100 years ago, the 1er May 1922, International Workers’ Day, were produced the letters patent of Noranda Mines, the mining group which was to operate one of the largest copper mines in the world in Rouyn-Noranda, and whose extraction activities ended in 1976, 53 million tons of ores later.
This mining epic, despite the silences of official history, probably began several years before the “discovery” of the deposit by Edmund Horne, the founding father of Rouyn-Noranda.
It all began in the summer of 1909, on the wild shores of Lake Osisko, in Conia Asini, in traditional Anishinabe territory. The Mackimoot brothers, two hunters from Winneway’s band, find a shiny rock near the body of water. The discovery spread quickly in the small world of mining prospecting in Témiscamingue, and it was most likely on the trail of this rumor that Edmund Horne set out two years later. The rest of the story borders on legend.
One summer evening, as Horne pickaxes the mineralogical vein he has found, he stands by a beacon to shoo the flies away. A clumsy movement makes him knock over the lamp which sets fire to the surrounding brush. Horne, terrified, throws himself into Lake Osisko. As he emerges, unscathed, he notices that the fire has exposed another outcrop further on, the visible head of the H deposit which will prove to be of unheard-of depth and richness. Its main gallery, whose shimmering wall makes workers dream, will be nicknamed Jewelery by Toronto bosses. Eventually, more than one metric ton of copper and 325,000 kilos of gold will be extracted from the twin cities’ subsoil.
A group of investors, the Chadbourne-Thomson Syndicate, bought in 1922 the claim on which the mine and its smelter are to be installed. The company, which wishes to register under the name of Norcanda, with a “c”, a contraction of the words “North and Canada”, notes with astonishment that all the official documents return to it with the erroneous mention of Noranda. Probably a transcription error. After debate, we adopt this name, whose happy sound seduces the bosses.
In 1926, we changed our minds about the scale of the work. It will not be 500, but 1000 tonnes of ore that can be processed daily by the foundry. At this stage, we do not yet know the exact extent of the reserves on which the adventure will be able to count. Chadbourne, the main American investor, who attends the erection of the huge chimney, expresses his doubts to Murdoch, the young president of the mine.
He would then have replied: “Chad, either this foundry will stand as a monument to our stupidity and our reckless spirit or else it will be the symbol of our wisdom and our clairvoyance”, reports Pierre Barette in Noranda. From Murdoch to Pannell (2006).
Just more of the same
A hundred years later, it is up to current generations to decide which of its two legends should now belong to the legacy of Noranda, now the Horne Foundry.
By 1930, the mine employed immigrants from Eastern Europe for more than half of its underground staff. An underground miner is paid 60¢ an hour and works eight hours a day, six days a week. The working conditions are intolerable “in-d’ssour”, so much so that in June 1934 a strike is declared. It is violently repressed by the police, who parade with a submachine gun in front of the picket line where women and children are. Noranda does not agree to any of the union’s demands, crushes the Fros strike in a few days and massively dismisses foreign workers. For the record, it is also Noranda that owns the mine in Murdochville, whose violent strikes of 1957 will go down in history and will be among the detonators of the Quiet Revolution.
If the history of this Abitibi institution is chilling, its recent exploits are probably even worse. Since 2013, the smelter has been owned by the Anglo-Swiss giant Glencore, whose tax avoidance schemes came to light during the Paradise Papers affair in 2017.
Qualified in 2003 as a rogue company by the French State (through the voice of Roselyne Bachelot, then Minister of the Environment), after it withdrew from the most polluted mining site in Europe without cleaning it, this huge financial entity is accused of political corruption in the Congo, which it keeps under its boot thanks to the abyssal claims that the African state has contracted in the personal treasuries of the firm. In 2011, Glencore controlled 60% of zinc, 50% of copper, 30% of aluminum and 25% of global coal. This is what is apparently called a balanced portfolio of varied and integrated industrial assets.
And as part of its daily operations in Rouyn-Noranda, Glencore still discharges its wastewater into the northern basin of Lake Osisko. Its releases of arsenic into the air, the peaks of which exceed up to 60 times the ceiling of the Quebec standard, are estimated to have neurological consequences on children. In 2021, like almost every year, the foundry is the regional company that receives the most notices of non-compliance with the Environment Quality Act.
100 years ago, to the day, the pact by which Abitibi linked its destiny to the mining company was sealed.
Today like yesterday
Since then, nothing has really changed for us. We are still the sleeping dogs of this bad master who poisons us and whom our chamber of commerce nevertheless applauds, in the name of the 600 jobs and the few crumbs that we are redistributed in sponsorship.
But the Rouynorandians, alas, who live in the shade of the two large chimneys, today as yesterday and tomorrow, will doubtless always sing, and perhaps for another hundred years, the same sacred song: “Viva la vie, viva love and, above all… long live the Company ! »