Nick Tintor

How did you get your start in the mineral industry?

During my second year at the University of Toronto in 1977, one of my teammates on the Varsity Rowing team, Bobby Boraks, told me he got a summer job working in the Arctic in uranium exploration. I loved the outdoors and asked him excitedly how did he get that job? He replied, “I’m a geology student and that's what we do every summer”. I then merrily went down Bay Street to Western Mines at the time and told them just that and got hired days later. After an amazing summer in the barren lands west of Baker Lake, Nunavut, on the way home I had to confess to my party chief that I was in fact not a geology student, but that I loved it so much I was going to switch my studies. A South African, he replied, “No worries, Nick. I only hired you because you look big and strong and I needed someone to roll fuel barrels.” When the first day of school started that September, I marched down to the Mining Building on College Street and walked in to see Dr. Gittins, Chair of the Geology Department, and told him I wanted to change my course specialty to geology. Desperate for any undergrad to enter the geology program, he warmly encouraged me, and I switched my course load. And the rest is history.

What was the most fulfilling project you ever worked on, and why?

In the late 1990s, during a period of very low gold prices, our company drilled out, permitted and engineered a small open pit, heap leach gold mine called Lluvia de Oro, just outside of Magdalena de Kino in Sonora, Mexico. Magdalena de Kino was a poor, rural farming community with hard working families doing their best to provide for their children. When we started hiring people to work at the mine, I could see in their faces, the pride they took in their jobs and how the salaries changed their daily lives. Every man and woman wants to provide for their family so that their children can grow to have a better education and future. Our small gold mine did just that and helped families who in turn could better provide for their children. That's when I saw first hand, the good that mining and mineral investment can do when conducted responsibly and with compassion for local communities and all stakeholders.