CANADA: Steelmen at Ungava

On a sidewalk in front of Montreal’s gilt-trimmed Ritz-Carlton Hotel, placard-bearing pickets from some 20 labor unions staged an indignant demonstration one morning last week. “The workers protest,” one sign proclaimed. “After Murdochville, Kruppville” warned another, in an obvious attempt to keep the United Steelworkers’ strike at the Murdochville works of the Gaspe Copper Mines Ltd. in the public eye. In one of the Ritz-Carlton’s handsomely appointed suites, German Industrialist Alfried Felix Alwyn Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, 50 (TIME, Aug. 12), shrugged off the demonstration: “In Germany we have good relations with trade unions.” Then newsmen gathered for a press conference got the news most of Canada has been waiting for: Krupp and four other German steelmakers have joined forces with a group of Canadian and U.S. interests headed by Nova Scotia-born Cyrus Eaton. 73, to develop a giant deposit of iron ore in Quebec’s Ungava Bay region.

Next day, with Cyrus Eaton Jr. acting as host and guide, Krupp and his party boarded an airplane for the first leg of a 1,000-mile flight to Ungava Bay. But when the plane landed at Schefferville. Krupp learned that his mother, Bertha Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, 71, had died in Essen. He hurried to New York to catch an airliner home to Germany, while Eaton and the rest of the Krupp party continued the flight to Ungava.

At Hopes Advance Bay, on the eastern shore of the Ungava peninsula, Eaton had helicopters standing by to take the Krupp men on a flying tour over the rocky ridges where Eaton’s engineers have blocked out a billion tons of low-grade (35%) ore in one concession, 750 million tons in another. They expected to look over the townsite at Hopes Advance Bay, where Eaton’s ambitious blueprinters have planned a concentrating plant to convert the ore to pellets testing 65% iron.

Under the elaborate scheme worked out by Eaton and Krupp, ships would move into Hopes Advance Bay during the four-month ice-free season each summer, haul the pelletized ore to Rotterdam, where it will be transferred to barges and towed up the Rhine to German steel mills. By great circle routes. Hopes Advance Bay is almost as close to Rotterdam (2,570 miles) as it is to Philadelphia (2,245 miles).

If Krupp and Eaton put the final commas in their iron-ore agreement and Quebec’s Premier Maurice Duplessis gives his expected O.K., they can begin construction on the mine and townsite at Hopes Advance Bay next year, start moving pellets to Germany three years later. By 1965 Ungava should be producing 10 million tons of ore a year.