The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Jonathon Naylor Editor Decades-old memories of the Flin Flon copper smelter recently came to life in the pages of Canada's largest national newspaper. The Globe and Mail's 'Collected Wisdom' feature on March 23 included a submission from former Flin Flonner Charles Grierson. Grierson, now of Surrey, B.C., responded to the previous week's column on why there are jogs in the Manitoba-Saskatchewan boundary. 'Nearly 60 years ago, as a university student, I worked one summer for Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting in Flin Flon, Man.,' he wrote. 'I spent a month in the copper smelter, which consisted of a large furnace that just happened to lie across the border line. 'The front of the furnace, where most of the action occurred, was in Saskatchewan and the back was in Manitoba. It was generally known that if you had an accident at the back of the furnace, you crawled around to the front to be found, because the Saskatchewan Workers' Compensation Board paid 75 per cent compensation while the Manitoba WCB paid only 66 per cent.' Today memories are all that Grierson and other former 'smelter rats' have left of their former workplace. The smelter closed in June 2010 after 80 years in operation.
