Mining Data and Canada’s Great Acceleration

Scroll this

This is the fourth post in a series about the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance for Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with Active History.

Each year in my “Canadian History Since Confederation” survey class, I take my students on a deep dive into something that has high potential to be boring: Statistics Canada tables on historical mineral and energy production. I usually put several data tables on a screen and ask the students to form as tight a semi-circle as possible. Faced with columns showing mineral production rates by pound, and the value of the ore by dollar, I ask the students what a historian might do with such seemingly impenetrable collections of numbers. The broader purpose of the activity is (spoiler alert!) to illustrate the vast increase in material production that accompanied the Great Acceleration—the unprecedented surge in industrial production that occurred in Canada beginning  in the 1890s.

After a fair bit of squinting, students inevitably offer their interpretations of the first batch data. Often the first thing they note is the dramatic change in copper between 1896 to 1914, roughly a sevenfold increase from just over 9,393,000 to 75,763,000 pounds. What might have caused this, I inevitably ask? “A big copper discovery,” is usually the first answer, not so far from the truth considering the commencement of copper production in Sudbury and elsewhere occurred withing this date range. “But,” I suggest, “nobody is going to invest money into big copper mines unless there is demand for it, so what big contextual changes in Canada during this period might be driving the production of so much copper?” Often a student will make the connection to the rapid development of electrical infrastructure during this period. “For sure,” I answer back, “think about what we talked about in other classes: urbanization, the rise of factory production, and rapid economic growth, all depended on electrical power, making copper wiring one of the hottest commodities of the day.”

A map of Canada showing a selection of major mining developments from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, identified by mineral type and nearest population centre.
Fig. 1: Map of Canada showing a selection of major mining developments from the late 19th to the mid-20th century.
Map by Charlie Conway under contract to the author.

I ask them to look again at the production tables and see if they can find other patterns. While answers vary from year to year, the students might notice that iron production more than doubled between 1896 and 1914, nickel output increased from zero to 45,000,000 pounds during this same period, and cobalt production rose from nothing to 702,000 pounds. Some students connect this massive increase in base metal production to the economic boom of this period, while others more specifically make the connection to the rapid expansion of steel and other metal alloys used to manufacture durable consumer goods and eventually armaments for the war that was soon to come.  

Taken as a whole, the mineral tables suggest little in the way of continuity in Canada’s mineral industry. Instead, the explosive increases in mineral production rates indicate an abrupt rupture with the past; a startling increase in the consumption of materials that is the hallmark of the Great Acceleration (the other being the increase in energy production in the form of coal, and later, oil).1

A large pile of waste rock at the abandoned Pine Point lead-zinc mine on Great Slave Lake, North-West Territories. The waste rock takes up the left half the photo, with the right half being the vast expanse of boreal forest. A thin sliver of blue sky is visible at the top of the photo.
Fig. 2: A waste rock pile meets the boreal forest at the abandoned Pine Point lead-zinc mine on Great Slave Lake, NWT, 2009.
Photo by the author.

Some may read the numbers as positive signs of progress and economic growth, but I suggest that students consider the toll of the Great Acceleration in mineral production on the natural environment. After all, most ore bodies contain only tiny percentages of valuable material. By the time a mining operation has blasted, crushed, chemically treated, and smelted the ore down to its most valuable components, tonne after tonne of waste rock and fine tailings sand has been left behind. This material often contains heavy metals, or generates acid, which pollutes water and soil in the immediate environment. When ore was roasted or smelted, a whole host of contaminants (arsenic trioxide, sulfur dioxide, lead, etc.) were released, polluting air, water, and soil in a huge radius around the mine site. Some of these mines became zombies upon closure, seemingly dead but still exerting malevolent influences on local environments that may require expensive (and often publicly funded) remediation projects or care and monitoring in perpetuity. Although the environmental record of Canadian mines has improved since the imposition of a stricter regulatory environment in the 1970s, the complex environmental challenges associated with the zombies are among the most significant consequences associated with Canada’s Great Acceleration, a point easily underscored with reference to the muti-billion dollar cleanup projects as places such as Yellowknife’s Giant Mine or the abandoned Cyprus-Anvil mine at Faro, Yukon.2 

View of abandoned Giant Mine in Yellowknife, with cart and "Remediation Project" sign visible in the foreground; large tower and several two-story buildings in the background.
Fig. 3: The abandoned Giant Mine in Yellowknife at the early stages of the Giant Mine Remediation Project, 2009.
Photo by the author.

Students are also generally unaware of the price the Great Acceleration has exacted on the workers exposed to the underground environment. Indeed, mine workers died by the thousands in Canada, with even greater numbers suffering debilitating injuries, in tandem with the great increased in the number of hard rock mines in the late nineteenth century. If the numbers of deaths pale in comparison to Canadian casualty rates on the battlefields of Europe, they are startling, nonetheless. In Alberta, 773 miners lost their lives between 1906 and 1930;3 2,548 died in Nova Scotia’s coal mines between 1838 and 1992; in Ontario, 2,640 perished in the province’s hard rock mines between 1892 and 1971.4 Invariably the highest mortality rates occurred during the boom years prior to World War 1, when largely unregulated working conditions prevailed in instant towns such as Sudbury, Cobalt, Timmins, and Kirkland Lake.

The causes of death varied, but underground mines featured no shortage of potentially fatal hazards. Falling rock, rock bursts, unexpected explosions (from misfired dynamite or from methane gas in coal mines), poisonous gases, and minor seismic events could all take the lives of workers. Miners also experience slower forms of death from lung diseases linked to harmful dust (silicosis, black lung disease, asbestosis, mesothelioma), or cancer linked to toxic exposures to arsenic, lead, uranium or radon. In Ontario, just one of these diseases—silicosis—took the lives of 1,303 miners between 1926 and 1972.5 The health and safety record of the mining industry improved dramatically after legislative interventions in the 1970s, but in the sudden growth in the industry beginning in the 1890s meant the exposure of ever-increasing numbers of workers to the health and safety risks inherent to extracting the minerals that fed the expanding material appetite of the Great Acceleration.

Photo of a roasting facility at Giant Mine, Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, with smokestack and numerous two-to-three story buildings. Highway in foreground.
Fig. 4: The roasting facility at Giant Mine just prior to demolition in 2013. Workers in the roaster were exposed to high levels of arsenic trioxide dust, a source of controversy throughout the operational life of the mine.
Photo by the author.

Back in class, the clock ticks to the top of the hour and the students start to get restless. I try to grab their attention with a bigger point: the lessons of mining development during Canada’s first Great Acceleration might be instructive as we embark on a new mineral rush to power up the energy transition away from fossil fuels. According to a recent World Bank report, humans will need to dig up 3.1 billion tons of critical minerals by 2050 to build windmills, solar panels, and batteries required to keep a warming climate from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. This is in addition to all the minerals that are fed into the millions of cell phones and computers produced globally every year. Environmentalists might have hoped at one time for a climate solution that prioritized a vast reduction in total energy and material consumption (a Great Deceleration, if you will), but time is running out. Almost inarguably, given the ever-rising global demand for electricity, and the need to act quickly, the production of vast amounts of renewable energy is the only possible response. How do we reconcile environmental protection with the material demands of this new Great Acceleration? This, I suggest to the class, is likely to be the primary challenge facing their generation.

Notes

1. John Sandlos and Arn Keeling, Mining Country: A History of Canada’s Mines and Miners (James Lorimer & Co., 2021); R. W. Sandwell, Powering up Canada: A History of Power, Fuel, and Energy from 1600 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016). On a global scale, John McNeill’s work on the Great Acceleration has highlighted energy and mineral production as central features of this period of rapid change. See Will Steffen, Paul Crutzen, and John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” in Ambio: A Journal of the Environment 36, no. 8 (2007): 614-21; John Robert McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (W.W. Norton & Company, 2000).

2. Tu Łidlini Dena Elders, Brittany Tufts, and Caitlynn Beckett, “The Reclamation and Rematriation of Tsē Zūl: The Tū Łídlīni Dena’s Story of the Faro Mine,” Journal of Political Ecology 32, no. 1 (2025), https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.8094; Kevin O’Reilly, “Liability, Legacy, and Perpetual Care: Government Ownership and Management of the Giant Mine, 1999–2015,” in Mining and Communities in Northern Canada: History, Politics, Memory, ed. Arn Keeling and John Sandlos (University of Calgary Press, 2015), 341-76; John Sandlos, The Price of Gold: Mining, Pollution, and Resistance in Yellowknife, with Arn Keeling, McGill-Queen’s Rural, Wildland, and Resource Studies Series 19 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025).

3. Karen Buckley, Danger, Death and Disaster in the Crowsnest Pass, 1902-1928 (University of Calgary Press, 2004), 201.

4. This data was taken from, Ontario Department of Mines, Reports on the Mining Accidents in Ontario, 1923-1957 (Queen’s Printer, 1958), and Ontario Mine Inspection Branch, Annual Reports, 1958-1971 (Queen’s Printer).

5. Dieter Grant Hogaboarn, “Compensation and Control: Silicosis in the Hardrock Mining Industry, 1921-1974” (Master’s Thesis, Queen’s University, 1997).

Feature image: An open pit at the abandoned Pine Point lead-zinc mine on the south shore of Great Slave Lake, NWT. Photo by John Sandlos.

NiCHE encourages comments and constructive discussion of our articles. We reserve the right to delete comments that fail to meet our guidelines including comments under aliases, or that contain spam, harassment, or attacks on an individual.