ARTicle from Mick Lowe:
TORONTO--So this was Inco's "No Tears" Annual Shareholder's Meeting.
No tears for the company's laid off workers here On the Rock. No tears for the $4.3 billion blown on Voisey's Bay, and no write down of this clearly overvalued asset. And no tears for the declining share price, dminished dividends, or two consecutive quarterly losses. Two - and counting.
No, this was the learn nothing, admit nothing, regret nothing, circle-the-wagons, bunker mentality, I'm-all-right-Jack Inco annual meeting.
And you know what? It worked. Jerry Rodgers and the INCO spin-meisters deserve to be congratulated. Nobody laid a glove on INCO CEO Mike Sopko. Not even close.
And when I say bunker mentality, I'm not kidding. Docile shareholders were herded like sheep ripe for a fleecing into the John W. H. Bassett Auditorium, deep in the bowels of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
The walls of this dismal place were chocolate brown, the same colour as the substance that was mostly being slung around from the dais this past Wednesday, which was also, coincidentally and ironically, Earth Day. (When a passing reference was made to this fact by one environmentally-minded questioner, an audible groan passed through the well-heeled assemblage.)
Oh, the Rock was well represented, and our contingent - Steelworkers Area Supervisor Wayne Fraser, Local 6500 President Gary "Red" Patterson, Local 6600 President Denis Dellaire, and Nickel Centre Mayor (and Local 6500 member) John Fera struggled manfully to communicate some of the anger and the desperation recent events at Inco have engendered here On the Rock.
They spoke well, and from the heart, and Mike Sopko welcomed them warmly, with all the meaning and evident sincerity of rainwater falling on greasy glass.
Especially ominous, I thought was his greeting to Patterson: "Gary's one of the most trustworthy Presidents we've had up there," Sopko confided reassuringly to the hundreds of gray-haired suits.
And folks, after Wednesday's meeting, it's clear to me that when Mike Sopko welcomes you like that it's time to start locking up the cutlery and marking the rye.
No, somehow, all our plaints fell wide of the mark. I watched the pliant, well tailored masses as our workers' tribunes spoke. They were absolutely stoical, unmoved that our children have no jobs, that people with 26 or 28 years' loyal service to "their" company now find themselves on the street, or that the highly prized industrial peace between Inco and Local 6500 has now been ruptured.
I tried to see us through their eyes. We seemed tiresome, down-at-heel, country bumpkins from the North, and when Sopko and his minions repeated, for the umpteenth time, that the layoffs were "a last resort" and that they knew best how to safeguard the "shareholders interests," like the Big Lie, it began somehow to all make sense.
The one real moment in the whole meeting was when Ben Michel, the representative of the Innu Nation, rose to give "a clear warning to the shareholders, especially the major shareholders."
Mike Sopko had considerably overstated the extent of progress in Impact and Benefit Agreement negotiations between the company and the Innu, Michel cautioned. "A lot has to happen before the Innu feel comfortable. If the Innu are not happy, rest assured you're going to lose money. You're going to lose if you can't get your CEO to deal with the Innu in an honourable way."
You could have heard a pin drop and there was suddenly an intensity in the room, because the shareholders understood that Michel and his 1,500 people in the Northern Labrador bush exercise real power over the future of Voisey's Bay.
The Innu want no part of any partnerhsip with the Mike Sopkos of this world, and after watching Sopko's performance last week - by turns unctuous, pettish, and petulant - I, for one, don't blame them. Several time during the post-meeting news conference Inco President Scott Hand was forced to intervene to soften some of his CEO's more insensitive remarks.
It is hard to imagine two groups in our entire species more at odds in their values, experience, cultures, and priorities than the managment team of the International Nickel Company and the people of the Innu Nation.
I'll predict flatly right here and now that the Innu will never, ever consent to a collaboration on their land with a corporation whose leaders so transparently betray insincerity, false flattery, and a boundless capacity for self- and public delusion, as Inco so brazenly displayed on Wednesday.
And in a contest on the ground in Northern Labrador who would you bet on? Johnny-Come-Lately Inco, or the Innu, who have been there for thousands of years?
Eventually, though it may take some years yet, it will sink in to these same shareholders, whose interests and understanding of the world are at once so narrow and so primitive, that they need the Innu far more than the Innu need them.
Oh yes, the No Tears Annual Meeting was a great success for the spin-meisters, who manged to dodge the tough questions and defer the still tougher answers that might, just maybe, have prepared their company to survive in the new millenia.
But for the rest of us, who love this industry and this community, nothing good, nothing good at all, will come from this meeting. And for us there will be more tears. Lots and lots of tears.
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