The Copper Cliff Refinery: a Greek tragedy.

• Author: Atkins, Michael
• Position: PRESIDENT'S NOTE - Inco Ltd. closes down its refinery

If you're outside of Sudbury, you probably haven't heard much about Inco's Copper Cliff Refinery. It's not that sexy and certainly at a 140 jobs doesn't rank on the misery scale as we watch the crumbling of forestry employment across the North.

It struck a chord in Sudbury. The chord is that even the most ambivalent of politicians and citizens understand that to lose a value-add business attached to the resource sector in a Northern Ontario community is a disaster. It is painful and impossible to replace those jobs.

Sudbury City Council, in a rare show of unity, voted unanimously to oppose the closure and approach the Ontario government for some muscle. Of course nothing will happen. Rick Bartolucci within seconds said there was nothing he could or would do.

The truth is Mark Cutifani, the current president of Inco's Sudbury operations, is the first executive with the guts to do anything at all about the refinery. I mean, in a year when they are going to make a billion or so, it is not very savvy public relations to start closing down business units. It could be a very expensive closure indeed. Negotiations with the Steel-workers are but a year away.

The Refinery is being closed because of an intransigent union, and historically weak management at Inco.

There has been no investment in the refinery for many years because serious investment would have meant serious layoffs. The union members wouldn't stand for it and the company wasn't up for the fight. The result: a hopelessly inefficient refinery.

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All of which led some of us the other day to consider making an offer for the refinery rather than sit around and bitch about it being closed.

Far fetched, of course, but sometimes if you start at far-fetched you can get to fetch.

Besides, until you stand in the other guy's shoes you don't really know squat.

There is a refinery of similar size at Kidd Creek in Timmins. It operates at one-third the employment level and has done so for years, and not surprisingly at a unit cost level half that of Inco's.

At Noranda in Quebec, where Inco is proposing to move its business, the cost base is extraordinarily low because their refinery is not operating at capacity. Therefore, the incremental cost of refining Inco's product is even lower than what it would be if you built a brand new refinery with the best technology in the world, and threw in some...