The Sword of Damocles dangles no longer.
Today is the day Tito Martins, then president and chief executive officer of Vale Canada and executive director of base metals for the Brazilian international parent company, told us was coming on Nov. 17, 2010 – 2,814 days ago, or expressed another way, seven years, eight months and 15 days ago. The day the Thompson smelter and refinery officially cease production and Thompson ceases to be a fully integrated nickel operation for the first time since March 1961.
Mind you, July 31, 2018 – today – is something of an arbitrary bookkeeping sort of marker. At the time of Martins’ 2010 announcement, the closing date was announced as 2015, so we’ve had about three extra years of nickel smelting and refining. As for the actual ramp down, the last furnace tap from the one remaining furnace in operation and anode cast from the smelter and the last cathode pulled from the refinery happened earlier this month. The recently completed Thompson Concentrate Loadout Facility, a fully functioning de-watering and loadout facility, will continue to ship Manitoba-source nickel concentrate from the Thompson Mill for further processing to Vale’s hydromet processing facility in Long Harbour in southeast Newfoundland on Placentia Bay on the western Avalon Peninsula, about 100 kilometres from St. John’s, as milling and mining continue in Thompson, albeit with a much smaller economic, and employment footprint, with just under 600 unionized Steelworkers remaining at Vale here by the end of the year.
Nickel smelting and refining here in Thompson has been a long and glorious run of value-added jobs, producing some of the finest electrolytic nickel plating in the world since Sept. 10, 1960 when the Thompson Smelter produced its first Bessemer nickel matte, and about six months later on March 30, 1961, when the Thompson Refinery produced its first nickel cathodes. At its peak, the smelter operated five furnaces, four nickel and one copper, and between September 1960 and July 2018 produced more than 16.6 million anodes. Between March 1961 and July 2018, the refinery produced more than five billion pounds of electro-nickel, with more than 90 per cent of the nickel produced being plating-grade quality.
There were several key dates in Thompson’s early 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. And 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.
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 three years later on July 7, 1970.
But the key date in Thompson’s history, at least before today? That would be March 25, 1961, when Progressive Conservative Premier Duff Roblin “cut the nickel ribbon to officially open the town” of 3,800 residents Nickel Belt News founding publisher and then owner Grant Wright wrote a few days later on March 29, 1961. The Nickel Belt News came into existence on March 24, 1961 – one day before Roblin and a who’s who of government and mining crème de la crèmes – opened the $185-million smelter and refinery, the free world’s first fully integrated nickel operation and second in size in the “free world” only to Inco’s Sudbury operations. Brazilian mining giant Vale purchased Canadian nickel producer Inco Ltd. in 2006 in an $18.2 billion takeover.
“The establishment of this new, major industry is another step in the developing economic might of the nation,” said Roblin standing at the Inco refinery and smelter site here March 25, 1961. “Indeed, through its products it will contribute to the advancement of the free world. With the need to create new international markets to sustain our economic growth, the export of a finished product – electrolytic nickel – has important ramifications.”
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