Closing Time: Last hoist for Thompson’s Birchtree Mine

On the surface, it was an unseasonably warm and brilliant orange early autumn day. Underground, it was closing time. Not last call, but rather the hard rock mining on-the-job equivalent: last hoist.

This day has almost come for Birchtree Mine in Thompson, Manitoba before. In fact, the day did come for Birchtree for most of a decade in the 1980s, as the mine was on “care and maintenance” because of unfavourable market conditions from December 1977 through 1989.

And on Oct. 18, 2012, Vale had announced care and maintenance was being considered for Birchtree Mine in 10 months time in August 2013. After finding $100 million in cost savings at its Manitoba Operations, bringing its cost per metric tonne for finished nickel to under US$10,000, Birchtree Mine would receive on May 6, 2013 a reprieve that lasted almost 4½ years. Until now.

As well as nickel, Birchtree has deposits of copper, cobalt, gold, silver, platinum and palladium. Re-opening of Birchtree was considered in 1981, but was deferred in favour of development of the Thompson open pit mine. Care and maintenance is a term used in the mining industry to describe processes and conditions on a closed minesite where there is potential to recommence operations at a later date. During a care and maintenance phase, production is stopped but the site is managed to ensure it remains in a safe and stable condition.

Preparation to place Birchtree on care and maintenance again some 28 years after its last mining production 12-year hiatus begins two days hence on Monday. Asset recovery is expected to be complete by mid-November, and the plan is for the mine to be officially on care and maintenance by Dec. 31. The current life of mine plan has long anticipated the closure of Birchtree Mine at some point around now. Vale, however, could, as was the case with Inco in 1989, reopen Birchtree Mine should nickel prices rebound more strongly than forecast in the next few years, and the company has said it believes there is a future for the mine.

The current London Metal Exchange (LME) price of nickel per pound would likely have to at least double from US$4.72 to make reopening Birchtree for a second time economically viable. While Thompson is noted for its high quality 99.9 per cent pure electrolytic nickel that is almost free of contaminants such as lead or zinc,  resulting in it often commanding a higher price than the LME price, Birchtree has relatively lower nickel grades. Nickel prices peaked at $25.51 per pound on the LME in May 2007, just months after Vale, the Brazilian mining giant, bought Inco in a $19.9-billion all-cash tender takeover offer deal in October 2006. Nickel prices have fallen nearly 70 per cent in the past six years as international supply far outstrips demand.

The nickel find near Manasan Falls, four kilometres east of Birchtree Lake and about five kilometres southwest of Thompson, that would become Birchtree Mine was first announced publicly to the world on April 22, 1964 by Henry S. Wingate, chairman of the board of the International Nickel Company of Canada (INCO) Limited.

There are several other key dates in Thompson’s early mining history: Borehole 11962 – the so-called “Discovery Hole” at Cook Lake, a diamond drill exploration hole – was collared Feb. 5, 1956 and assayed positive for nickel.

There’s also the Dec. 3, 1956 signing of the founding 33-page typewritten double-spaced agreement creating Thompson between the Province of Manitoba’s F.C. Bell, minister of mines and natural resources, and International Nickel Company of Canada Limited’s Ralph Parker, vice-president and general manager, and secretary William F. Kennedy. As well, there was Manitoba Liberal-Progressive Premier Douglas Campbell driving the last spike in the Canadian National Railway (CNR) 30-mile branch line from Sipiwesk to Thompson Oct. 20, 1957, and March 25, 1961, when Progressive Conservative Premier Duff Roblin cut the nickel ribbon to officially open the $185-million smelter and refinery, set to close also next August, as the world’s first fully integrated nickel operation, and with its 1,800 employees, second in size in the “free world” at the time only to Inco’s Sudbury operations. Vale’s Thompson operations, landholdings or mining rights, consist of at least 2,947 order-in-council (OIC) leases, mineral leases and mining claims “negotiated as part of an agreement entered into in 1956 between Vale Inco and the Province of Manitoba covering the development of the Thompson nickel deposits,” noted filings by the company in 2004 and 2008 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Thompson, originally a townsite within the newly-created 975-square-mile Local Government District (LGD) of Mystery Lake, within the Dauphin Judicial District, from 1956 to 1966, became a town on Jan. 3, 1967 and a city just 3½ years later on July 7, 1970.

Wingate, a lawyer, was born in Talas, Turkey, the son and grandson of American missionaries, and was raised in Northfield, Minnesota. He was with the New York law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell from 1929 to 1935, when he joined INCO as assistant secretary. The sinking of the Birchtree Mine development shaft began on Ink 6 in 1964. The three-compartment shaft was completed to 1,373 feet a year later.

Birchtree began production in 1966. Between 1965 and 1967 the production shaft on Pip 301 was sunk to 2,800 feet, with levels between 300 and 2,300 feet at 200-foot intervals. Inco announced plans in 2000 to move ahead with a $70.4-million deepening of Birchtree Mine to be completed in 2002 and help extend the mine’s life by at least 15 years. In its Exploration and Development Highlights 2001 report, the Manitoba Science, Technology, Energy and Mines Department estimated the shaft deepening would access proven reserves of 13.6 million tonnes of 1.79 per cent nickel and “extend Birchtree’s production to 2016.”

As a result of the Birchtree Mine closing, about 200 high-paid jobs are expected to disappear from the local economy over the next few months – a very big though by no means fatal hit to the local economy – including not only Vale employees but other mining sector contractors and support service positions.

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Soundingsjohnbarker: ‘You can write that?’ You bet

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/) debuted as a WordPress blog two years ago today with a small post headlined “Labour history: Mine-Mill v. Steel” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/labour-history-mine-mill-v-steel/) on September 3, 2014 about Mick Lowe’s The Raids, a 295-page fictionalized work centred on the epic battle in Sudbury in the late 1950s and early 1960s in relation to the Cold War, international politics, McCarthyism, Communism, and the inter-union rivalry between the United Steel Workers of America (USWA) and the International Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers Local 598, which had just been published that May by Robin Philpot of Baraka Books in Montreal. Here in Thompson there is a still partially untold story of that same inter-union rivalry between the Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers and United Steelworkers of America between 1960 and 1962. Mine-Mill was the first bargaining agent here in Thompson when Inco workers unionized and had negotiated a contract with Inco that ran through 1964. But the USW was certified by the Manitoba Labour Board as the bargaining agent for Inco employees in Thompson on May 31, 1962. Because the USW itself went on to merge five years later with the United States section of the International Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers in Tucson, Arizona in January 1967, a lot of that nastiness has been papered over, at least publicly.

There was also a post that day headlined “Black Death: Not so bad?” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/black-death-not-so-bad/) which went onto explain a new study in PLOS ONE, an international peer-reviewed journal, authored by University of South Carolina anthropologist Sharon DeWitte, which suggested that people who survived the medieval plague, commonly known then as the Black Death, lived significantly longer and were healthier than people who lived before the epidemic struck in 1347. The Black Death killed tens of millions of people, an estimated 30 to 50 per cent of the European population, over just four years between 1347 and 1351, which, it turns out, may not have been such a bad thing after all.

Finally, on Sept. 3, 2014, soundingsjohnbarker had a third posting headlined “A bigger picture,” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/a-bigger-picture/) which focused on Samaritan’s Purse’s “Operation Christmas Child,” which was started in 1990. By 1993, it had grown to the point it was adopted by Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian organization founded by Dr. Bob Pierce in 1970 and now run by Franklin Graham, son of 97-year-old Asheville, North Carolina evangelist Billy Graham.  While “Operation Christmas Child” has its share of supporters and critics with meritorious arguments on both sides for and against its “shoebox” gifts collected and distributed in more than 130 countries worldwide each Christmas [each shoebox is filled with hygiene items, school supplies, toys, and candy. Operation Christmas Child then works with local churches to put on age-appropriate presentations of the gospel at the events where the shoeboxes are distributed], Samaritan’s Purse is about much more than Operation Christmas Child, whatever your views might be on that, I pointed out. In the midst of the deadliest Ebola viral hemorrhagic fever outbreak recorded in West Africa since the disease was discovered in 1976, Samaritan Purse’s Ebola care centre on the outskirts of the Liberian capital of Monrovia was right on the front lines. Dr. Kent Brantly, the medical director of the centre, contracted Ebola and was medically evacuated to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, the first patient ever medically evacuated to the United States for Ebola treatment, where he was given ZMapp, an experimental drug treatment produced by U.S.-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical, while Nancy Writebol, who was with Serving in Mission, (SIM), which runs the hospital where Samaritan’s Purse has the Ebola care centre, was also medically evacuated to Emory University Hospital and treated with ZMapp.  Both Brantly and Writebol survived their brush with death Ebola experiences and returned to Liberia.

So that was Day 1 for soundingsjohnbarker on Sept. 3, 2014. And in some ways it set the tone for the 226 posts that have followed since over the last two years. Some of them tell Thompson stories but many don’t. Some (OK, many) are offbeat and the range of topics that has struck my fancy to write about has been eclectic, if not downright eccentric at times. I explained some of my thinking behind how I choose what to write about in a blog post March 7 headlined “Tipping points and blogging by the numbers” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/tipping-points-and-blogging-by-the-numbers/) where I noted, “Write local if you want some big numbers on a given day. While I do from time to time, if some local issue or story interests me in an unusual way, I stay away from that kind of writing for the most part. For one thing, those kind of stories, I find, have little staying power, with three or four rare local exceptions (an unsolved murder story; a story about Dr. Alan Rich’s retirement and local lawyer Alain Huberdeau’s appointment to the provincial court bench; and several Vale stories come to mind). But most of them are one or two day wonders. It’s the more eccentric pieces on other places and even times that have a deeper and wider audience in the long run. Fortunately, I prefer to write on more eclectic things these days without any particular regard for geography or subject matter if the topic strikes my interest. Thompson city council may well make decisions that affect me in myriad ways, not the least of which is in the pocketbook as a local taxpayer, but even that can’t remove the glaze from my eyes long enough to write much about local municipal politics, although our water bills are tempting me to make an exception. But reading newspaper accounts of such goings on is usually painful enough. Mind you, I realize what strikes my fancy to write about when I don’t write local, is not for everyone, and I have no doubt that I’ve created some eye glazing of my own especially when I write on eschatology or some other arcane to some of my local readers religious topic.”

That’s not to say I’ve lost my interest in local affairs. I live here after all. But I don’t have the inclination, or time even if I had, to write about all of them. So, pretty much like everyone else in Thompson, I rely on the local media, including the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, CBC Radio’s North Country, Arctic Radio’s thompsononline.ca and Shaw TV to keep me informed with occasional stories about Vale’s proposed Thompson Foot Wall Deep Project, at the north end of Thompson Mine, previously known as Thompson (1D), and what the chances of the 11 million tonnes of nickel mineralization, which form a deep, north plunging continuation of the Thompson deposit, have of being developed into a new mine that will sustain the Thompson operation for up to 15 years when nickel is selling on the London Metal Exchange (LME) for US$4.5269/lb, with the refinery and smelter, which opened March 25, 1961, set to close sometime in 2018, resulting in lost jobs – don’t kid yourself and think otherwise – as more than 30 per cent of Vale’s production employees in Thompson work in the smelter and refinery.

Take away nickel mining, which isn’t destined fortunately to happen for at least several decades yet in even the most pessimistic scenario, and there’s not much reason for Thompson, at least as we have all come to know it, to exist, all mindless happy talk from politicians, newspaper publishers and other spin doctors aside. Mind you, I have admittedly been a tad critical of newspaper publishers in this space before, writing on Sept. 14, 2014: “In the old days, publishers and newspaper owners would from time to time ‘kill’ a writer’s column before publication. Despite their ballyhoo and blather about freedom of the press, publishers and newspaper proprietors are almost universally in my long experience with them a timid lot, if not outright moral cowards at times, always afraid of offending someone.”(https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/retroactively-spiked-the-post-publication-killing-of-msgr-charles-popes-blog-post-on-new-york-citys-st-patricks-day-parade/).

But if you think being a regional hub for Northern Manitoba, or tourism, or even both, is going to give Thompson a new raison d’etre for continued existence at its current size and state in a somehow magically more diversified local economy sans nickel mining some day in the near-to-mid future, I’m afraid you’ve been drinking too much of the Thompson Economic Diversification Working Group (TEDWG) Kool-Aid.

I’m a bit of a contrarian when it comes to the local good news peddlers of all stripes. So it’s perhaps best for everyone’s peace of mind, mine included, if I stick these days to writing mainly about the faraway and eclectic. Bad news prophets have a short best-before date at home.

And besides there is something just plain fun about writing about the weird and whacky. It’s a good antidote to taking either yourself, or life for that matter, too seriously. Hence I’m just as incorrigible when it comes to posting stories or links from others about the offbeat and odd on Facebook, as I am about my own blog post writing, I must confess. “The internet has been aflame this summer with predictions the Antichrist was coming Aug. 30,” I mentioned in a Facebook posting Aug, 31, noting I had forgotten all about it until the next day. “Me bad,” I wrote. When my old friend from Iqaluit Michèle LeTourneau found herself among those who couldn’t resist joining the thread to comment, she observed “OK. I think I just officially outed myself as a weird nut that posts really weird things on Facebook. Maybe I am. Maybe I’m not.” I reassured her by replying, “I think I could give you a bit of competition for the ‘weird nut Facebook poster’ title, Michèle!”

Locally, the Thompson Citizen was moved to editorialize Aug. 31 that “Northern Manitoba’s summer of woe turned [a] deeper shade of blue with the announcement Aug. 22 that Tolko was shutting down its operations in The Pas.”

Tolko Industries said they were going to pull the plug Dec. 2 on their heavy-duty kraft paper and lumber mill in The Pas after 19 years, leaving all 332 employees unemployed. The mill in The Pas has been a money-loser for years. It was conceived by the Progressive Conservative provincial government of premier Duff Roblin in 1966.

Less than a month before Tolko pulled the plug on its mill in The Pas, OmniTRAX, the Denver-based short line railroad, which owns the Port of Churchill, announced on July 25 it would be laying off or not re-hiring about 90 port workers, as it was cancelling the 2016 grain shipping season. OmniTRAX bought most of Northern Manitoba’s rail track from The Pas to Churchill in 1997 from CN for $11 million. OmniTRAX took over the related Port of Churchill, which opened in 1929, when it acquired it from Canada Ports Corporation, for a token $10 soon after buying the rail line. The Port of Churchill has the largest fuel terminal in the Arctic and is North America’s only deep water Arctic seaport that offers a gateway between North America and Mexico, South America, Europe and the Middle East. OmniTRAX created Hudson Bay Railway in 1997, the same year it took over operation of the Port of Churchill. It operates 820 kilometres of track in Manitoba between The Pas and Churchill.

At the time the cancellation was announced, OmniTRAX did not have a single committed grain shipping contract. Normally, the Port of Churchill has a 14-week shipping season from July 15 to Oct. 31. When the Canadian Wheat Board lost its grain monopoly, creating a new grain market several years ago, and was renamed G3 Canada Ltd. by its new owners, the newly-minted G3 Canada Ltd. began building a network of grain elevators, terminals and vessels that bypasses Churchill and uses the Great Lakes, St. Lawrence River and West Coast to move grain to foreign markets. Surprise.

While OmniTRAX accepted a letter of intent last December from Mathias Colomb First Nation, Tataskweyak Cree Nation and the War Lake First Nation to buy its rail assets in Manitoba, along with the Port of Churchill, the deal has not been completed to date, and its future looks murky to non-existent. Rail freight shipments measured by frequency along the Bayline have been cut in half by OmniTRAX this summer.

“Government announces more grant money to develop tourism during visit to Churchill” headlined the Nickel Belt News in an unbylined front page story Sept. 2.  Don’t get me wrong. I love Beluga whales and polar bears. I’ve seen both visiting Churchill (known as Kuugjuaq in Inuit.) And guess what? While Beluga whales and polar bears will support some local tourism and related businesses, it’s still not enough to make for a local sustainable economy of any scale in the community of less than 800 permanent residents now along our Hudson Bay coast.

That’s about as likely to happen as calling itself the “Wolf Capital of the World” is going make a game-changing difference to Thompson’s economic future. A difference, sure. Great. But don’t bet Northern Manitoba’s future on tourism. We’re still either a resource-based economy or no economy to speak of.  If it’s any comfort that remains largely true for most of our provinces and territories and Canada as a whole. Sure there’s the capital cities and a few other kinda largish provincial cities – Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montréal, Québec City, Moncton, Saint John, Halifax and St. John’s (this is a very generous reading BTW) – and even a few more genuine high-tech areas such as Gatineau, Québec and Kanata, Ontario on either side of Ottawa, along with Kitchener, Ontario and elsewhere in the Regional Municipality of Waterloo, all of which are exceptions to the hewers of wood and drawers of water reality, but the exceptions are few and far between.

Oops … did I say that out loud? Me bad.

Kool-Aid anyone?

I may need to quench my thirst unless I intend to pen my next post on UFOs, eschatology or perhaps some virulent disease, preferably a safe distance from Thompson.

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Agreement-in-principle reached with federal government on environmental sulphur dioxide (SO2) airbone emission standards that will allow Vale’s Manitoba Operations smelter to stay open until 2018, mayoral candidate Luke Robinson and USW Local 6166 president Murray Nychyporuk say

Vale has reached an agreement-in-principle with the federal government that will allow it to continue to operate its 53-year-old smelter in Thompson until sometime in 2018, say mayoral candidate Luke Robinson and USW Local 6166 president Murray Nychyporuk.  Pending environmental sulphur dioxide (SO2) airborne emission standards that were due to come into effect  in a few months, as applied to Vale’s Manitoba Operations, would have required its closure if Vale couldn’t meet the standards. The new standards would require a reduction in airborne emissions of approximately 88 per cent from current levels at the Thompson operation, Vale has said previously.

More than 30 per cent of Vale’s production employees in Thompson work in the smelter and refinery. Employees hired before Oct. 1, 2011, have the option to transfer to the mill or underground to the mines from surface operations when the smelter and refinery close under the company’s transition plan.

The announcement that the smelter and refinery would close was originally made on Nov. 17, 2010, with Vale saying at the time it was “phasing out of smelting and refining by 2015” in Thompson. Mining and milling operations are slated to continue.

Almost two years later, in October 2012, Vale announced a possible one-year extension for the Thompson smelter and refinery, contingent on federal sulphur dioxide (SO2) emission standards approvals, to no later than Dec. 31, 2015 because of construction delays at the now open state-of-the-art hydromet processing facility in Long Harbour in southeast Newfoundland on Placentia Bay on the western Avalon Peninsula, about 100 kilometres from St. John’s. It will also process sulphide concentrate feed produced at Voisey’s Bay in Labrador, which has been processed in Thompson. The Long Harbour plant is Vale’s first processing facility in Canada located on tidewater. Long Harbour was originally scheduled for completion in the first quarter of 2013.

Robinson, a first-term incumbent councillor, running in the Oct. 22 municipal election for the open mayoral seat being vacated by Mayor Tim Johnston, who is not seeking re-election to council, against Dennis Fenske, another first-term incumbent councillor, who is Vale’s engineering supervisor of support services for central engineering and the project management office here, said Sept. 22 at a regular council meeting Vale has reached an agreement with the federal government on the sulphur dioxide (SO2) emission standards that will allow the smelter to stay open into 2018.  Robinson is a mechanical underground worker at Vale.

The Thompson smelter and refinery, which opened March 25, 1961, was the free world’s first fully integrated nickel operation and built at a cost of $185 million.

The Canada-Wide Acid Rain Strategy for Post-2000 was agreed to in 1998 by federal, provincial and territorial ministers of energy and environment to fulfill an earlier commitment in their 1994 “Statement of Intent on Long-Term Acid Rain Management in Canada,” which in turn built on the 1985 Eastern Canada Acid Rain Program.  Sulphur dioxide emissions in Canada have decreased 63 per cent since 1985, thanks mostly to a reduction of the amounts produced by base metal smelters due to a combination of a code of practice and implementation of pollution prevention plans, the Winnipeg-based Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment reported last year. The president of the council is Manitoba NDP  Minister of Conversation and Water Stewardship Gord Mackintosh.

Their 2010-2011 progress report on acid rain strategy for after 2000, released early last year, reported that  Manitoba was the third-largest emitter of sulphur dioxide (SO2) in Canada in 2010, accounting for 14 per cent of the total, behind only Alberta at 27 per cent and Ontario at 20 per cent.

SO2 emissions from Manitoba in 2010 were down 44 per cent from their 2008 level, to 197,000 tonnes from 350,000 tonnes, thanks in part to the closure that year of Hudbay’s copper smelter in Flin Flon, which was expected to reduce total emissions of SO2 by 185,000 tonnes per year. That was the largest relative decrease in S02 emissions in any province over the same two-year period.

The scheduled closure of Vale’s smelter in Thompson is expected to reduce the amount of sulphur dioxide emitted in Manitoba by another 185,000 tonnes, the report said. Together, those two smelters in Flin Flon and Thompson had accounted for the bulk of the emissions produced by the nonferrous mining and smelting sector, which was responsible for 98 per cent of all SO2 emissions in Manitoba.

Liz Dykman, programs co-ordinator for the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment, told soundingsjohnbarker (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/) Sept. 25 the “2010/11 report is indeed the latest report on the Canada-wide Acid Rain Strategy for Post-2000.  A 2012/13 report is currently being drafted. CCME does not have any more recent reports on refinery and smelter mining operation SO2 emissions.”

USW Local 6166 president Murray Nychyporuk said in an interview Sept. 25 with soundingsjohnbarker he believes the deal with Vale the federal government, which was discussed by the bargaining teams during recent contract negotiations, is essentially an agreement-in-principle that would allow Vale to continue to operate the smelter and refinery through some point in 2018 on environmental grounds.

Nychyporuk said it’s not clear to him at this point if the deal would run right until the end of 2018 on Dec. 31.

He also said he understood agreement-in-principle means there will likely be some public comment period, for perhaps written comments or a town hall meeting, where people would have the opportunity to make representations on the issue of the new sulphur dioxide (SO2) emission standards not going into force for Vale next year, as previously expected, before the federal government grants its final environmental approval.

Nychyporuk also said it is important to keep in mind also that environmental approval is not the same thing as a business case for Vale keeping the smelter and refinery open into 2018, although he suggests it is unlikely the company would jump through all the necessary legal regulatory environmental hoops to keep the smelter and refinery open if they didn’t plan to carry on operating it during at least most of the extended three-year period. However, Nychyporuk said nickel is a cyclical market, subject to wide price swing flucations, and a big downturn in nickel prices, or the need to do major capital repairs at the smelter if something big should break down, could influence the company to close it before 2018 even with an environmental green light. Conversely, a strong market and high demand might mean Vale will want to keep the smelter and refinery open even beyond 2018, he added, saying there is just no way of knowning that this far in advance. “I don’t have a crystal ball,” Nychyporuk deadpanned.

Nickel was selling on the London Metal Exchange (LME) Sept. 25 for a  spot price of around US$7.82 per pound. At the beginning of 2014, nickel was about US$6.50 per pound, compared to just under US$8 per pound a year earlier. Nickel prices peaked at US$25.51 per pound on the LME in May 2007 just months after Vale bought Inco in a US$19.9-billion all-cash tender takeover offer deal in October 2006. Mining is a cyclical business involving finite resources. Manitoba Operations produces nickel, copper, cobalt and has associated gold, silver, platinum, sulphur, selenium and palladium deposits.

Mark Scott, general manager of mining and milling for Vale’s Manitoba Operations, sounded a cautionary note on the possibility of the smelter and refinery remaining open beyond next year when he spoke to about 30 members and guests at the Thompson Chamber of Commerce’s weekly luncheon May 28, saying the “base case remains” that they both “will close at some point in 2015.” In addition to sulphur dioxide (SO2) emission standards issues, there also remained questions over availability of nickel sulphide concentrate feed, Scott said.

Ryan Land, manager of corporate affairs and organizational development for Vale’s Manitoba Operations, said May 6,  “Vale remains very much committed to Thompson. Largely as a result of challenging market conditions, and in order to align with the ramp-up of projects (which at some point may include a concentrate load-out facility for Thompson), there may be an opportunity to keep the smelter and refinery in operation for an extended duration.

“As a result, we do continue to participate in discussions with the federal government and have requested further flexibility on the date for meeting the emissions targets. We did previously receive approval to operate the plants until the end of 2015, which is already very positive for the community and our employees. While we are hopeful that we can further extend the deadline, we will still transition to mining-and-milling-only at some point between 2016 and 2019.”

Land said in an e-mail follow-up Sept. 29, “We have a tentative agreement with the federal government to allow for the operation of the smelter up to Jan.1, 2019, until such time as the concentrate load-out facility is completed. This is subject to the completion of satisfactory terms within an Environmental Performance Agreement with Environment Canada, pending the submission and approval of a performance plan.”

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