The Insatiable Maw

by Mick Lowe

  Harry Wardell went on to win five successive elections in Sudbury. . .

  15

  “$2.95 & Bus Fare”

  . . .Harry Wardell gauged the mood of the crowd, the sea of expectant, upturned faces that awaited his words as he strode to the podium on the stage of the main auditorium of the Sudbury Steelworkers’ Hall.

  Fully nine years had passed since his victory, virtually unheard of for a freshman backbencher, over both Inco and the ruling Tories, in the fight for cleaner air in the province. The day he had quietly but unobtrusively stood in his place to vote “Aye!” for the Torys’ Clean Air Act, grinning broadly at an ashen-faced Reginald McSorley-Winston, had been one of the happiest of his life.

  But now another crisis—which had precipitated this monstrous Sudbury rally—loomed. Just days before Inco had shocked the world with its announcement that, healthy profits in 1975 and ’76 notwithstanding, it would lay off thousands of its Sudbury workers in February 1978. Or rather new Steelworker Local 6500 President Jordan Nelson had made the announcement, upstaging Inco’s own carefully planned news release. The move was typical of Nelson, a youthful, brash new breed of union leader—the first of the “young guys” to rise to power in the big Steelworkers Sudbury Local. Nelson’s move to pre-empt Inco’s press conference with one of his own hours earlier had proved highly controversial at the Union Hall, where he was roundly condemned “on the third floor,” where the International Union maintained offices for its Staff Representatives, generally older union veterans who had moved up through the elected Local Union ranks into permanent full-time positions on the union payroll. “A union leader doesn’t deliver the company’s bad news, the company does,” they had advised Nelson in no uncertain terms. But Nelson persisted, deftly stealing the march on the company. His audacity did not pass unnoticed, or unadmired, by the press corps, including Foley Gilpin, that crammed the Union Hall that memorable Friday morning. Commingling with the reporters, photographers and cameramen were a clutch of union officials, including Jake McCool, newly-elected Vice President of Local 6500, whose own meteoric rise up the hierarchy of the big Local rivalled Nelson’s own.

  And now both men were on the floor of the Steel Hall, watching Wardell’s loping advance toward the podium. It had been an unforgettable seven days in Sudbury since Nelson’s presser. His gloomy prognostication had indeed come to pass, with sensational—and immediate—fallout. Nothing like it had ever happened before in Canada—a financially healthy, profitable company suddenly deciding to idle a good chunk of its workforce! All during the week the Nickel City was a magnet to television news crews from all the major networks. Pundits and politicos scrambled to make sense of it all, and the “Inco layoffs story” led the CBC’s nightly television newscast three nights running. Even Foley Gilpin had been asked to venture his opinion. As a long-time Sudburian, he found it impossible not to reflect the profound sense of doom that pervaded his hometown that early autumn. A company that had, for generations, offered the promise of well-paid, steady employment for a lifetime was suddenly, for no apparent reason, tearing up that agreement with its home community, with its country. Where would it all end? It seemed a fine madness, aberrant behaviour with no bottom. The economic impact, Gilpin had predicted darkly in his gloomy op-ed, would soon be felt on the city’s downtown streets, where abandoned storefronts would begin to dot the streets “like a rubbie’s gap-toothed grin.”

  A numbed sense of loss soon turned to downright anger. The “Nickel Capital of the World” had long since become accustomed to the vagaries of the boom-and-bust cycle of world metal markets, but this, this was different. The Americans’ war in Vietnam, which had run up nickel prices for the previous decade or more had ended, it was true, but commodity prices had remained buoyant, and, so, too, had company profits. Howls of outrage filled the mouths of politicians and union leaders. A small airplane buzzed in circles over downtown Sudbury, trailing a banner that read NATIONALIZE INCO.

  The whole matter was coming to a climax now, as a thousand angry nickel workers shifted impatiently in their seats at the Steel Hall, pissed off and ugly, but eager to hear what their firebrand political representative Harry Wardell was about to say.

  As he approached the podium on the stage high above the restless throng, Harry Wardell knew that he was treading with caution along two parallel political fault lines. There was, first of all, the question of nationalization. An increasingly popular notion since the announcement of the layoffs, the position of a government takeover was tempered by the memory of recent events in Chile, where a democratically-elected but leftist President, Salvador Allende, had expropriated the American-owned copper mines in his country. The move triggered a wave of bloody, anti-government violence and Allende perished in a hail of bullets inside his own Presidential Palace. The resulting coup ushered in a decade of brutal fascistic repression led by the Chilean military. Many observers believed the coup had been encouraged and secretly funded by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a claim that was sombrely and flatly denied by no less a personage than Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

  Still, the Chilean events stood as an object lesson to any political leaders who dared tamper with American-owned interests in their own countries. Certainly, the lesson was not lost on Ontario’s political leaders who, at least in Harry’s estimation, were so buddy-buddy and beholden to International Nickel as to make declarations calling for nationalization just so much empty rhetoric which might play well with this crowd but would, in fact, accomplish very little.

  Even still, the leader of Harry’s own party, a man long noted for his rhetorical brilliance, had adopted a cautious position when he’d spoken earlier, stopping just short of calling for nationalization outright, though he’d done so with typical hortatory flourish. “When a corporation shoots an arrow through the heart of a community,” he had declared grandly, “then we must take away its corporate bow!” His grandiloquence had served only to lower the room temperature from the boiling point to tepid, and was greeted by polite applause.

  The second fault line, Harry recognized, was the issue of compensation. How much should Inco’s Wall Street owners be paid in the highly unlikely event that McSorley-Winston and his cronies actually ever moved against Inco? The hard-line position here was that Inco shareholders had already been amply compensated by the billions of dollars plundered from the rich Sudbury mines over the previous century. On the other hand, it was true that American investors had been willing to risk millions to open the Sudbury mining camp at a time when no Canadian investors were willing or able to follow suit. . .

  How would he come down on the question of first, nationalization, and then of compensation?

  It is possible that even Harry himself does not know the answer as he steps to the podium this Sunday afternoon with the TV cameras from all the big national news networks rolling, their glass eyes pointing at him from atop their tripods way at the back of the big room as Harry bends his long, lean frame over the podium, pausing to adjust the microphone just so, so that it will deliver his rich baritone perfectly to the expectant throng down below that stretches back to the far corners of the big room, so far that exact details are lost in a haze of commingled cigarette smoke and angry popular blue funk.

  As Harry leans in above the crowd, his forearms resting atop the angled podium, a dark suit-clad figure newly arrived from the Holy Mount, he begins to speak, and his words take flight, soaring above the thousand rough-hewn faces, hungry for truth, for emotion, for justice oh Jesus just once in this life of drill, blast, of drill again, please Jesus just this once give us justice!

  And he feels it, Harry feels this terrible, flaming thirst for justice and is swept up in it, and is borne aloft, “and so I say ‘Hell yes, let’s take over these goddamned bastards!’” Harry pauses, and smiles approvingly at the roar of approbation that rises from a thousand parched and fevered throats. But the roar is sustained and it breaks in on itself like some terrible, ineluctable wave. At last Harr
y signals for silence so he can continue. “And when people ask me ‘Should we compensate the Company?’ My answer is ‘Yes, we should compensate the Company, and pay them every penny we owe them! And you know how much that is, don’cha?” Harry pauses here for a beat, hunched still more over the podium, leaning in even further, and an unaccustomed silence falls over the crowd waiting, expectant, for Harry’s answer. “Two ninety five and bus fare!” Harry stretches out one long arm, his index finger twitching, pointing south, toward Toronto, toward the way out of town.

  Another split second of silence elapses as Harry’s words and gesture sinks in, but once it has a deafening thunderclap of rapture and joy erupts from the crowd and they are on their feet now, stamping the wooden floor with their work boots, and the tumult is fine and they can see it now, a future without white hats hovering, telling them needlessly what to do next and the noise threatens to lift the roof of the Steelworkers’ Hall from its moorings, a roaring that rivals even the rolling concussive booming of the blasts underground, and it is Sunday and they will live forever and the words of their roaring will roll out from Frood Road to the far corners of the camp, all the way out to crest in Levack and then roll back again, and there is no hint, no intimation of the terrible time of testing that lies dead ahead.

  . . . Introducing

  Part Three of “The Nickel Range Trilogy”; an exclusive preview of the final, concluding novel in the series in Mick Lowe’s sweeping chronicle of life in the “Nickel Capital of the World,” and of the epic struggle for control of the fabulous riches buried deep beneath the city’s streets, Year of the Long Strike:

  Year of the Long Strike

  “Revolution is the workers’ festival.”

  V.I. Lenin

  Like all good movies, this one begins with a song.

  It was everywhere that fall and late summer of 1978, rattling out of the tinny speakers of cheap transistor radios in truck-stop kitchens, booming out of two-ton Wurlitzer jukebox woofers in every honkytonk bar north of the French, always sung with a Nashville twang coarse and unadorned as a rasp file: Take this job and shove it! I ain’t workin’ here no more!

  It was seen by all of them as their song, telling the story of their lives, their theme song. And they would, in their thousands, have flipped the company the bird as they strode through the plant gates that end-of-shift, except both hands were full, as they lugged their belongings and dirty laundry from cleaned out lockers.

  A total of more than eleven thousand hardrock miners and nickel smelter and refinery workers left the plants with swagger that afternoon: Take this job and shove it! They were pulling the pin, stickin’ it to the Man. Greeting their departing comrades brimming with a bravado their wives might not have shared, thinking of their children with no Christmas, and cash running low over the long winter months ahead: “Out ‘til the grass is green, brother!”

  “Fuckin’ A! Out ‘til the grass is green!”

  They were like lemmings, piling off a high cliff, about to plunge to their own mass graves, all the papers and politicians said so, even the political leaders of their own, social democratic party, the party of the workers. Hell, even some of their own union leaders said it: “Do Not Strike: Union Leader” was the headline blazoned page one above the fold in the province’s largest circulation daily newspaper.

  And they all knew it was true: they were taking on a powerful and enormously rich opponent, one they had strengthened by letting their own stupidity and cupidity crowd out common sense by creating a huge stockpile—enough to last the company a year without an ounce of additional production—in their eagerness to make money through overtime work and the bonus system.

  So maybe they were like men waiting for the trap door to swing. Fuck it! They were young, many of them, and they were cocky. Take this job and shove it! I ain’t workin’ here no more!

  Out ‘til the grass is green, brother!

  Out ‘til the grass is green!

  Afterword and Acknowledgements

  I must, first of all, give due credit for the title of this book to a legendary former Sudburian who is not, alas, alive to read these words. Some forty years have now passed since I first read the phrase “feeding the insatiable maw of the Copper Cliff smelter” as being the raison d’etre for Sudbury’s mines and its miners--if not for the whole city itself—in an op-ed column penned by the late Elmer Sopha. The phrase jumped out at me at the time, and it has stayed with me ever since.

  Lawyer, legislator, genius orator, journalist manqué (he once confided to me that, if he had it to do all over again he thought he’d become a reporter) Elmer was sui generis, a true Sudbury original, but also, it must be said, a deeply flawed and troubled—even tragic—public figure who towered over the rest of us. His ineffable sadness, which led him to so much self-destructive behaviour, licked him in the end, and I am happy to revive his memory here, however briefly.

  And then there is an entire supporting cast of living Sudburians who have appeared to share their memories of the epic true-life battle upon which this story was based. Elie Martel, Norris Valiquette, and David Patterson were invaluable in this regard, as was the late Homer Seguin, whose constant re-telling of this story over the decades kept its memory alive. I received invaluable technical advice and assistance about the smelter and its myriad processes from Norris and from Jamie West. Any factual or technical errors in the text are my own.

  To a considerable degree The Maw owes its very existence to the financial success of its predecessor, Volume One of The Nickel Range Trilogy, The Raids, for which I must once again thank the usual sus-pects: Robin Philpot of Baraka Books in Montreal, my long-time agent, Janine Cheeseman, of Aurora Artists in Toronto, and the members of my crack mini-marketing team: Ian MacDonald, Julia Lowe and Melanie Lowe. You kids are all right.

  And yes, the quotations in the final chapter of this novel are excerpted, verbatim, from the actual document that so incriminated the then-governing party of Ontario in its dealings with Inco that the last, best face-saving measure was to pass the sweeping clean-air legislation that forced the clean-up of the Copper Cliff smelter, a technically-challenging, multi-billion-dollar task that continues even today, in 2014.

  It was not the first, not the last, time in the history of the Canadian nickel industry that powerful interests would do the right thing for the wrong reason, as the reader will soon see . . .

  Publisher’s Note –

  Follow-up to The Raids

  We launched The Raids, volume 1 of The Nickel Range Trilogy, before a crowd of some sixty friends and supporters at the Steelworkers’ Hall in Sudbury on May 25, 2014. At the same time Oryst Sawchuk, who illustrated both The Raids and The Insatiable Maw, inaugurated the Mining Art Exhibition of his work at Gallery 6500 in the Steelworkers’ Hall. (Mick Lowe was elected founding chairman of the Gallery 6500 board.) Borrowing from Pablo Neruda, Oryst described the exhibition as a tribute “to those who have penetrated the bowels of the Earth” and an honour to the memories of miners killed on the job.

  Quite coincidentally, Jack Pauzé, an eighty-nine-year-old former constable, attended the launch and brought original 1960s clippings from The Sudbury Daily Star following the real siege of the Mine Mill Hall in August 1961 and another with a huge ad that appeared in January 1962.

  For the record, we are pleased to reproduce some parts of the clippings that Jack Pauzé kept so carefully all these years. They illustrate the veracity of the story told in The Raids and the international character of the events.

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BARAKA BOOKS

  FICTION

  The Raids, The Nickel Range Trilogy, Volume 1

  Mick Lowe

  Principals and Other Schoolyard Bullies

  Short Stories by Nick Fonda

  I Hate Hockey

  François Barcelo

  The Adventures of Radisson, 1 & 2

  Hell Never Burns

  Back to the New World

  Martin Fournier

  NONFICTION
<
br />   Exhilarating Prose

  Cognitions (…) & Ruminations on the Process of Writing

  Barry Healey & Cordelia Strube

  Rebel Priest in the Time of Tyrants

  Mission to Haiti, Ecuador and Chile

  Claude Lacaille

  The Complete Muhammad Ali

  Ishmael Reed

  Slouching Towards Sirte

  NATO’s War on Libya and Africa

  Maximilian C. Forte

  Storming the Old Boys’ Citadel

  Two Pioneer Women Architects in Nineteenth Century North America

  Carla Blank and Tania Martin

  The Question of Separatism

  Quebec and the Struggle over Sovereignty

  Jane Jacobs

  Journey to the Heart of the First Peoples Collections

  Musée de la civilisation

  Marie-Paule Robitaille, Dir.

  www.barakabooks.com