Posted By Frank Armstrong
Sept. 17, 2007
Kingston Whig Standard
It was a doctor's orders that began George White's long career in the mining industry.
The founder, president and CEO of Oakville-based Frontenac Ventures was suffering some health problems in the early 1960s and his doctor suggested he needed some exercise and some fresh air and should start walking in the woods or something similar.
White was an industrious young man who had just taken a six-month prospector course and he was far too ambitious to settle for a simple walk in the woods.
Then the logistics manager for Hersheys in Smiths Falls, he grabbed a few friends from the plant's investment club and brought them to the mineral-rich Sharbot Lake area where they started prospecting on weekends for uranium, a fuel in high demand in the '60s.
"We started prospecting and that took us into the woods," said White, now 74, referring to his doctor's orders.
Together, White and his friends began staking out claims in Quebec and Ontario, including parts of the 64-square-kilometre site that is being blockaded by local Algonquins, who fear a uranium mine will be opened there.
Assisted by non-aboriginal local residents, members of the Ardoch Algonquin and Shabot Obaadjiwan First Nation have been barring access to the potential mine site, just north of Sharbot Lake, since June 29. They've said they're afraid of the environmental damage a uranium mine could cause.
A judge has ordered the protesters to leave and has authorized police to remove them, but no other action has been taken.
Frontenac Ventures is scheduled to go to court in Kingston on Thursday to sue the Algonquins for $77 million and to ask a judge to permanently remove the protesters.
For White, the situation is a nailbiting nightmare.
The uranium at the site, which is mostly Crown land, is low-grade, but the sheer amount of it in the ground could make it worth mining. The price of uranium has risen from just under US$10 per pound in 2002 to about $90 this week and is projected by some people to more than double next year.
White and his fellow investors stand to make a fortune if their explorations pan out, but they've been stopped in their tracks by the Algonquin blockade.
They have said through their lawyer that continued inaction could ruin them.
Frontenac Ventures entered into an agreement with Vancouver-based Sylvio to take part in a reverse takeover, which would bring in a much-needed $5-million infusion. White said the money could keep the company afloat for several years.
Frontenac Ventures lawyer Neal Smitheman has said in court that the deal won't go through if Frontenac Ventures can't restart drilling by the time the snow flies.
"We have some investors that have put money into it with a deadline," White said. "If we can't get in there, we can't spend their money."
Throughout the '60s, '70s and '80s, White and his investors drilled about 100 holes in the ground while prospecting for uranium in the Sharbot Lake area.
While initially financing the work themselves, they eventually brought in more investors and had 20 geologists working for them.
In the beginning, White and his friends spent a lot of time bushwhacking, battling bugs, harsh weather, heavy snows and temperatures as cold as minus 40 Celsius.
"Ski-Doos had just been invented, so it was snowshoeing in the winter and walking in the summer," he said.
The exploration ended in the 1980s, when the bottom fell out of the uranium market with nuclear disarmament and power-plant disasters in Chernobyl, Russia, and Three Mile Island in the U.S.
White remembers being in Germany pursuing investors when the price of uranium plummeted from $42 per pound to $8.
"For the next 30 years, there was no uranium exploration anywhere in the world," he said.
It was devastating after all the work that had been put into research and exploration in the Sharbot Lake area.
After all, it had taken more than 10 years just to determine that there might be some potential for a mine there.
While the uranium industry remained dormant, White invested in other mining ventures, including the Holmer gold mine in Timmins, which may be on the verge of production.
A few years ago, the price of uranium began to soar.
The world had rediscovered nuclear fuel in its quest for clean energy and many governments decided uranium was the answer.
According to the World Nuclear Association, as of January 2007, 28 nuclear reactors were under construction, another 64 were being planned and 158 were being proposed, mostly in Asian and Eastern Europe.
In 2004, White launched Oakville-based Frontenac Ventures.
He pulled together a group of seasoned mining investors and a board of directors was formed. Its members are respected members of their communities, including its chairman, the retired chairman and CEO of CIBC Wood Gundy Private Client Investments Inc.
White's son, Scott White, a lawyer who ran his own law firm for several years before becoming president of a successful commercial software company in Oakville, joined Frontenac Ventures as corporate secretary.
They put together a team of geologists and student geologists and began exploring and prospecting in the same area George White had explored in the 1960s near Sharbot Lake.
In 2007, they completed an airborne survey, a high-tech scan of the geography and geology below that essentially gave them an X-ray of the Earth.
"The next phase that we were getting into, when the program was halted by the invasion, was to start laying out priorities of where the [exploratory] drill sites should be in the future, what's going to be required and a lot of additional supplementary work," White said.
The protesting Algonquins have proclaimed Frontenac Ventures their enemy in this battle over land rights and environmental concerns, but White said he had no idea there would be any problem with prospecting on the land.
After all, Frontenac Ventures did the usual research at the land title office to ensure there were no disputes over the land in any files.
"If the aboriginals thought they had some title, you would have thought they would have had a caution on them," White said. "But there was no caution."
White said he was surprised when Doreen Davis, chief of the Shabot Obaadjiwan, joined forces with the Ardoch Algonquins to block access to the prospecting site on Highway 509.
"Chief Davis initially indicated to me they were businesspeople and talked about signing a memorandum of understanding," he said.
Davis had some concerns about some native burial grounds, but was keen to put aboriginal people and businesses on lists for employment at the site, he said.
"All this sounded reasonable, [so] I went to our board and informed them," White said. "We thought we were making some progress with them until the day of protest arrived [June 29]."
Davis could not be reached for comment yesterday.
Aboriginals aren't the only local residents who would benefit from a full-scale uranium mine operation and refinery, White said.
About 500 or 600 jobs would be created in the wider community, he said. Five to six spin-off jobs would come out of every mining job, while new businesses would spring up to service the new people, he said.
Municipal taxes could be lowered as the mine tossed more money into municipal government coffers and the mine would have its own hospital so people in the community would have to travel less often to Kingston or Ottawa for medical treatment, he said.
White accused the Algonquins of using environmental "scare" tactics to gain public support for their cause and said there's no "sound evidence" to support the allegation that a uranium mine or drilling holes looking for uranium is harmful to the environment.
Indeed, James Archibald, a Queen's University professor who heads the mining engineering department, told the Whig-Standard last month that low-grade uranium deposits, such as the ones being examined by Frontenac Ventures, are of such low concentration that they can be safely touched.
"At those grades, there is literally no hazard," he said in an interview with the Whig-Standard. "You would have to crush and grind the rock and ingest tonnes and tonnes of it to give yourself a hazard. It's like saying water is no problem, but if you ingest a tonne of it, you're dead."
The Algonquins have voiced fears that a uranium mine, or exploratory drilling, could damage the region's water table.
However, White said that an analysis of lake sediments collected in the townships of North and Central Frontenac in 1982 indicates there is already a large amount of uranium in the local watershed, which has arrived there naturally.
"The World Health Organization says two parts per million of uranium is a safe level," he said. "Some of the lake sediments [in North Frontenac] are at 68 parts per million."
Uranium can leak into lake beds as a result of rocks being crushed by glaciers, by waters flowing over rocks and till, or in lake sediments made of marble or limestone.
If Frontenac Ventures decides to set up a mine at the site north of Sharbot Lake, it would process the uranium on-site, White said.
In that case, 97 per cent of the uranium would be leached out of the mined material and only three per cent would remain, an "infinitesimal" amount, said White.
"It's a myth and a scare tactic," he said, referring to the allegation that uranium mines are dangerous.
The company has considered hiring security staff to help employees sneak in and continue their work on the site unfettered, but White said he's avoided exercising that option because he doesn't want to be the one to spark violence.
"They're looking for a confrontation and we don't want to provide it," he said.