When Hudbay found zinc at Lalor Lake a decade ago, the nearby community of Snow Lake felt like it had struck gold.
In an October 2007 conference call with journalists, then-Hudbay CEO Peter Jones discussed highly encouraging drill results from the Lalor Lake deposit.
Hudbay had discovered what “may well be the most significant new zinc discovery in Canada in many years,” Jones said. He envisioned a Lalor Lake mine launching production as early as 2010.
Mining executives make such bold statements from time to time, and their visions don’t always pan out. Had the CEO of a different company spoke the same words as Jones, he may have been dismissed as at best Pollyannaish or at worst just trying to hawk shares.
But everyone seemed to know Jones meant business. Lalor (the “Lake” was eventually dropped) would indeed be the Flin Flon-Snow Lake region’s next mine, yielding not just zinc, but copper and gold as well.
For the people of Snow Lake, the Lalor discovery was a godsend. Already accustomed to population decline, the town was dreading the loss of its last remaining mine, Hudbay’s Chisel North mine a few years down the road.
The Lalor find spawned predictions of Snow Lake as Canada’s next boomtown. The Winnipeg Free Presswent so far as to say the town’s population, then 730 people, was expected to double by 2014 thanks to Lalor and other potential mining projects in the area.
According to the latest census, Snow Lake has indeed grown since 2011 – but by a modest 176 people. This mini boom means 899 residents now call the community home.
This isn’t what Snow Lake or Hudbay anticipated. When Hudbay first opened a work camp to develop Lalor, it was envisioned as a temporary measure – once the mine reached full production, employees would be expected to reside in
Snow Lake.
But as Lalor went from first blast in 2010 to full production in 2014, the 170-person work camp remained open to house Lalor employees, many of whom commute from Flin Flon.
Lalor mine manager Robert Carter recently told the Opasquia Times’ Marc Jackson that the camp is almost full to capacity. Carter could not foresee closing the camp any time soon.
As much as Hudbay once envisioned a Snow Lake-based workforce for Lalor, the cost-benefit analysis makes no sense for a large number of employees.
If you’re living in Flin Flon and working at Lalor, do you want to sell your house to move to a much smaller town that is just two hours away? Where your spouse and children may face limited job prospects? For a mine projected to last another 10.5 years?
A mass migration of employees to Snow Lake was never likely in this era of “days in, days out” scheduling. It’s more than feasible for people to work at Lalor and live in Flin Flon (or elsewhere), so that’s what many of them do.
This doesn’t make Snow Lake an undesirable community; indeed the town is scenic, safe and cozy. It’s understandable why some Snow Lakers would feel disheartened by the limited Lalor-fuelled population growth.
But it’s also understandable why the once-anticipated boom never materialized.
