Louis Gignac contributed to the stature of Canada’s mining industry during his exemplary career as a company builder, mine operator and developer, and advocate of industry best practices. He is best known for building Quebec-based Cambior into an intermediate gold producer and mentoring a new generation of mining talent.
Robert Friedland has been a dynamic, transformative force in the Canadian and international mining industries for more than 25 years. The entrepreneur, financier and company-maker is one of the most recognized mining personalities and achievers on the world stage.
Major advances in metallurgical engineering and metals processing can be traced to the intellectual prowess of a few giants, and Keith Brimacombe is unquestionably one of them. As a researcher, he pioneered the application of computerized mathematical modeling to analyze and design processes to extract metals from their ores and convert them into useful products.
Murray Edmund Watts, a combination of adventurous prospector and mining engineer, is probably best known for his work in the Arctic, where he made a number of major ore discoveries, revealing much about that vast land inside Canada’s Arctic Circle.
Jules Timmins’ finest hour, and his claim to mining fame, occurred when he brought into being the iron ore fields of northern Quebec and Labrador, in one of the greatest projects in Canadian mining history.
Karl Springer, a highly successful mine-finder, has amply proved in his career as a prospector that not only could he find the mines but that he could provide the inspirational leadership and drive to make them pay. As well, he has done pioneer work, particularly with the helicopter, in the use of aviation in exploration and mine development.
It was not for nothing that The Northern Miner, the weekly journal of Canada’s mining industry, in 1977 chose Stephen B. Roman as its first Mining Man of the Year.
A lawyer by profession, James Y. Murdoch, who became first president of the fledgling Noranda Mines in 1922, at the age of 32, was one of the greatest its builders Canada has ever produced. Not just a mine-builder, but a nation builder.
Thayer Lindsley, the father of such mining giants as Falconbridge Ltd., Ventures Ltd. and Frobisher, has been described as the greatest mine finder of all time.
Gilbert LaBine helped shape the course of world history when in 1930 he discovered pitchblende at Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories. With his discovery there of the ore that yields radium and uranium, LaBine pushed Canada into the atomic age. He was probably one of the few Canadian prospectors of that time who could have identified the pitchblende mineral.
