Never Rest on Your Ores

Book excerpt: More than a century ago, a prospector discovered gold at Ontario’s Kirkland Lake and a son was born to British immigrants in Saskatchewan. The boy – Norman Bell Keevil – went on to become a renowned scientist, teacher, and prospector, discovering a small but high-grade copper mine in Ontario. Parlaying that into control of the Kirkland Lake gold mine fifty years later, he formed the fledgling mining company Teck Corporation. In Never Rest on Your Ores Keevil’s son Norman, also a geoscientist, recounts how over the next fifty years, a growing team of like-minded engineers and entrepreneurs built Canada’s largest diversified mining company. In candid detail he tells the story of a company and its makers, of the discovery and creation of mines, of the mechanics of industry financing, and of the role that mergers and acquisitions play in a volatile environment. Along the way he meets fascinating captains of industry and politicians not only in Canada, but in the United States and around the world. Finding an ore body – rock that holds valuable metals and minerals – and promoting its development in order to finance and create a mine, most often in hard-to-access wilderness, is complicated work, comparable to locating and extracting a needle in a very messy haystack. Underlying this history is a constant need to replenish the ore, and this need drives the people involved. Drawing new lessons from the turbulent period between 2005 and 2023, this new edition of Never Rest on Your Ores is both entertaining and instructive, a rare insider’s account of an industry that has been crucial to the building of this country.