The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - The Woman Behind a Legendary Timmins Mining Scandal

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

Viola MacMillan, owner of Windfall Oils and Mines, was a rare woman in the Canadian mining industry. In 1964, after three decades in the business, she became the central figure in a Timmins mining scandal that led to regulatory changes at the Toronto Stock Exchange and the Ontario Securities Commission. Author Tim Falconer tells her compelling story in his new book, "Windfall: Viola MacMillan and Her Notorious Mining Scandal." See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Viola McMillan, owner of Winfall Oils and Mines, was a rare woman in the Canadian mining industry. In 1964, after three decades in the business, she became the central figure in a Timmons mining scandal that led to regulatory changes at the Toronto Stock Exchange and the Ontario Securities Commission. Author Tim Volkner tells her compelling story in his new book, Winfall, Viola McMillan and Her Notorious Mining Scandal. And Tim Volkner joins us now for more. Welcome. Great to be here. I should mention John Michael McGrath, one of our own, TVO's own, also helped to research this book. We'll talk a little bit about the research because there's a lot of that involved in this. So tell us a little bit about Viola, born in Muskoka. How did she get to mining? What was her path?

She, yeah, so she grew up on a farm. She was the 13 of 15 children. The farm is now part of the Windermere Golf Course for anybody who plays golf up there. She had to drop out of school at age 12 to help out on the farm. And, but she dreamed of being a stenographer. She thought that was the most glamorous thing in the world.

She managed to get her high school and went to North Bay originally, but her family couldn't afford to send her to business school. She ended up in Windsor, went to business school, ended up working for a law firm. She meets a guy named George McMillan and he's got an uncle who's a prospector. So one summer they go up to help out with what's called assessment work. You have to work on your claims to keep them.

And she falls in love with it. And then in the early part of the Depression, she was doing real estate and selling Christmas cards and things like that. She tells George, I'm going north. If you want to come, great. Otherwise, I'll be OK. And they both go up there.

And they have no money, but they're staking claims and selling them and making a little bit of a living. But she discovers that she's really good at the business side of mining. She opens an office first in Timmins, and then a few years later, in about 35, she opens an office in Toronto and so

she's got these two the two sides of mining and that she and she loves both and she would have said that she was just as good as prospector as a business person but she was better at that side of it and And by the late 40s, she had her first operating mine. In the 50s, she added more. She was a really successful woman in mid-century Canada when women didn't really work outside the home. Or if they did, they were school teachers or nurses right in 1953 there were 3,700 women who made ten thousand dollars or more and that's equivalent to about a hundred thousand dollars, right?

so It was very difficult for women and yet she did it in Probably the most male industry possible. I am curious about sort of that time, the constraints. I'm curious, what constraints did Viola face as a woman in a male dominant industry? Because you mentioned that one trip to a particular mine with her uncle. Correct me if I'm wrong, she wasn't allowed, really.

She wanted to go underground because her brother had worked there until he died of a Spanish flu. And she wanted to go see where he worked. And they said, no, no, it's bad luck. And this was a long time. As a woman, it was bad luck. Yeah, to have a woman go underground was bad luck in a mine.

And she, because she had certain powers of persuasion, convinced him, like, OK, I'm tiny. I'll look like a little boy. I'll put my hair up under my helmet. And she went down. And she thought, then she thought mining was the most glamorous thing, even though she said these would be horrible places to work. But she just fell in love with the industry and started to learn about it.

And yeah, so she was really an evangelist for mining, particularly prospecting, and she became the president of what was originally called the Ontario Prospectors and Developers Association, it's now known as PDAC, or Professional Developers Association, Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada. She became the president in 44, and she held that position for 21 years. And it was practically a male fraternity when she started.

Boys club. And she turned it from just like a loose collection of prospectors, who are all individualists, and into this quite powerful national organization. I am curious for people. I can imagine we probably have a few prospecting and mining experts who watch our program regularly, but for people who are not familiar, how was mining and speculation around mineral finds different then? Because as you mentioned she was

comfortable getting dirty as well, but what was it like to actually get out there into the woods and start mining? Well the first thing you had to do was stake a claim. So this was a quarter of a mile by a quarter mile, 40 acres. And so you had to put a big post in each of the corners and then go and get it registered. And then you had to do this assessment work. You had to go and work on it. And you banged rocks.

And you dug trenches so you could see the rock underneath the soil. And all these things, you're trying to find a Knorr body. And so she enjoyed that part of it, too. And one thing, they would stake claims and then sell them. I mean, if they thought there was something, they would try to hold on as long as they could. But that took lots of money. So that's where the developer side comes in, that they had to raise money. And so these penny stocks, and they had these underwriting agreements which allowed, and

they were a little bit they were supposed to raise money for the company but really the developer was like so she was very good at that. Alright before we talk about the scandal your book is based on give us a little idea brief history of sort of the big mining finds in Timmins I know you talked about Timmins you've mentioned you know there's cobalt, there's also Kirkland Lake as well, porcupine. But what was, Timmins was booming in and around this time?

Well, it had been, like you're talking in 64. Yeah, it had been, so there was a cobalt silver boom in 1903, which was the first big mining thing in Ontario, and really created thing in Ontario and really created mining in Ontario and created this stock exchange in Toronto as a mining center and then followed the porcupine which created out of that came Timmins and then Kirkland Lake were the three big finds in Ontario. The porcupine one gave us companies

that people might remember, like Dome Mines and Hollinger Mines. And it was a big, big gold community area. And Timmins was the big town. It was sort of falling in hard times in the early 60s. The mines were coming to the end of their life. And then Texas Gulf Sulphur, a big American company, finds this massive copper, zinc, and silver mine 20 minutes outside of Timmons.

And this sends Timmons, the stock market, and prospectors into a frenzy. And it's like, oh, because in all the other finds, one find led to another, or several others. I suspect there's a little frenzy. It's like, oh, because in all the other finds, one find led to another or several others. So everyone was convinced there would be more mines once Texas Gulf announced theirs. I am curious, you know, currently,

there's a lot of talk about our neighbors to the south, with the US having interests in minerals around the world. I am curious, back then you had mentioned Texas Golf founded that mine in Kidd Creek. How did that even happen? How was it that an American company comes in, just for people to understand that that was open? Yeah, they decided to do a big,

throughout the Canadian shield. And Timmons was just part of it. And the Ontario government was open to this as a way to generate economic activity. And of course, they would have preferred a Canadian to own that Kidd Creek mine. But they just wanted mining to generate jobs and money. And so there wasn't, you know, it wasn't until the 70s that Canada sort of became more protectionist.

And then of course, you know, now all the big mining companies like Naran and Inco, which were the big mining companies when I was a kid, they're all owned internationally. So it's, that was, you know, one of the things was mining minister really wanted Viola and her husband, you know, Windfall to be a successful mine because then it would be Canadian owned. That's the whole ground, yeah. All right, let's look at a clip. This is from June of 1964, as we're gonna talk about,

1964 was a big year and really important one for this story, when Viola appeared on the CBS show to tell the truth. Let's have a look at that. Will the real Viola McMillan please stand up? Two. Ah, it's time, Dr. Radler. It's time, Dr. Radler. Well, that's a busy field you put yourself into, but you certainly made a success of

it, and I wish you continued success. Thank you. Continued success. Maybe she knew, maybe she didn't, but a couple of weeks later, she was at the center of a controversy there. For people who aren't familiar about that show, there's some irony there. Tell me a little bit about sort of the premise

to tell the truth. So it was a game show. It was sort of similar to Front Page Challenge, and people remember that show. A real person and two pretenders would get up in front of four minor celebrities who would ask questions. And they would try to suss out who the real person was.

I mean, in Viola's case, only one person did. And he did it because she looked wealthier than the others. But you saw that clip. She's got a string of pearls. She doesn't look like a prospector. Where the other two kind of, oh, that could work. And the irony, of course, was that the show was called To Tell the Truth.

And then what happens next is she doesn't always tell the truth. Well, tell us about that. How did the scandal happen? What was it? So a few weeks after that, well, OK, I go back to the Texas Gulf thing. Once Texas Gulf had found its huge mineral deposit,

it kept it quiet. And they tried to lock up all the land around their mine. Because they assumed that there would be others as well. Because of the staking error, there were four claims that Texas Gulf wanted that they didn't get. Violet Millen knew the prospectors who got them, and she went to Timmons, and she bought them. She bought them personally and then sold them

to Windfall Oils and Mines, which was a company that she controlled with her husband, George. So everyone was saying, well, if there's going to be another mine, she's got a really good chance at it. And a couple weeks after she's on that show, they begin drilling on one of their claims. A few days into drilling, George stops the drill. He says that he wanted a core shock.

Basically, there would be a little building where you could keep the core, the rock that came, the drill pulled out of the ground. And, but of course that just started rumors like, oh, they've got something, you know, if they need to build a core shock, they've got valuable stuff. Because that core would be able to show if there's trace amounts of minerals. Absolutely. And so on the Friday, the stock had been trading at 55, 60 cents. On Monday, so he stopped the drill on Sunday. On Monday, it opened $1.01, and it continued to go up.

And over the next three weeks, it bounced around, but it got as high as $5.70. And everybody was, this was huge news. Like everybody was like, oh, you know, gotta get on this one. People wanted this stock. And, well, I don't know, do you want me to tell it? I think, let's do it. So the Tron Stock Exchange is saying, you gotta give it, you gotta release statement.

You gotta, you know, do you have assay results? But you know, you gotta say something. And she just didn't want to say anything. Finally, after three weeks, they get the results. They got nothing. So they have to put it at a press release and of course the stock plummets. Lots of money lost.

In three weeks, she made a million and a half, which would be equivalent to about 10 million today. And other investors lost two and a half million, equivalent to 25 million. I imagine we'll talk a little bit about sort of what happened to her, but out of that investigation came some recommendations and changes to the Toronto Stock Exchange and the Ontario Securities Commission. What were they? So, okay, so this was such a big deal that Ontario Premier John Robarts

appointed a Royal Commission. And the Royal Commission had all sorts of recommendations for training and tightening up the rules. And basically the TSE and the OSC had to sort of clean up their act. He called the TSE, they operated like a private gaming club. But one of the big consequences, they pushed all the speculative mining stocks out,

and they all went to Vancouver, which then in the 80s, the Vancouver Stock Exchange was known as the scam capital of the world. So I think it was really important. Even today, the Toronto Stock Exchange is the eighth largest stock market in the world, but it has the most mining and oil and gas stocks of any exchange. And I think if it hadn't cleaned up its act, it probably would have not succeeded that way, it would not have thrived the way it has. So

I think it was, in a way, it was a really important moment for the stock exchange and Toronto is the financial centre. I think we can get sort of bogged down in that, you know, many people will say this happened quite a long time ago. But to put it, it's seriousness into context. Is there a modern version of this scandal? Is this something that still happens? The obvious one, and it's now a few years old, but Breaks.

But Breaks, they actually put gold in the samples. They what they call salting the sample. Right. So it was much more of a fraud. This was much more she kept her mouth shut. She didn't say anything, right. And let people's greed and rumor and like just let human nature make her a lot of money. The royal commissioner basically accused

Byelona and George of fraud, but they ended up getting off. They were charged and they got off. She did get charged with something called wash trading, which is basically trading with yourself. So she had a company called Golden Arrow, and she had another of her companies sell shares in Golden Arrow to a third company. And because of the—well, it was after 1964, the Royal Commission, but computers were sort of coming on board, you know, big computers.

But they did an analysis of all the stock trading, and they found this. So she was charged with something called loss trading. And she got nine months. She only served seven weeks. And that was another scandal for the Ontario government. Because everyone said, oh, you know, one law for the rich and another law for everybody else. And with that as well, she managed to, some would say, sort of recover her reputation

in some way. She goes on later to be awarded the Order of Canada as well. How did she rehabilitate her reputation? Well, she kept a low profile for a long time. She got a pardon in 78. Pardon doesn't mean you're innocent. She talked about it as if it did. But it really just means that your record is wiped clean.

And then she was inducted into the Mining Hall of Fame. And then on her 90th birthday, she got the Order of Canada. How do you think she's seen through the lens of history? I think, unfortunately, she's seen through the lens of history? I think unfortunately she's forgotten. I think, I mean, I was alive in 64. And I worked in the mining industry. I studied mining engineering for two years. I'd never heard of her.

People older than me, if I tell them, they go, oh, yeah, I remember that because it was front page news story. But I think most people don't remember, which I think is a shame because she really was a remarkable woman who did, in another time, would have been a role model for her success as a businesswoman. I wonder if the scandal is maybe partly responsible the fact that she's forgotten it.

Time is probably part of it as well, but yeah, I think it's too bad we don't remember her more. I did mention off the top, the research. This is a very well-researched book. You had mentioned the headlines. This was top story front page news. What was the process like for the research? How difficult was it?

It was, I have to say, compared to some of my other books, it was quite easy. There's the Royal Commission transcripts. The OSC had an inquiry, and the Ontario Archives up at York. All those transcripts are there. So I just went up there and with my phone scanned every page and then went home and read them. There are 66 boxes of her papers and stuff in an archive in Gatineau, Quebec. And then there were a million articles.

The Troul Star used to have a supplement called Star Weekly. They did a profile of her every few years. So she was written about from the 30s, she was like the late 30s, she was written about frequently. Then she would do radio. When TV happened, she would be on TV. She never turned down an interview. Yeah, I mean, the mining reporters didn't really like talking because she would never

answer her questions. But if it was about her or about mining, yeah, she was great. She was very good with the media. Alright, in our last 30 seconds, what do you hope people take away from your book? I hope that they enjoy reading about a really fascinating woman. Alright, Tim, we're going to leave it there. Thank you so much. We appreciate it. And a really great read. Thank you. Thank you.