The years 2020 and 2021 will be recorded in our history as two times when Elliot Lake families and City Hall had to scramble to organize the annual display of the names of a few more miners who lost their lives in the mining industry.
Their shrine is the Elliot Lake's Miners' Memorial on Highway 108 near Hillside Drive North.
In 2020, the ceremony, which normally attracts several hundred, had to be replaced by a visit to the Memorial on the shore of Horne Lake by a few members of Council and city staffer, Darla Hennessey. They took part in a brief wreath-laying in honour of the miners.
Similarly in this year, 2021, the ceremony that normally falls on April 28, the annual Day of Mourning, again had to be delayed due to restrictions imposed from the COVID pandemic. Coun. Ed Pearce and Mayor Dan Marchisella dedicated another wreath.
The latest fixing of this year's full ceremony has been set for June 18, 2021. But that could still change if conditions warrant.
This year's honorees, as selected by the City's Miners' Memorial Naming Committee, are William Drysdale Sr., Richard Dumas, Oswald Hajek, James (Jim) Hobbs, Lenard Alexander McKay and Aimo (Moe) Salo. Their names will be chiselled onto one of the granite monoliths that stand erect at the memorial.
Yet the adjustments and realignments relating to the ceremonies themselves pale in comparison to the extreme consequences and life-altering outcomes that careers in Elliot Lake's mining industry weaved into the lives of the miners, their families and friends.
Those memories cut very deep for women like Janice Martell and Maxine Salo.
At the age of 81, Maxine's husband Aimo (Moe) Salo passed away in 2015. He had begun his career at 17 years in his native Geraldton, ON, where life left few options for a young man but to work in the mines.
After they married a few years later in their early 20's, the couple eventually wound up in Elliot Lake when Moe's career brought him to the Rio Algom mining operation at Quirke Lake. Over the years he had risen to management as shift boss and captain, at retirement.
What eluded Moe and many other miners was access to proper compensation for debilitating health issues that often accompanied a career in the mines. He was left with a legacy of health issues including bladder and breathing woes.
Fortunately for them, Moe kept meticulous records of his work, so his widow is receiving compensation after a three and a half year struggle of her own to achieve it. She resides in Elliot Lake but had to travel to Sudbury to get proper redress by dealing there with government issues.
Salo remains adamant that many more names should be on the Memorial.
For Janice Martell, who spent her younger years in Elliot Lake and now resides in Sudbury with her husband and children, what started as a drive for fairness for disabled and deceased miners has become a career and a passion.
"This work has become my life and I really need to push for changes. It's not just miners, there are many workers."
Her father James (Jim) Hobbs also found himself working for Rio Algom, at Quirke Mine #2. He too had started his mining career in his late teens when urged by his mother to drop out of school and help support the family.
Eventually, he left the mines for a while only to return to support his children's aspirations for higher education.
Martell took her training and became a specialist in helping victims of occupational illness pursue their claims.
She recalls a wildcat strike by the Denison miners in Elliot Lake in April 1974. It led to a Royal Commission which generated the eventual passage of Ontario's Occupational Health and Safety Act, which previously did not exist.
"Before that, we did not have the right to refuse unsafe work. That's how that happened, because of Elliot Lake miners," she said. "So that's hugely meaningful to have that monument. I go there every time I go to Elliot Lake. I go there for Father's Day."
"Years ago I bought him one of the commemorative bricks that go around where the miner sits. I have pictures of him looking down at the brick there," Martell continued. "I never thought his name would go on the wall because it was such a long fight."
It's been a 10-year fight to have his Parkinson's recognized. Parkinson's is linked to his McIntyre Powder exposure and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is also linked into it.
"The mining executives up at McIntyre Mine in Timmins started researching ways to combat silicosis and this was a cheaper fix to what they ought to have done, which was to improve ventilation," Martell said. "So they tested 13 rabbits with it and then they started. The next rabbit was the miners."
"I started his claim in 2011. We have acknowledgement that he was granted compensation for Parkinson's in 2020.
"He died in 2017.
"I'm just really grateful that long after I'm gone, that there's a place (the Miners' Monument) that we can go to," concluded Martell.