PROFILE Robert Stairs showcases New Brunswick’s deposits

Throughout Canada, few mineral deposits were successfully developed in the past two years. New Brunswick’s Bathurst camp, however, boasts two profitable new mines. Since they started or resumed operation in 1989, the Murray Brook gold mine, owned by NovaGold Resources, and the Heath Steele base metal mine, owned by the Noranda group, have been faring well. Their performance has inspired “a feeling of momentum” in the province, says Robert Stairs, 39, president of the New Brunswick Prospectors and Developers Association (NBPDA).

In the past five years, the NBPDA membership has grown from 50 to more than 200. Custom Laboratories Ltd., its first corporate member, is owned by Stairs himself. Formerly known as Stairs Laboratories, it was founded by Stairs’ father, Ivan, who pioneered some of the discoveries in the Bathurst camp in the ’50s and ’60s.

Every year NBPDA sponsors a rock room to display the province’s exploration and development activities at the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada’s annual convention in Toronto. “Many delegates will recall the 1,700-lb. stuffed bull moose that beckoned them into the display,” says Stairs in a recent interview with The Northern Miner.

“It has always been difficult to attract new players into New Brunswick but we have seen that happening as a result of the NovaGold base metal discovery at Sewell Brook,” he adds.

Stairs has also inherited from his father the mineral rights to New Brunswick’s fourth largest massive sulphide deposit at Canoe Landing Lake. He has held a prospecting licence since he was 14. As a youth, he participated in all phases of exploration activity with his father.

Born and raised in Bathurst, Stairs raced snowmobiles for 15 years, five years as a professional. “Now I restrict my relaxation time to quarter-mile drag racing with my wife, Lyne, and 9-year-old son Mathieu as pit crew,” he says. “We race our 500-horsepower, 1966 Beaumont throughout the Maritimes, Quebec and New England states.”

Will the recession check miners’ forays into New Brunswick? “I view this period of uncertainty as a time in which companies can take positive steps to gain a foothold in New Brunswick,” he says. “Chances are better for discovery (in Atlantic Canada) just because of the lack of competition.”