Claude Resources Inc. CEO Neil McMillan had a special surprise in store for local Rotary members at a noon-hour luncheon Monday.
McMillan brought along a 50-pound chunk of ore, which he described as an unusual specimen because of the unusually high grade of gold within it.
The hefty ore sample, containing shiny-yellow specks of gold clearly visible to the eye, was drilled from Claude Resources Inc's Seabee mining operation in north-central Saskatchewan.
The ore was the star attraction at the event, as it was eagerly passed around and examined by impressed Battlefords Rotary Club members and guests in the Tropical Inn ballroom.
"You will get a feeling for how heavy it is and what gold looks like in its natural state," said McMillan of the sample. McMillan was not kidding. The sample was so heavy, it turned out, that when Jean Walker of the Rotary Club tried to lift the ore so it could be passed around the room, she couldn't.
Contributing to the hefty weight of the ore sample was the impressive amount of wealth within it. McMillan estimated there was probably somewhere between $10,000 and $50,000 worth of gold within that sample.
"It's a rare and very spectacular piece of ore," he said.
At the luncheon McMillan, once a Liberal MLA for Kindersley, spoke of the vast opportunity and potential of the mining sector in Saskatchewan. While he also spoke of the challenges the sector faces, his was mainly a good-news message delivered to the business-minded audience about the resource-based economy in Saskatchewan.
"I'm excited about what's developing in Saskatchewan not just on the mining front but on all fronts, particularly relative to what's going on in the rest of the world," McMillan told reporters.
"We already are the world's largest producers of potash and uranium. We have the largest undeveloped diamond project in the world 60 kilometres east of Prince Albert, and we don't even know how much oil and gas we have in the province. And all this we have in a province of one million people.
"The amount of wealth we create here is staggering on a per-capita basis," he said.
His company, Claude Resources Inc. out of Saskatoon, currently has gold projects on the go at Seabee and Amisk and at Madsen, Ont.
The two Saskatchewan projects are 100 per cent owned by Claude Resources and were expected to host multi-million ounce ore bodies, with the potential to produce over 100 thousand ounces per year, according to the material presented.
A 130,000 metre drilling exploration project was slated for 2012 at the Seabee Gold operation, located across 14,400 hectares of land. That operation has produced 973,000 ounces of gold between 1991 and 2011 and includes two producing mines.
McMillan also spoke about their Amisk gold-mining project about 20 kilometres west of Flin Flon. There, some 23,450 hectares of gold deposit was located.
He spoke about what was involved in gold mining with respect to finding and mining gold thousands of feet under the ground.
"The amount of rock you need to move to get to the gold is simply staggering," he said in describing the process. He also described the intensive work done in milling, grinding and recovering the gold.
Employees work 11-hour shifts underground, working four weeks straight and taking two weeks off, with the company footing the bill to fly the mine workers in from wherever they were living. About 180 people live on site full-time, he said.
He spoke of the importance of mining in general to the province and its economy. He said one in four people in the province owes their living to mining, with mining accounting for 19 per cent of GDP to the province.
He spoke about the immense amounts of wealth produced from the mining sector, making the point that the last things people quit spending their money on when they're resources are shrinking are food and energy. Despite a worldwide recession, that was why "we've had no material change in our unemployment rate" said McMillan, and the "trajectory of our incomes is accelerating."
"We are hitting on all cylinders," said McMillan.
McMillan also spoke of the need to fill mining jobs in the province. He described them as good jobs that could earn workers six-figure salaries just with a Grade 12 education.
"We are short an immense number of people in the mining sector," said McMillan. He noted the industry was short 850 engineers in the mining sector alone.
He also made the point that unlike some other industries, the resource-sector jobs in Saskatchewan can't be out-sourced to Asia any time soon.
"You can't move our jobs to China or Malaysia or Laos or Cambodia where labour is cheaper. They have to stay here. Our only challenge is where do we get enough skilled workers to work in this business," said McMillan, who suggested immigration would be needed to fill some of the gaps.
The cost of mining gold is staggering, millions upon millions of dollars, but there's a reason for the effort.
"Gold is money," said McMillan.
McMillan spoke of the secure value of gold as a source of wealth, especially compared to paper money, which he described as being "devalued constantly."
In speaking to reporters, McMillan made the point of gold being seen as a safe harbour in stormy economic times.
"Gold has been recognized for the last 9000 years as a store of value or money," McMillan told reporters.
"In times of financial disturbance, people tend to go back to gold as a basic way to store their wealth," said McMillan, with the price of gold going up from under $300 to over $1,600 an ounce. He said that's really good for his business.
"Our gold mine in Saskatchewan this summer will produce its one millionth ounce of gold, which is a world class production scenario and, we think, just getting started. So in its own right it is real money and an exciting part of Saskatchewan's mining sector as well."
