About 550 temporary pink slips are now permanent after Cameo Corp. announced plans to indefinitely suspend production at two of its temporarily shuttered uranium facilities in northern Saskatchewan.
Another 150 people working at the Saskatoon-based uranium miner’s head office are expected to lose their jobs in the coming days, Cameco announced late Wednesday afternoon.
The cuts, which leave Cameco with a single operating mine in Saskatchewan, are what Cameco CEO Tim Gitzel described as another “tough decision” in response to persistently weak uranium prices.
“We don’t know today, and we don’t want to speculate (on when the operations will restart), because we don’t want to put any false hope out. It could be a significant period of time,” Gitzel said.
Late last year, Postmedia News reported that the Saskatoon-based uranium miner planned to shut down its McArthur River mine and Key Lake mill for 10 months beginning in early 2018.
Those shutdowns are now “indeterminate” as the company takes what Gitzel described as “supply actions,” decisions meant to reduce the amount and boost the price of uranium on the market.
“Obviously, there’s excess uranium around the planet. We didn’t want to add to that, because that will just exacerbate the problem,” he said, adding that Cameco will also buy uranium to fill its contracts.
The layoffs are expected to cost Cameco up to $45 million in severance this year. Its flagship Cigar Lake mine in northern Saskatchewan is now the province’s sole operating uranium mine.
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Cameco is one of northern Saskatchewan’s most important businesses, particularly when it comes to employing Indigenous people, a point Energy and Resources Minister Bronwyn Eyre made in a statement issued Wednesday.
“Now more than ever, all levels of government need to be engaged on this important file to ensure market access for Saskatchewan’s natural resource industries, such as uranium,” Eyre said in the statement, hinting at the recent U.S. probe of uranium imports.
Cameco, which returned to the red this week by posting a $76-million loss on revenues totalling $333 million, has been cutting costs in the face of weak prices, sent plummeting by the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
The company previously shut down its Rabbit Lake mine in northern Saskatchewan, at a cost of about 500 jobs, slashed about 120 jobs from its headquarters in Saskatoon and curtained its U.S. uranium production operations.
While the news release announcing the plans took a bleaker tone than previous statements, which have expressed confidence in its “lower-for-longer” strategy, Gitzel said Cameco is not exploring the possibility of a sale and remains confident in growing demand.
“We’re going to muscle our way through this. This is a tough day and some tough decisions but we think we’ve got some excellent assets. Right now, we’re better off leaving that Saskatchewan uranium in the ground and buying on the market to fill our contracts … It’s coming back, it’s just a question of when.”
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