Impressions of PDAC 2022

Line Ups, Cut Outs & Simulcasts

In this brave new COVID world, the threat of infectious diseases is everywhere. So, when Father’s Day weekend came around just post-PDAC I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. I was sleeping in a partly finished bedroom, smelling slightly of ammonia, my face and hands covered with white spots. In a moment of rashness I’d told my wife -the mother of my 2 wonderful boys- I’d do anything for her so she sent me to Home Depot to buy a gallon of Pearl White Matt paint to freshen up the dreary basement bedrooms. A father’s work is never done.

PDAC is over for another year and the rigours of yet another 5 day trip to Toronto are finally behind me. It was good(ish) to get back in person to the concrete wasteland of Front Street: My colleagues and I skipped the on-line version in March 2021. Zoom fatigue was really beginning to bite so the thought of “standing” in a virtual booth for hours (which in reality meant sitting in my home office in boxers and a wrinkly shirt) waiting for e-Investors to google their way down Aisle 6 didn’t appeal.

Line Ups and More Damn Line Ups

In the week leading up to this year’s show, the Canadian press was replete with stories about the chaos at Lester Pearson airport in Toronto. Massive lines ups, lost luggage, absentee staff – CBC’s website would have us believe civilization was falling apart starting with Gate A36. Pierre Pollywotsit, the erstwhile conservative (the small c is deliberate) Prime Minister of Canada, even filmed himself striding purposefully -nay, manfully- through Lester Pearson pronouncing loudly and totally apolitically that it was the worst airport in the world. To which I can only say he’s never been to Karachi, Tehran, Newark, Leeds / Bradford, large chunks of Frankfurt airport, Manchester, Kabul and any one of a couple of hundred others. The man should get out more. Personally, I had no issues on arrival until that is we got to the baggage carousel and the de rigueur 50-minute wait for bags kicked in.

You Had 2 Years To Organize This.

Unfortunately, all the bad PR surrounding the airport shit-show was just a half-hearted warm up act for the anarchic gong-show in the PDAC registration area. I mean, they only had 2 years to nut through the conference logistics for this year’s show, right? Anyway, the organizing committee -ever eager to learn a dastardly new trick or two- took on board the recent airport fuck ups, adapted them for the convention centre, and managed to make the PDAC check-in experience significantly worse for their 17,000 delegates. Well done to all involved.

Most people rocked up Monday morning at the peak 9am time slot, QR codes downloaded, and made a bee line for the escalators down to registration, which were quickly at capacity. When I tried to push through the throng, a bunch of harried looking PDAC security folk were blocking the way, backed by a handful of beefy RCMP types with guns, mace and tasers in case the dischuffed miners decided to go all January 6 on them.

Nobody could get down. And to compound our misery, the convention centre had turned the aircon up to “steam heat”. So, there we stood. Hundreds of mining people sweating into wool suits, a hint of damp sheep smell in the air, waiting for our sadistic captors to let us down the stairs.

The Horror, The Horror.

When we did finally get to the registration area, fresh horrors were waiting. Line ups, long bloody line ups, wound down every corridor on the registration level, circling meeting rooms, winding round potted plants and eventually looping hundreds of meters back to where they started.

At one point, someone said we faced close to a 2 hour wait to get our badges. Screw that, thought I. So I stood nonchalantly with my back to the folk at the front of the main queue, staring off into the distance, picking my nose and idly scratching my bum until a gap appeared over my sweaty right shoulder. After a quick check to make sure the folk in the line up a) weren’t paying attention, and b) were speaking fluent Canadian English, I sidled into the gap knowing full well that nice, polite Canadians would never be rude enough to complain. It worked. I was in at the front of the line.

It Was A Small One

The line up belied the fact that this year’s show was the smallest in ages; only 17,000 or so people attended. Which perhaps explains why the food was even more overpriced than usual – to keep the revenue at the same level as 2020 when attendance was 23,000. I mistakenly bought a poke salad bowl and a side of seaweed salad on Tuesday -about the only options available that didn’t involve fries, cheese or bread- and ended up 28 bucks lighter than when I entered the food hall.

My colleague and I opted not to fork out thousands of dollars for a booth in the investors’ exchange. The concept of moping around, slumped on bar chairs waiting for that rarest of all breeds – an optimistic investor- to stop by, didn’t appeal this year. Instead, we chose to mope around the hall, trudging the aisles looking for victims. (I figure I probably walked 10-12km a day on average for the 3 days so I got my 10,000 daily steps.)

So How Was The Mood Ralph?

Glad you asked. The mood was reasonable given the recent rivers of blood on Bay Street, and there were lots of meetings going on although it may have been people simply taking turns to commiserate each other over the market carnage. Next year, PDAC should consider bringing in counsellors and green leather chaise lounges, one for each aisle, so we can all have good cry to a sympathetic listener when we’re feeling overwhelmed by the intermittent shitness known as a mining career.

Now I’m a simple chap. Nobody’s ever accused me of being perceptive let alone averagely intelligent, so my Grade 8 take is that my industry colleagues believe that demand for “green” metals is going to rise, and -coupled with the dreadful situation in Ukraine- metal prices can really only go one way in the medium term, which hopefully is up. Hence, the increasing number of companies using words like Eco or Energy in their names to show how focused they are on greenifying the world through mining. Sadly, the stock market disagrees with my naive rose-tinted opinion because most resource companies remain shackled to a leaky drainpipe way down in the dark, spooky basement of equity hell. Ho hum.

Where things were positively positive was the abundant hospitality suites and social events. Some of them were even outside and people were enjoying the warm June weather in Toronto. Yes, I did just write that people were enjoying the weather at PDAC. Walking back to my AirBnB late in the evening was for once a pleasure and not an exercise in Arctic survival.

Rocks and Widgets

There was no shortage of drill companies and widget sellers eager to equip miners and explorationists with everything from drones to hammers (somethings never change – we still need to break the big rocks into smaller rocks.) One of my usual stops in the Trade Show, Russian Rock and Gem who sell crystal samples, was absent. Can’t think why that might be.

My other crystal dealer is Grenville Minerals. I always head to their booth first to make sure I get the best selection of rocks to chose from. Collecting rocks is an expensive hobby -my PDAC rock buying budget is usually $1k- plus they don’t really do very much once you’ve bought them. They recline seductively on shelves, and wink at me from the desk but that’s about it. Occasionally when I’m drunk they wobble a bit. but I might be wrong. But I’m pleased to say my collection pays for itself as my best pieces are rented to a mining company office in downtown Vancouver. The yearly rent is nominal but just enough for me to be able to treat myself every year to a couple of decent samples at the PDAC. I digress.

The Hubristic Cult

The 2022 PDAC Hubristic Cult Award goes to a group of companies (to remain nameless) that decided to put 6ft high cardboard cut outs of its people along the back of their booth, and then planted the flesh and blood versions of the same people on bar chairs in front of it. And they also had a cut out pet dog which I think was supposed to be cute or funny, or maybe both, which it wasn’t. All in all, it was a slightly discomfiting sight that posed some very real sensory problems for those of us with bad eyes and hangovers. It frightened the willies out of me, and I can’t imagine who in their right mind would want to sit and listen to a presentation with a dozen cardboardy doppelgangers staring at them. And why do they need so many people -real or pretend- at the mostly empty booth? It must have cost a small fortune in airfares and hotel rooms.

The Global Criminal Elite

I missed the annual anti-mining protest on Front Street. Wisely, the eco-warriors have finally realised that consistency in messaging is crucial to defeating the nasty resource sector. (I’ll take Effective Smearing & Reputational Damage for $400 please!) Hence, their chosen line of attack – which is to brand all of us in the business as a Global Criminal Elite- has become pleasantly familiar over the last few years, like a high school nickname that sticks with you into adulthood. I’m guessing they were severely disappointed when PDAC moved on-line in 2021, snuffing out the chance for their annual shouty parade through the lobby of the Royal York. Anyway, we in the industry are (still) the planet-soiling progeny of a nasty one night back-alley threesome involving Dr Strangelove, Vladimir Putin and Eva Braun. My wife won’t be happy when she hears that. More painting awaits.

And The Highlight Is…

The conference highlight for me was a lunch I attended. The presentation was an hour of macro economic metrics enthusiastically delivered in Spanish over the chink chink chink of cutlery on plates. My ability in the language is best described as “Menu Spanish” so I took advantage of the simultaneous translation service on offer. A harried looking translator chappy was locked in a plastic booth at the back of the hall speaking earnestly into a microphone. I was given a radio unit with headphones and flipped to the chosen channel 2, to be greeted by a gruff male voice that sounded like its owner smoked 40 a day for breakfast washed down with a pint of hot battery acid. He was trying hard to sound interested, reciting the speaker’s economic statistics in time with the on-screen PowerPoint show, and parroting his rosey economic predictions in English.

I admit it must be hard to maintain focus with that kind of data overload and the dozens of economic terms that go with it, so eventually, like the rest of us in the hall, he started to flag. The odd mistake began to creep into his translation, which he had to correct on the fly.

At one point, the speaker pivoted to describing improvements that the government hoped to make in the country’s commercial legal code. In Spanish, he said something like “And we’ll be making improvements to our laws.”

What the illiterati heard over the English simulcast was “And we’ll be improving our lies. *pause* *gulp.* Er.. NO! NO! Laws, yes our laws, not our lies.“

Half a dozen people with headsets started laughing as one, drawing horrified stares from the Spanish speakers at nearby tables who couldn’t work out why the legal code should induce such hilarity. There was a frenzy of shushing with a few extra muffled snorts from the English speakers for good measure and then it was back to macro economic rosiness.

That’s All Folks

And those are my thoughts on this year’s PDAC. Not very perceptive, I admit, but hopefully they add a bit of colour to the event. If you’ve come here looking for commentary on companies or projects you’ve come to the wrong place. Unfortunately, for next year the PDAC has decided to revert to March again which means 1) Toronto will be nut-shrinkingly cold, and 2) we only have 9 months to wait before we get to do it all again. That’s good right?

And remember…

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