Vale’s Long Goodbye: 2,814 days adding up to 7 years, 8 months and 15 days

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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Libraries and hotels: Different sectors, but value-added information is a hot, proprietary commodity for both

In late 2006 and early 2007, I did some work in Trenton, Ontario for TeleTech Holdings Inc., an Englewood, Colorado-based company, as a high-speed Internet specialist offering technical support to their client, St. Louis-based Charter Communications, owned not by Bill Gates, but by Microsoft’s less famous co-founder, Paul Allen. The facility, which had just opened in May 2006 with more than 200 employees, had superb computers and desks and chairs, which ergonomically would put to shame any newsroom I’ve ever worked in.

Sadly, TeleTech closed that Trenton facility on Aug. 31, 2009, little more than two years after I arrived in Thompson, Manitoba. Why? “There is a change in the needs of the client. The work will be moved around to other centres,” TeleTech explained, adding the closure is “not a reflection” of quality of work completed at the Trenton centre. The closure came sandwiched somewhere between Outsourced, the 2006 romantic movie comedy, which won the best film award at the 2007 Seattle International Film Festival, and the one-season NBC sitcom by the same name that aired in 2010-11, telling the story of a fictional all-American company, Mid America Novelties of Seattle, outsourcing its call centre operation to Gharapuri in India.

Apparently newspapers aren’t the only type of business to go out of business. Or outsource their work to India. Although in the news biz it is more likely to be layout and production work, increasingly editing, and to a limited degree, at least so far, local reporting. The old real estate adage, “location, location, location,” which once seemed to apply to community newspapers, as much as your home, as where both were located was the most important factor in giving them value, in the case of papers for what was thought to be a unique commodity – local news – not so much anymore. Still, call me a Luddite, but it is hard to picture local council and school board meetings being covered remotely from 12 time zones away. Technically possible, yes; But likely on a wide scale? Probably not, although it has been done with some fairly unimpressive results to date.

Not long before I worked for TeleTech, I spent some time in 2005 and 2006 living in Amherst, Nova Scotia and Sackville, New Brunswick, both on the saltwater Tantramar marshes, and worked as a financial agent at Moneris Solutions in Sackville. I always marvelled at how I could walk into the lunchroom at Moneris in the remodeled red brick historic Atlantic Wholesalers building at 2 Charlotte Street, and pick up a hard copy of the Harvard Business Review off a shelf to read at lunch, or maybe chat over lunch with a fraud detection specialist about things like the language of a purchaser one of our merchants was dealing with half-way around the world being different from the primary language spoken in the location where the true IP is registered, etc., raising red flags for us. The other nice thing about both Moneris and TeleTech was they were “inbound” call centres – the client is calling you for help, as apposed to “outbound.” If you want to know the difference, ask a telemarketer.

My Moneris boss, Tom Rusted, had a M.Sc. in entomology, and was a black fly specialist, who in a career as a banker, had been involved in the pioneering rollout of mbanx in 1996 for Bank of Montreal, which was the first North America-wide virtual, full-service bank. Moneris Solutions, established in 2000, is a joint investment between RBC Royal Bank and BMO Bank of Montreal, and with more than three billion transactions a year from over 350,000 merchant locations, is Canada’s largest processor and acquirer of debit and credit card payments.

Moneris was a very different world than journalism, but not uninteresting by any means. I met a number of very bright and talented people at Moneris. Mind you, like the hotel industry where I devote my efforts now (along with the university library), Moneris is very much built on proprietary data – as much or even more so than the hotel business – and you couldn’t leave your computer without doing a “lock-and-walk.” Documents had to be turned facedown when you went away from your desk because there could be non-employee contractors or visitors in the building, although I can’t recall them letting many visitors in. Documents had to be paper shredded at the end of every shift. I remember not so long ago Googling the remodeled Moneris red brick historic Atlantic Wholesalers building at 2 Charlotte Street and no images came up for it! Sort of like Area 51 or Groom Lake, Nevada. My favourite story from that line of work was having a food and beverage manager from the Calgary Saddledome (now known as the Scotiabank Saddledome) call me at Moneris in Sackville because one of his concession clerks the night before at a Calgary Flames NHL hockey game had sold a fan a hotdog or something for $7 (in 2005-06) and the customer had paid by debit card.

The transaction had gone through not as $7 but $70,000 – immediately, of course, out of the customer’s bank account, courtesy of our Moneris point-of-sale (POS) hand-held terminal device.

Too many zeroes punched in, I guess. The manager was totally beside himself, desperate to refund the customer and credit his bank account before he found out about the mistake. It would have been a lot simpler, of course, if he had paid with a credit card, not a debit card, because you wouldn’t need the credit cardholder physically present with their card to do the refund, unlike a debit card. Although even a credit refund for $70,000 wouldn’t be that simple given the staggering sum.

I remember the manager asking me how it could possibly have been approved on our end and gone through and telling him presumably the customer had the $70,000 in the bank account linked to his debit card, and the bank had obviously not imposed a daily withdrawal limit for him, like most customer have. The poor manager said, “I’m not even sure I could get a mortgage right now for $70,000, much less buy something on my debit card for that amount.” I told him maybe do a quick refresher with his clerk on punching in numbers on the Moneris terminal keypad a bit more slowly. One of my favourite non-journalism true work stories.

Whether community newspapers can continue to monetize with much success their local information remains something of an open question, but much of the rest of the world is ever increasingly living on proprietary data and value-added information. For hotels, think cloud-based hotel property management systems.

But the phenomenon is, of course, much, much bigger than the for-profit private sector payment processing and hotel industries. Here at the university library, where we’re part of the institutional not-for-profit public sector, we’re also always dealing with proprietary information and data, albeit of a different type sometimes, in terms of copyright and intellectual property issues. Make no mistake; libraries monetize information. Want an inside-the-ballpark library term? Think GOBI3 (Global Online Bibliographic Information).

GOBI3 is an information source and bibliographic database that enables research libraries and consortia to have access to print and electronic titles.

A company called EBSCO, founded in 1944 and headquartered in Ipswich, Massachusetts, supplies a fee-based online research service with 375 full-text databases, a collection of 600,000-plus e-books, subject indexes, point-of-care medical references, and an array of historical digital archives. Last February, EBSCO bought Yankee Book Peddler, Inc. (YBP Library Services), located in Contoocook, New Hampshire, and founded in 1971 as a bookseller for academic libraries, providing books, collection management, and technical services in print and electronic formats to academic, research, and special libraries in the United States and internationally. There is also Midwest Library Service, out of Bridgeton, Missouri, a book jobber serving libraries since 1959.

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