningful relationships and work on being a champion for the success of my colleagues, our stakeholders and rights-holders, and the communities we work in and near. Importantly, it afforded me a real chance to deepen my understanding of truth and reconciliation, and my responsibility within it.

“I am not in a rush, but I feel like excited about what might be next. We have grown to love Sudbury and the region and we’d love to stay, but I’m anxious to invest myself as a servant leader in a great organization and I appreciate that the best opportunity may not be close to our current home. I’d love to hear about possibilities and ideas you have for me, so please message me if you have advice, coaching or suggestions.”

His wife, Carmilla Land, has been a registered nurse since 2016.

A number of Land’s former Vale colleagues posted their well-wishes on LinkedIn in response to his departure from the company.

Patti Pegues, mine planning manager for Vale North Atlantic, wrote, “Best of luck Ryan. It has been a real pleasure working with you.”

Said Anuj Agarwal, manager of mines and technical standards, North Atlantic at Vale Canada: “You will be missed. It was a pleasure to know you and work alongside you.”

Whether it is a local day trip travel fall colour adventure to Onaping Falls, near Sudbury, or an international summer jaunt from San Sebastián to Tuscany to Prague to Brussels, Land is well known to friends and colleagues as a bon vivant, who immensely enjoys adventuresome travel, sampling fine local cuisine wherever he lands, and a suitable craft brew to complement the rest.

Before becoming principal of R.D. Parker Collegiate in August 2009, Land had spent the previous academic year in West Africa as principal of the Canadian Independent College of Ghana in Accra, a Canadian university preparatory co-ed college day and boarding school. The Canadian Independent College of Ghana is a licensed sister campus to the Canadian Independent College (CIC), a co-ed university preparatory college, formerly known as the North Wilmot School, which opened in 1964 and is located in Baden, Ontario. It is a member of the Council of Advanced Placement Schools in Ontario.

Land completed one year of a five-year contract in Ghana, but, as was allowed in his contract, resigned from the position for family-related reasons.

Aside from Accra and Thompson, Land was a teacher and eventually a principal in schools in a number of communities, including a Dené community, Leicester in England, rural Saskatchewan, and Steinbach and Winnipeg in Manitoba. He has a masters degree in educational leadership and undergraduate bachelor degrees in education and the arts.

On April 27, 2010 trustees from the School District of Mystery Lake took the extraordinary step of publicly rebuking Land during a board meeting and announced that his probationary status as principal of R.D. Parker Collegiate which would normally be one year in duration, was being extended another year after a unanimous vote by the board of trustees, who had considered the option of terminating Land’s employment, but ultimately decided not to.

Trustees then twice in identical 5-2 splits on Feb. 22 and April 5, 2011, voted to remove him as probationary principal.

Then in mid-June 2011, trustees subsequently fired Land for cause – four months after they had removed him as probationary principal. At a trustees meeting the day before graduation, former superintendent Bev Hammond provided details of an investigation she said she had conducted, which she said found that students had had marks changed without doing remedial work, responsibility for which she later laid at the feet of Land in an interview with the Thompson Citizen. Hammond’s marks-changing investigation focused only on the years that Land was principal.

A year later, the saga, which generated strong feelings and emotions, with plenty of both pro and anti-Land sentiment, and national media coverage, ended when the school board and Land reached a deal, resulting in an arbitration hearing that had been set to begin June 18, 2012, being cancelled. Both Land and the SDML withdrew all claims against each other and ended litigation between the parties.

Land offered his resignation to the SDML June 14, 2012, effective Nov. 18, 2011. The school board accepted Land’s resignation and rescinded his termination.

Two years later, in what supporters saw as a rich case of poetic justice, Land would run for a trustee’s seat in the October 2014 municipal election for school board, where he not only won a seat, but was the top vote-getter among all candidates picking up 2,177 votes.

In between working for the School District of Mystery Lake and Vale, Land worked out of Thompson briefly in the run-up to the 2011 federal election campaign for then Elections Canada assistant returning officer Lou Morissette as a training officer looking after all the inland training for the polls.  A bit earlier, Land had been offered the position of part-time vice-principal of Hapnot Collegiate in Flin Flon, but turned it down, trustee Glenn Smith, chair of the Flin Flon School Division board of trustees, told the Flin Flon Reminder at the time.

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Truth and Mythology: Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht and Joyeux Noël with the impromptu Christmas Truce of 1914 in the trenches of the Western Front

The First World War stands as the real demarcation line between the 19th and 20th centuries and an older world and the modern era. In 1983, Ohio State University historian Stephen Kern wrote The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918, a book that talked about the sweeping changes in technology and culture that reshaped life, including the theory of relativity and introduction of Sir Sanford Fleming’s worldwide standard time. All of these things created new ways of understanding and experiencing time and space during that almost 40-year period ending with the end of the First World War. Kern’s argument is that in the modern preoccupation with speed, especially with the fast and impersonal telegraph, international diplomacy broke down in July 1914. Yet there were still vestiges of that older world of shared values and decency – even among enemies – and even in the barbarism of trench warfare in the early years of the First World War.

While it has become one of the most mythologized events of the First World War, the essence of the story remains: “Late on Christmas Eve 1914,” writes Amanda Mason, curator-historian with the Imperial War Museum in London, “men of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) heard Germans troops in the trenches opposite them singing carols and patriotic songs and saw lanterns and small fir trees along their trenches. Messages began to be shouted between the trenches. The following day, British and German soldiers met in no man’s land and exchanged gifts, took photographs and some played impromptu games of football. They also buried casualties and repaired trenches and dugouts.”

John McCutcheon’s ballad Christmas in the Trenches has been described as “perhaps the best and most heartening Christmas story of modern times.” McCutcheon, an American from Wisconsin, tells the story of the famous Christmas Truce through the voice of a fictional British soldier, Francis Tolliver.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who created Sherlock Holmes, later described it as an “amazing spectacle.”

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 1914 were marked by the remarkable unsanctioned fraternization of enemy troops along much of the Western Front, which included caroling in German, French and English, exchanges of small gifts between soldiers, and even a soccer game. And when the Christmas bells sounded in the villages of Alsace-Lorraine-Franche-Comté in the Vosges Mountains late on Christmas Eve Dec. 24, 1915, they triggered a second First World War Christmas Truce along that particular area of the Western Front, much like the now more famous 1914 Christmas Truce.

Most recently, on Dec. 20, Raf Casert, a writer for The Associated Press in Brussels, in an AP “Big Story” placelined Ploegsteert, Belgium, has revisited the 1914 Christmas Truce in a well-researched and colourful human interest piece of reportage, contributed to by Virginia Mayo, a veteran AP photographer and photo editor in Brussels. You can read the piece here: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ce7bcbc9b7a444af9e5c88dc065aaf51/christmas-1914-day-even-wwi-showed-humanity

“With British and German forces separated only by a no-man’s land littered with fallen comrades, sounds of a German Christmas carol suddenly drifted across the frigid air: “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht” (“Silent Night, Holy Night”),” writes Casert in his lede.

“It was a time when swift military movement from Germany across France to the Belgian coast was grinding to a stalemate, leaving hundreds of thousands of casualties behind. For both sides — Germany versus an alliance led by France and Britain — this buried any hope that the war would be over by Christmas,” writes Casert.

He goes on:

“Frank and Maurice Wray of the London Rifle Brigade settled in to keep watch when they suddenly heard a German band in the trenches play songs ‘common to both nations,’ they later wrote in an article. ‘Quite understandably a wave of nostalgia passed over us.'”

As dawn broke, Casert writes, “a German called out, ‘We good. We no shoot,’ and the Wrays noted: ‘And so was born an unofficial armistice.’ Men walked out, extremely apprehensive at first, many fearing some deadly trick. Then human warmth cracked the freezing cold.”

Similar scenes played out here and there along the Western Front, “which ran from the North Sea to the Swiss border,” he notes.

“Apart from talk in a shared language or merely with hands and kindred eyes, the men exchanged gifts, using everything from bully beef and barrels of beer to small mementos. Some played football.”

When British General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien learned of the Christmas Truce two days later, he wrote in a confidential memorandum, Casert notes, ‘this is only illustrative of the apathetic state we are gradually sinking into.’

While Christmas bells sounding in the villages of Alsace-Lorraine-Franche-Comté in the Vosges Mountains late on Christmas Eve Dec. 24, 1915, triggered a second First World War Christmas Truce along that particular area of the Western Front, deliberate and intensive shelling, ordered by the High Commands on both sides in an attempt to prevent any truces on a similar scale happening again, precluded any repeat of the larger scale, if unofficial and piecemeal, truce of Dec. 25, 1914.

Joyeux Noël, a 2005 heart-warming, albeit highly fictionalized account of the 1914 Christmas Truce, written and directed by Christian Carion, was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 78th Academy Awards on March 5, 2006, losing to the South African film, Tsotsi.

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