Inside the Mining Convention Where Industry Toasts Its Disastrous Growth

When I was a young kid, I was stuck in an outdoor school in Saskatchewan. It was OK as far as elementary schools go, but it’s also where I learned we were cooking the earth to death. We would bike between city parks and the prairie grasslands learning statistics about plastic bags and straw-bale homes, until by the end of the semester we were a militant pack of 13-year-olds picking up the Slurpee litter of our cooler friends and telling everyone we shopped at Value Village.

I doubt our snake-skin of insufferability would’ve lasted through the less apocalyptic but still pressing concerns of high school, and maybe some of it was dulled by weed and minimum wage jobs, but then everyone seemed to catch the eschatological bug. There was Al Gore with his doomed graphs and goofy drawl, time lapses of our ice caps turning into melted slushies, and even Jesse Eisenberg nervously exploding a dam in Night Moves. Permaculture had entered the lingo. A&W had a vegetarian option. We all knew we were screwed. We still do. Everyone does.

A decade and a few oil spills later, it seems that maybe—with some luck, with the IPCC report counting down our 10 years left—our collective will is barreling us towards the future of green cities with garden roofs I’d been made to imagine as an idiot kid. With Teck withdrawing its application for a $20 billion new tar sands project in Alberta, families partying on railroad lines to interrupt the metastasizing pipelines, and, uh, vegan burgers at KFC, climate awareness is at a critical juncture my punchable, no-waste 13-year-old self might have beamed at. Maybe we can stop our country’s accelerated heating. Maybe we’ll transition away from Canada being a petroleum state which houses nearly 75 percent of the world’s mining companies. Maybe this is our moment. Maybe?

It was with these thoughts that I entered the shiny halls of Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) 2020, the largest mining convention in the world. Jammed into the Metro Toronto Convention Centre in early March, PDAC is the global nexus of the industry, where tens of thousands of executives and investors and officials come to shake hands and show off their latest offerings. I came with doubts and my own perspective, it’s true. But I also sincerely wanted to know if the industry was living up to the earnest “priorities” on PDAC’s webpage, where a slideshow projects healthy forests, snow-capped mountains, and lofty claims of “gender diversity” and “capacity-building for Indigenous communities.”

I also wanted to know how they were responding to the big rumblings of bad publicity in the last few weeks—Teck’s cancelled project, the solidarity work against Coastal GasLink’s pipeline, the Supreme Court ruling which, in a historic case, now allows for Canadian companies to be sued for human rights abuses abroad. How would the mood be at PDAC? Would they be wiping their hands and planning the next offensive? Or would they be pensive and introspective as their industry is seemingly facing an existential crisis? Equipped with filtered water, a phone powered by lithium, and travelling on a failing public transit system, I went to find out.

Right away, I entered the large stadium of display tables and was awash in the bright oranges and mechanical greens of what is essentially a giant science fair for adults. Picture hundreds of stalls, maybe thousands. There were booths advertising mech tools that looked to my untrained eye like parts of Transformers. There was a giant, reflective drill that shone in the centre of the pavilion like a kind of private-industry flag. There was a young enterprising 20-something giving a presentation on a project that required innovation, with an Einstein quote to prove it, next to a depository for business cards that would enter me into a chance to win a bottle of wine. “Wait, do you have a business card?” someone asked, and before I could confront the embarrassment I ducked away to a VR station. There, in a 10- minute guided tour, I saw the model-inside of a mine (“see how much bigger it is than most people assume,” my guide told me, “one day we hope to make it all done remotely, with drones and 5G”).

It’s all very tiring, all too quickly, but fortunately, after I walked across the hall and saw all the drones and remote cars the size of bulldogs, the education booth with colouring books for children, the bookstore with mining-specific dad-joke comic books (I laughed at a few of them—including one where a personification of gold asks his therapist why he always ends up with fools—I’m sorry), the golden pens with diamonds where the erasers should’ve been, the custom carry-on-luggage-tag-making station, there were well-being booths with massage therapists and seats you could fall into. (“Physical health is key for mental health,” my massager said while she pressed an elbow down my shoulder. “You need a sharp mind to keep a healthy body.”)

I learned the first rule of the convention is that science fairs for the elites work the same way as they do for kids. That is, the best goodie bags attract the most people. After some recovery I did the full three-hour rotation, just to see what was on offer, and found everything from Werther’s Originals to chocolate golden coins. It was mostly a Halloween-box affair, I thought, until I turned a corner to RNP Mexico’s hydraulic drill manufacturing company and found a charcuterie board of fine cheeses, crackers, and spoonable jams. This turned out to be a siren song that led me into lectures about “maximizing efficiency” and “increasing outputs,” but I got out with a complimentary pen you’d find at an architectural firm: smooth, sleek, and tough as steel.

The second rule was that there was a dress code, and, having not got the memo, I was one of maybe ten people without a suit or dress shirt. From the raised platform that overlooks the main room, the men (it was nearly entirely all men) below me were a swirl of black and blue blazers that looked like a giant, swelling bruise over the whole plaza. The dress code was mostly Bret Easton Ellis financier chic, with fitted clothing, gold watches, and product-infused hair. There were a few exceptions, some geeky engineer-types with triangle beards, or belts notched a bit too high, and I felt for them, remembering the guys you’d see in the robotics lab in high school, all gnome-shaped hats and wraparound glasses, but then I overheard one of them plopped $80,000 away on the stock market and my empathy wilted.

No matter who you were though, everyone seemed to travel in packs. They wore their BMO sponsored name tags, they carried their PDAC tote bags, and they travelled from booth to booth—taking pictures, making deals, and, most importantly, shaking hands. This shaking hands business isn’t trivial. In fact, it’s such an essential part of PDAC 2020 that there were warnings on their front page that the convention may be cancelled, given what they’ve heard about the Coronavirus. On day one, they’ve still given us the OK, but just to make sure everyone knows how diligent they’ve been, there seems to be a hand-sanitizer squirter at just about every corner, and I saw more than one person hold their hand out like an infected thing after a handshake, touching no one and nothing until it’d been doused in the stuff.

For all the grandstanding at PDAC, you’d think the industry was in perfect running order. If you didn’t know better, you might think the event was clean and innocuous, but in case you did, there were at least 100 protesters outside drumming their discontent. I saw a few besuited men take pictures of the protesters from inside their police-protected fortress, exasperatedly sighing when a sign-carrier outside flipped them off with frenzied, righteous glory, but for the most part the attendees avoided that side of the building. I couldn’t help but make the overly neat analogy: if I was inside the consciousness of the mining industry, out there was its unconscious—an angry, blotting stain that couldn't be cleaned with Tide to Go.

Nonetheless, the word “sustainable” seemed to be featured in big block letters at just about every corner, and I was struck by how earnestly exhibitors believed the industry was making big steps towards change. One man, a kindly marketing manager with an easy gracefulness, nodded seriously when I mentioned the public’s concerns about climate change.

“No—look,” he said, “There’s no doubt we need to worry about the environment. That’s why we offer certification through ECOLOGO—so the public can trust that what companies are saying about themselves is true.” After some Googling I discovered ECOLOGO is a kind of ethics checkmark, something companies can stick on their branding to prove they’ve got more than money on their minds.

When I pressed another exhibitor at a major mining company, he seemed ready for my mention of the Green New Deal. “I’m not against regulations and government involvement per se, but I think change should come from the investment side of things. Investors are already asking what their relationship is with local communities and the environment before getting involved,” he said.

In case the sector was having any self-doubts—of which I saw no evidence—Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dropped in to soothe their angst in a surprise appearance.

“[Our] government wants to keep [the] mining sector strong and growing,” he said.

It was at this point that my sanity began to waver. The more I toured the halls the more I saw evidence of innovation. There were before and after pictures of oil spills that looked like a chronic smoker’s tumorous lungs on one side, and a verdant Garden of Eden on the other. There were displays of mobile water-treatment centers that turn sewage into potable drinking water. There was a sequestration process that freezes arsenic from gold mining into what looks like a perfect hunk of shiny black metal that I’d value, using my inexpert eye, in the millions of dollars. By the time I was reminded I had a complimentary coupon for shoe shining, and a headshot, and a beer was stuck into my hand, I had to Google the mining industry’s recent record to maintain sanity. Right, the Yukon has been left polluted by a fleeing mining company. A gold mine in Nova Scotia threatens one of their last sizeable populations of salmon. More distantly, the hunt for lithium in Chile is stealing the region’s water at more than 2,000 litres per second. Thank you, MiningWatch Canada. Sanity restored.

What I did not find at PDAC was any mention of history. When your entire industry is responsible for untold numbers of accidental burials and land so wasted it looks like the moon, it’s much better to focus on the present. This is probably why there were bouquets of flowers down almost every aisle. Some of them were obviously fake, little plastic explosions of colour, but others were as beautifully trimmed as Japanese gardens. It’s easy to forget about more sordid associations—like, for instance, that your company has been accused of slavery in Latin American countries, and can now be tried in a Canadian court—when there are such cheery nudges all around. No need to have an ethics table. No oversight committee here. Ultimately, visiting the convention was like opening a birthday present, perfectly wrapped in wholesomely re-used floral paper, only to find a lump of coal.

Whatever it was that the majority of the booths were displaying, it’s not going to lead us to a global eco-village. There were specialized appliances meant to increase efficiency, but at least 99 percent of the booths were companies that mined or were connected to oil, gold, platinum, diamonds, nickel, potash, and coal—not the stuff of a brave new renewable world. Instead of the five-year plan I was hoping for, some screed that promised free CPR bullet trains and plans to scatter one trillion trees across Canada, a vision where we could buy a laptop without thinking about someone’s home in the DRC being demolished, or even car pool across town without remembering the fires in the Amazon, there were lots of sylvan backgrounds and pristine landscapes photoshopped behind company names. I didn’t expect to find anything different, but I hoped to.

It was about 5 p.m. when RBC rolled out free meals and alcoholic beverages for everyone who wanted them. It was getting late. I was getting tired. True to my past, I filled two of their bamboo plates full of almond sourdough, olive tapenade, fresh celery and hummus, then proceeded to covertly scoop one of them into a Tupperware for later. Then I found a seat away from the now much more social crowd, avoiding their networking which had seemed to go viral. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what a tipsy corporate industry man was capable of.

It was in my own self-exile, looking at the goings-on from a distance, like I was the camera from Koyaanisqatsi, that I saw the lone dead-eyed pigeon pecking underneath my row of tables. It was a flappy, paranoid thing. (And in this place, who wouldn’t be?) But for as long as I was down there, no one seemed to catch it. It nibbled on leftover plates of pizza and crepes, some half-chewed bits of fries, finding safety in a high corner when anyone took too much notice.

Somehow, even here, it was still alive.