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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The rise and fall and rising again of Alexander Dubček and the blooming of Czechoslovakia’s ever-so-brief Prague Spring of 1968

It was 47 years ago yesterday that Alexander Dubček replaced Antonin Novotný as first secretary of the Czechoslovak Party Central Committee and the Prague Spring of 1968 began to unexpectedly bloom under the still Communist regime.

Dubček was born in 1921 in Uhrovek, Slovakia. He had joined the Communist Party  in Slovakia in 1939 and during the Second World War in 1944 joined the Slovak Resistance, serving with the Jan Zizka Brigade, which operated in the lower Tatra Mountains.

After the war ended n 1945, Dubček rose through the Communist ranks. From 1951 to 1955, he was a member of the Národního shromáždění republiky Československé, the national assembly, and in 1953 he was sent to the Moscow Political College, where he graduated in 1958 with honours.

When he returned to Czechoslovakia, Dubček was appointed principal secretary of the Slovak Communist Party in Bratislava.Under Dubček’s leadership, Slovakia began to move toward political liberalization. Kultúrny život, the weekly newspaper of the Union of Slovak Writers, published frank discussions of liberalization, federalization and democratization, written by progressive and controversial writers – both Slovak and Czech – and became the first Slovak publication to gain a wide following among Czechs, as well as Slovaks.

In 1958, Dubček also joined the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, which he served as secretary from 1960 to 1962, and the same year became a member of the Czechoslovak Party Presidium. A year later, he succeeded Karol Balicek as first secretary of the Slovak Communist Party. From 1960 to 1968 he was again a member of the Národního shromáždění republiky Československé.

On Jan. 5, 1968, the party’s central committee nominated Dubček to succeed Novotný after the Czechoslovak Party Central Committee passed a vote of no-confidence in its then first secretary.
As first secretary, Dubček, although no democrat, began nourishing the first seeds of what became known as the Prague Spring, that proved to be a brief but exciting season of liberalization that wouldn’t bloom again for 21 years until the Velvet Revolution of November 1989, when  Dubček returned from long political exile to be elected speaker of the  Federální shromáždění, the federal assembly.

In 1968, Dubček had moved toward what became known as “socialism with a human face,” saying he was determined to achieve the “widest possible democratization” of Czechoslovakia and the establishment of “a free, modern, and profoundly humane society.”

He allowed Communist Party members in Czechoslovakia to challenge party policy, as opposed to the traditional acceptance of all government policy. Party members were given the right to act “according to their conscience.” He also announced the end of censorship and the right of Czech citizens to criticize the government. The country’s newspapers produced scathing reports about government incompetence and corruption.

Dubček also announced that farmers would have the right to form independent co-operatives and that trade unions would have increased rights to bargain for their members.

At the same time, Dubček tried to reassure the country’s Soviet masters that Czechoslovakia had no intention of leaving the Warsaw Pact and Czechoslovakia’s 1968 reforms were an internal matter. The Soviet Union was not reassured.

On the pretext they had evidence that West Germany was planning to invade the Sudetenland, comprising the Czechoslovakian border districts of Bohemia, Moravia and parts of Silesia. Moscow said it  would provide Czechoslovakia with the troops needed to protect the country from invasion by the NATO power. Dubček refused the offer but the Soviets insisted.

On the night of Aug. 20-21, 1968, Soviet and other Warsaw Pact forces from Hungary, Poland, East Germany and Bulgaria crossed the frontier into Czechoslovakia. The occupying armies quickly seized control of Prague.

The beginning of the end of the Prague Spring came on that night of Aug. 20-21, 1968. Dubček was arrested, spirited away to Moscow with other reform leaders, and detained for a week before he was returned to Prague and released, and then continued on as first secretary until April 17, 1969, when he was appointed speaker of the new Federální shromáždění, the federal assembly, and soon after went on to serve as Czechoslovakia’s ambassador to Turkey for just over six months from Dec. 15, 1969 to June 24, 1970. Three days later, on June 27, 1970, Dubček was expelled from the Communist Party and banished to Bratislava where he worked in a timber yard, spending the next 19 years in a low-profile but not entirely uncomfortable position, although he had little contact with the outside world for almost two decades and was under surveillance by the Státní bezpečnosti (StB), the Czech secret police.

Dubček  spent the last three years of his life back in the political limelight after the Velvet Revolution of November 1989. He died at the age of 70 on Nov. 7, 1992 at Homolse Hospital in Prague. A little more than two months earlier on Sept. 1, Dubček had been seriously injured in an automobile accident that occurred when a car driven by his  chauffeur left the highway in a rainstorm and plunged down a ravine. Dubček suffered serious spine and chest injuries and underwent surgery.

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