Mexican Beer Edition
Isn’t Toronto lovely this time of year? Parks, the lake, pretty girls in outdoor cafes…the early spring sun breaking through. A sense of rebirth lurking just around the corner. Just lovely. And total horseshit, as anyone unlucky enough to be in downtown TO last Friday can testify. True, it was warmish yesterday and raining; a fairly typical Vancouver type day, a tad better than the weekend. But if you ask me, Toronto is still a frigid fucking concrete wasteland populated by thinsulate-clad half frozen people running for the PATH tunnels. And I bloody hate it. Give me Skegness. Give me Milton Keynes. Fuck give me Red Deer; anywhere but downtown TO in the cold.
Camped in my booth at the PDAC investors’ exchange (maybe the singular investor’s exchange is better grammatically), pondering the lack of traffic on the floor on Sunday, it was obvious that our beleaguered resource sector is caught in the perfect shit storm. Whatever way you turn it’s hey ho down the turd slide we go. DJIA was tanking so gold’s up. Oops, no it’s not, now it’s down. And there goes silver along with zinc, copper and everything else China needs to make decent anti-viral air filters. If their factories were open, that is.
And with or without viral intervention, you had to know that the markets would head for the hills the moment the enormous orange cockwomble in DC started whispering sweet nothings to himself about how well everyone’s pension plans were doing. Strangely, my RRSP portfolio is also down. It’s suffered the quickest financial drop I’ve seen since the Queen cut Prince Ginger Nuts & Meghan Merkin off from the royal purse strings.
And so, to the PDAC convention.
Is It Busy?
Hmm… not really compared to previous years, and opinion is mixed on the advisability of attending. Some naysayers are convinced that simply turning up will cause a massive Corona virus outbreak in downtown TO leading to a lingering, painful death rattle from the Canadian exploration industry.
To avoid any last vestiges of physical contact with their fellow repressed miners, this year’s PDAC handshake is the elbow or fist bump. Cue lots of hilarity from the stuffy suits in the investors’ exchange who now think they look way more street cool.
Friends of mine cancelled their trips from Vancouver to TO, erring on the side of caution. Presumably they have no such qualms about using the crowded public transit system in Vancouver where they’re far more likely to come into contact with someone who’s recently been in one of the infection hot zones of China and Iran.
We’re All Really Old
If the old truism about age imparting wisdom is true, why the fuck isn’t our industry better and smarter? Looking at the delegate demographics, the ubiquitous grey-white hair, and the glaring lack of millennials walking the floor, one of the biggest issues our business faces is only getting worse. We’re too old.
It’s Not Lube
The PDAC kindly lined up a sponsor to provide hand sanitizer to every booth in the investors’ exchange. It comes in a handy low-carbon footprint plastic bottle and is 70% ethanol, so if you don’t want to sanitize you can drink the stuff (assuming the gelling agent is digestible). I’ve seen lots of people using it which means we now have a mining industry with cleaner, softer hands.
The Shit Marketing Award goes to…
Globex, who have one of the other heart-warming constants at the PDAC; the shaking rubber guy. Globex long ago convinced themselves that a life-sized, senile male rubber sex doll is a good way to promote the company. Depressingly, it actually blends in with the aging PDAC crowd and I’ve seen a handful of people talking to it hoping for a corporate update. I’d like to suggest that they finally put the poor bastard out to pasture -get rid of the fucking thing- but truth be told it makes the rest of us look better.
Some Things Never Change
Fear of infection didn’t stop the annual anti-mining protest, a regular feature at PDAC. On Sunday, a few hundred vocal demonstrators from the Mining Injustice Solidarity Network showed up with enormous banners and blocked off Front Street. They then proceeded to shout about fracking of all things. The banners included one that renamed the PDAC “The Super Criminals Convention” which is catchy although perhaps not entirely accurate.
My personal experience of the protests got substantially weirder when my colleague Mike and I were accosted by a very shouty guy on a bicycle. Around 2pm on Sunday I found myself outside on Front Street engaged in a very measured conversation with a polite, smiling demonstrator. He was taking us to task about water pollution issues and tailings dams failures. Fair enough – our industry has had a less than stellar record in the last couple of decades with some high-profile dam failure disasters. It’s a logical target to aim for and we deserve the criticism.
It’s All My Fault
But while we chatted, a second protestor appeared on a bike. He had a bright red face -the colour of apoplectic rage- and a good head of steam up. He’d clearly been stewing on something for a while. It took him 30 seconds to escalate the ongoing discussion into a one-sided screaming match. Our original protestor was shocked, staring at the guy in horror as the spittle flew, telling him to calm down and stop being so aggressive. The shouty man played his trump card. He began to loudly berate Mike and I.
“What the fuck are you going to do about autism in children caused by cell phones” he yelled.
True tin foil hat stuff but I have to admit shouty guy got me there. I had no come backs on the subject of cell phone induced autism other than a barely stifled bemused chuckle which only enraged him more.
We kept walking, he kept screaming. Eventually we walked by a group of cops on the sidewalk who started to show some interest in him, and he disappeared on his bike.
How’s the hotel this year?
Glad you asked. My colleagues and I opted for an Airbnb this year. We were simply unwilling to pay the gouging conference discount rate of $450 a night for a downtown hotel. So, we’ve rented a cozy 42nd floor, 3-bedroom Airbnb on Front Street just across from the CN Tower. It was an easy decision; pay $900 a night for 2 hotel rooms for three of us, or $350 for an apartment for all of us. Stocked up with a few pots of yoghurt and some hi-test coffee and we have everything we need. It’s hard to see how the downtown hotels can keep charging their elevated rates for PDAC with the growth of Airbnb. Every other person I’ve spoken to seems to be in an Airbnb suite.
Tell Us A Success Story…
On the rare subject of exploration industry success stories, I’m waiting to chat to the guys at Isoenergy -particularly Craig Parry- who have a booth for the last 2 days only. World-class drill results stock up(-ish) in the face of massive market headwinds, social media coverage… fuck. It’s the full Pornhub geosex niche package.
Granted the company sounds like it’s named after a post-coital pick up drink and it IS uranium (what CAN you do with that stuff? Door stops? Paper weights.. nope.. er…. hmmm…) but still, it’s a rare junior success story and lord knows we need more of them. Well done to Craig and the team. The North American girls must love it when he starts whispering to them in his charmingly parochial antipodean accent about how fast he got the drill in.
And The Hangovers?
My last day of Funless February gave way to March and I had my first glass of red wine on Sunday night. After a month off the piss, I was healthier, richer and generally in a better mood so time to muck it all up again by drinking from the PDAC hospitality fountain. But I’ve been a good boy and have avoided getting polluted. I even had 2 pints of soda to start the evening last night, leading to lingering horrified looks from my colleagues and concerned enquiries about my health.
I did find it slightly disquieting to tell the corporate story without the requisite PDAC hangover. I now know when I’m spouting complete shite to investors and I can’t rely on the smell of turpentine wafting from my sweaty torso to keep them out of the booth. Fuck.