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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: long-gone who wrote (81989)	2/13/2002 5:02:41 PM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116782

Midway through World War II (the last great fun war), the US and Canadian governments declared gold a non-essential material for war purposes. What this caused was a diversion of men and materials to other industries, declared essential. This made it hard to get such necessary items as pumps, piping, tungsten bits and the like. Whatever had a use in a boat or on a tank or aircraft got taken by the armament industry. A surprising amount of mine and mill materials fall into this category. Canada had a lot of enlistment from its mining towns too. In Kirkland Lake Ontario, a gold mining town of 15,000 people, in one year 128 men enlisted for service. Many mines dropped production was well. Wartime inflation took its toll as the gold price did not keep pace with the rising costs. In Kirkland, some mines' production dropped by 40%. I talked to quite a few mine managers who told me that one of the chief reasons they could not increase or maintain production was the shortage of trained men. Before the war many used to come from Cornwall and Wales, already trained as narrow vein miners. That manpower supply dried up completely during the war years, as they could not even be assured of getting them here safely, even if Britain could spare them, which was unlikely. Canada had 300,000 men drafted, and many were volunteers as well for the new merchant fleet if not armed service. At that time Canada had the 5th largest navy in the world, and a huge merchant fleet as well. 30,000 Canadian men went to their graves in the Atlantic aboard merchant vessels during WWII. The Sultana mine in Kenora was one such wartime casualty. It was operating under Lake of the Woods. They could not start new stopes to keep mining as the men and equipment to run them were not available. When they reached a diabase dyke under the lake the main vein was offset and they could not trace it with drilling as they would have had to wait for winter to drill from lake ice, even if they could have found a drill. In addition they could not afford to deepen the shaft to mine below where they had reached for similar reasons. Contract miners who worked in shafts were not around. In 1945 the Sultana closed, despite being a profitable 1/2 ounce per ton producer. After the war many mines suffered from high labour and material costs. The Canadian government enacted the Emergency Gold Mining Assistance Act which paid the mines a premium above the fixed US price for gold of 35 dollars. This was calculated according to the mining cost of each mine, and varied from 3 to 7 dollars an ounce over base gold price of 35 bucks. For many mines, even the one ounce per ton Leitch Mine in Beardmore Ontario, this government-paid figure was the sole profit of the mine. (Of course, they had the grandfathers of the Arthur Anderson accountants figuring costs so that they were high enough to get the premium paid.) Only a few mines in Canada could operate without this premium. One of the was the Campbell Red Lake Mine in Red Lake Ontario at .45 ounces per ton. EC<:-}