To call Gillyeard (Gil) Leathley’s career path a meandering one would be an understatement. Over the past 50 years, he’s mined for coal in Scotland, copper in Zambia, bauxite in Guyana, asbestos in northwest B.C. and gold in Alaska. All in all, a long journey.
Just don’t tell him that.
“Nope. Short journey,” Leathley insisted emphatically. “Because I’ve loved every place I’ve been.”
Short or long, now that Leathley has decided to step down from his current job as senior vice-president and chief operating officer at Vancouver-based NovaGold, the journey is coming to an end – at least, this leg of it.
Leathley started his career by going “underground” at the age of 15. Although he did well in school, his family couldn’t afford to continue his education. When a family friend suggested he try his hand at mining, Leathley jumped at the chance.
“[He] said, ‘Would you like a job with the national coal board?’” Leathley reminisced. “I didn’t know what it meant!”
Leathley was able to complete his education at night school while he worked. He then went to college, eventually earning qualifications as a mine surveyor and industrial engineer. It wasn’t long before he was off to northern Rhodesia (later Zambia) where he was trained in all aspects of mine operations – drilling, blasting, loading, timbering and more.
For the next several years, Leathley and his family were globetrotters, travelling to wherever the mines were: South Africa, Guyana, Alaska. It was only in 1975 when he came to Vancouver that he started to think about putting down more permanent roots.
“We always said: look, wherever we’re working is home,” said Leathley. “Don’t care where it is – you have to make it home. You have to make friends, which we still keep – from Africa, South America. It’s been a blast. Great people. Great jobs.”
Needless to say, Leathley has seen a fair bit of change over his half-century in the mining industry.
“It’s more complex than it used to be,” he said. “It’s much more difficult to find an ore body. The spinoff of that is that to make money, things have gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. Capital’s gone up. The whole amount of money – the risk profile – has gotten huge.”
One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is the people.
“They’re still as bright as they were before,” said Leathley. “You look back and you see these miners who mined the ground and left behind what they considered was not economic. We’re now mining what they left behind.
“They didn’t have all these fancy tools we’ve got and computers and everything else – what did they have? The same brains. What did they have? Dedication. What did they have? Teamwork. So that hasn’t changed.”
Leathley’s long career has given him a unique perspective on the challenges facing the mining sector in B.C.. From where he stands, the most significant one is forging a consensus on the role mining should play in our economy.
“One of the things I think we can do is be sensible about our approach to the environment – both sides,” said Leathley. “Can we get a balance between economic benefits and environmental and social benefits? There has to be a place there.”
“B.C., whether we like it or not – Canada, whether we like it or not – is commodity driven. The commodities we have, there’s more to be discovered. There’s more to be developed.”
This balanced perspective extends to the art of management as well. Over the years, Leathley has learned that running a successful company requires dedication and hard work. But it also requires a sincere desire to do right by the people who work for you.
“This assumption we have, that the head office is the company – it’s not,” Leathley said candidly. “The company is some guy or some girl on night shift, on a Sunday night when you’re lying in bed, and she or he are doing their job, the same way you would do it. Because without them – forget it.”
Leathley’s retirement will be a working one. While he certainly plans to get more R&R in his day than he has been getting, he intends to hang on to his workboots too, continuing on as a senior adviser and director at NovaGold, as well as three or four other companies with projects in various parts of the world.
“What it really means is that I will not have to make the trudge to the office every day,” he joked.
Not that it was much of a trudge to begin with. “The biggest lottery you can win is to do something you love and get well paid for it,” Leathley said. So: after 50 years, four continents and countless tons of minerals pulled out of the earth, has he won the lottery?
“Oh, absolutely. Since I was 15.”
