KIRKLAND LAKE - Twelve Mexican immigrant families recruited by Agnico Eagle to move to Kirkland Lake seem to be acclimating well, the gold company said last week.
Natasha Vaz, the Toronto-based miner's executive vice president and chief operating officer, made those observations in an Oct. 31 webinar with mining analysts upon the release of its 2024 third-quarter results. Agnico is one of the world's largest gold miners with operations in Canada, Australia, Finland and Mexico.
With the opening of some new mines in Ontario, Vaz acknowledged there is some market “tightness” when it comes to sourcing labour, particularly on the skilled trades side.
Since Agnico is regarded as an employer of choice, job vacancy rates are low, Vaz said. But the company has been looking to fill its trades gap in running a targeted immigration pilot program that involved moving 12 families from a closed mine in Mexico to Kirkland Lake, the host community of its flagship Macassa Mine Complex.
“So far, it’s going really well,” said Vaz, who was in Kirkland Lake in September to check on how well the families are integrating with the community and the team.
“They come with a lot of skills, a lot of ideas, and it’s really going well.”
On the recruiting side, Agnico is also looking to tap into the urban youth demographic to develop a mining workforce, said Ammar Al-Joundi, Agnico president-CEO, in the conference call.
“It’s not just the mining industry, it’s by and large a trades deficit in Canada,” he said.
Agnico to looking for avenues to attract job-seeking young people who may not want to go the postsecondary route – “but are frankly kind of lost with what they want to do” – and get them interested in the trades, “which would certainly help Agnico, but would help a lot of other industries in Canada,” said Al-Joundi.
Gold prices are surging to historic highs, Agnico continues to drill and expand its existing mining operations at Detour Lake, north of Cochrane, its Macassa Complex operations at Kirkland Lake and develop its stable of new resource projects in northeastern Ontario.
With Agnico’s gold prospects in the community of 8,000 looking strong well past 2030, the Town of Kirkland Lake is working with Agnico and government on the development of a proposed new subdivision.
In a recent episode of TVO’s The Agenda, Kirkland Lake Mayor Stacy Wight said Agnico directly employs almost 1,000, many of whom do the long commute from neighbouring communities since there is not enough available housing in town.
With the support of Agnico and nearby Alamos Gold, the town has been able secure a provincial government grant to expand capacity of its public works infrastructure to service that subdivision and stoke growth in the community.
During last week's conference call, Vaz told a mining analyst last week that Agnico is in active discussions with government to help fund community infrastructure in Cochrane and Kirkland Lake with a focus on housing, medical care and a children’s education centre,
Earlier this year, Vaz said, Agnico received $10 million from a government skills development fund to assist with the development and training of individuals in Northern Ontario.
In its third quarter performance, Agnico posted record financial results for its fourth consecutive quarter, attributed to its operational efficiencies and keeping costs under control amidst record gold prices. The emphasis is on continuous improvement at its mines and mills, and ongoing reinvestment into exploration across its pipeline of gold prospects, which are showing significant gold upside.
At its Detour Lake open-pit mine, Agnico said it has made strides to dive deep into underground mining with site preparation that involves the removal of overburden to clear space for a portal. Agnico is chasing a high-grade, deep extension of the mine to the west of the existing pit.
Drilling in a high-grade corridor in Detour’s West Pit zone continues to generate some encouraging hits at depths exceeding 700 metres with a wide enough mineralized geological structure that’s amenable to underground mining, Agnico said.
Quarterly gold production at Macassa was the highest achieved since the merger with Kirkland Lake Gold in 2022. Management said that’s reflective of the productivity gains made with the completion of the No. 4 shaft and new ventilation infrastructure in 2023.
