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What today is a Mandy, Bobjo or God's Lake, a Consolidated Chibougamau, a Bagamac or an Ymir Yankee Girl may be tomorrow's Noranda, Dome or Lake Shore. Or it may turn out to be a Red Lake, which lately tumbled from $1.78 to 66¢on annual report in which the company revealed that its ores were not up to expectations. A contributory factor in the fall of Red Lake was a widely-circulated but quite false report that the president had been arrested.
The Millionaires. In the early stages of the mining boom, Toronto was a lush pasture for bucketeers, sharpsters and boiler-room operators who had skipped across the frontier after the Securities Act went into effect in the U. S. Most of them have since been cleaned out by the Ontario Securities Commissioner, John Milton Godfrey, who is a sort of one-man SEC. All stock salesmen are now licensed, and selling stock by telephone is banned. Though he has never used it, the Securities Commissioner also has power to regulate the Toronto Exchange. Co-operation is so close between the Exchange and Commissioner Godfrey that that public official sits in on sessions of the listing committee.
Because of the nature of mining finance, regulating securities in Canada has to be limited to prevention of the grosser types of fraud. The first stage in the development of a mine is grubstaking the prospector. From the rim of the Arctic Ocean to the shores of the St. Lawrence, Canada today is crawling with prospectors grub-staked by individuals, syndicates and big mining corporations. As soon as a prospector stakes a claim, money has to be raised for surface exploration to see if diamond drilling or a shaft is worthwhile. This money is usually raised by a small syndicate. Not until there is proof of actual ore can stock be sold to the public. But the presence of ore, like the stock prospectus, means little. It took 20 years and the Whitney millions to get the Flin Flon in northern Manitoba into production for Hudson Bay Mining & Smelting. About all that a good broker, the Toronto Stock Exchange or the Ontario Securities Commissioner can do is to give some assurance that the issuing company has a serious business purpose.
However wasteful this system may appear, it has dotted Canada with producers of gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc, nickel, cobalt, radium (which is mined at Great Bear Lake on the Arctic Circle). And it has created an entirely new set of Canadian tycoons, many of whom started as prospectors. Typical are Harry Oakes and William Henry Wright, who with another partner staked the claims that became Ontario's Lake Shore Mines. One night before the War with the mercury at 40° below they waited up until the stroke of midnight to re-stake a claim which was about to expire. Harry Oakes finally raised some capital for development in Buffalo, and Lake Shore turned out to be the richest claim in Canada, past or present.
Today Harry Oakes is supposed to have an income of around $3,000,000 annually while the figure for Bill Wright is about $2,000,000. Harry Oakes showered his home town of Niagara Falls, Ont. with benefactions, served his guests on solid gold, had his picture painted with his wife and six children all on one canvas, finally retired to Nassau to escape income taxes.