Mr. Bloom, you talked about the need for a more holistic approach, and again I know more about mining than I know about many other sectors. But to develop a mine you could high-grade the deposit. You can take the easy stuff and leave town. That's been done. Many companies have done that. You can take a long-term approach and say we're going to go for some lower-grade ore and use the rich high-grade to make sure the mine life is long, and we're going to have a value-added processing.
So you look at a company like Falconbridge. It had a track record we could see for 90 years. We knew what Falconbridge did. They had excellent metallurgical work. They were known around the world for their processes and their advancement.
Xstrata is a company that comes out of nowhere, and they're riding a peak in the market and they're flush with cash and they basically have a dodgy record. But all being said, all capital is not equal. There is capital that's in there for the short term and capital that has a record that's going to build. So Falconbridge gets taken over by Xstrata, and that leads to Inco being gobbled up by Vale. Our minister at the time said that Vale came to save Sudbury, that Sudbury was in, he said, the “Valley of Death”. That was a pretty bizarre comment to make when Inco and Falconbridge were on the verge of a merger at the height of the biggest metal boom in memory.
So we see the loss not just in terms of what they did to the communities and not just what they did to the copper-refining capacity, but no one has ever talked about the job losses in Toronto in terms of head offices, management, sales, that area of expertise that those companies have developed; that once you are a branch plant you're not in the same game at all in terms of a value to a national economy.
Mr. Bloom, would you have any comments about the effect of what it means to become a branch plant as opposed to a world leader?