Fireside Chat With Ian Bliss

0:08 It's my pleasure today to be joined by Ian Bliss, the President and CEO of Northern Shield Resources. How are you this morning, Ian?

0:14 I am very well, Romeo. Thanks for having me. Yeah, great. So I'd love just to get started, if you could tell us a bit about your background. Curious. I love to ask people in the space. This was a career in mining always in the cards for you, or did it just sort of happen? Well, I guess it sort of was. I mean, I was born in the bush in

0:32 Zimbabwe. My father was a geologist with the Rhodesian Geological Survey. For 6-months of the year, I lived in a caravan with my parents, my older brother and my older sister, a 14-foot caravan,

0:48 and saying that this caravan was set up wherever my dad was assigned to map for the survey that season. So I was introduced to rocks and bush life literally since day 1. And on top of that, my mother was a cartographer or a mapmaker, you know, before moving out to Rhodesia with my father, worked at the Royal Geographical Society in London with many of the world's sort of top explorers and mountaineers at that time, including Stradburn Hillary, Vivian Foulkes, and Canada's Fred Roots, who did a lot of work in Antarctica and the Arctic. And so I was brought up around maps and reading about these stories, about these explorers, and my dad's second career was a navigator, first in the Royal Air Force, and then the Rhodesian Royal Air Force. And so I'd say I was maps for everywhere around our caravan and our house.

1:43 So along with the maps, the rocks, the bush life, and reading and hearing stories about Arctic explorers and living in the bush, it seemed that a career in exploration was destined for me. But having said that, actually, I always went through my early life assuming I was gonna be a pilot and leaning a lot towards that. I mean, my father's second career was as a navigator in the Royal Air Force Coastal Command and then in the Norwegian Royal Air Force. And I always thought my career was leaning towards aviation, either as a commercial pilot or with the Royal Air Force. And I did much of my high school in the UK.

2:30 I was at boarding school for 8 years. And in the midst of that, there was the Falklands War. And I remember going to bed, listening to BBC radio underneath my pillow and basically listening to the score of what was happening in the South Atlantic, what ships were being hit and what aircraft were doing what. And of course, the Harrier jump jet was heavily involved in that campaign. And I always thought I was going to be flying Harrier jump jets for the Royal Air Force, for the Royal Navy. And I wanted to become a pilot so quickly and keenly that I wanted to leave school a little bit early and in the UK, you sort of go on to grade 12 or 13, I guess it's equivalent to our first year of university. If you go to trade school, you can drop out early and I wanted to drop out early and start flying. And my dad insisted I stay in school those last 2 years. And so I paid him back by then following a career in geology and came back to Canada to study geology at UNB in New Brunswick. But he actually sort of, I guess, leaned me, I wouldn't say encouraged me, but warned me of the trials and tribulations of a career in exploration a lot of time away from home, and of course the very cyclical

3:44 nature of the industry. But nonetheless, I more or less followed in his footsteps in the end. So yes, I guess it was somewhat hesitant for me. Sounds like geology is a bit of an act of rebellion, but also kind of where you're meant to be. So there you go. I know very different obviously than starting in Zimbabwe, but it sounds like you cut your teeth in the mineral exploration industry exploring in Greenland, which is rugged, remote terrain. So I'm curious what you learned from that experience and how did it shape you and ultimately what you do now at Northern Shield? Well, the first thing I think I learned was how to order beer in Danish.

4:24 And secondly, what was navigating, I mean, my first few years in Greenland was, we didn't have GPS. So I think, thank gosh, my father also taught me something about navigation, otherwise I may still be wandering around the ice cap of Greenland. But no, seriously, it was baptism by fire into the exploration world, very rugged, very remote, not very sophisticated early on. I remember just being sort of kicked out of the helicopter with 4 or 5 wooden ration boxes and the next Danish military radio set for communication. And that was that was kind of it. And so in Greenland, you know, the seasons are generally quite short and I was given large tracts of land, large licenses to explore and you had to find a way to get it done. At the time, I didn't know what it was, but essentially a model-driven approach to exploration, which is of course what we've adopted here in Northern Shield, which is really just going back to the basics. What does a deposit look like and what should it look like in your current environment, considering deformation and morphism, etc.

5:34 You are charged with exploring large tracts of lands in a relatively short season, and you just have to find a way of getting it done. That was it. It was just get the job done. I mean, in this environment, you know, your first instincts or a lot of people maybe just just sort of survival as a lot of geologists know these aren't always very hospitable places, but it wasn't a matter of surviving as a matter of getting a job done. And I say with relatively poor communications, you can always be touching base with management, back of the office or the other camps. And so you just learn to sort of, you know, get the job done. But it's also appreciation for the remoteness that, you know, when you go to areas that are unexplored or underexplored, you really have the opportunity

6:25 to find something brand new. I worked in a lot of different terrains, some of the oldest rocks in the world at the Isua complex, so highly deformed, not the easiest rocks to start off your career trying to map these things. Also much younger rocks, but it was just the remoteness

6:44 and these large terrains. Really, as a geologist dreams, You just had rock everywhere, rock, ice, or the water. And so you were between a rock and a hard place, but you've got to learn to get the job done. But it was, especially in those days, It was remote and you were left on your own I mean, I was there 3 or 4 months straight living in a pop tent and in hospital conditions and So, but it was it was mapping, you know, or exploring large tracts of land in short periods. And actually just to bring things a little bit full circle, one of the things I did find in Greenland during my 8 years in exploration there, or 8 seasons, was a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber from World War II, which made a wiggle on the ice cap when being transferred from its factory in North America to the war front. And so that brings my aviation, mixed my aviation and geology career once again. That's quite a thing to find while exploring.

7:50 But to zoom forward, just for anyone who might not know in our audience, how did you find yourself becoming the CEO of Northern Shield? Well, I came back from Greenland. And the whole Breex thing had happened a couple of years before, maybe even 18-months. I was getting a little bit tired of the Greenland scene, as adventurous as it was. I was spending a lot of time away from home and so I thought, okay, maybe I was finding and exploring projects for other people in this place. Since we are a Danish government mining company, why can't I find it for myself or my own shareholders? So I decided to start my own company and right away with the objective of listing publicly.

8:37 A lot of people are saying, no, don't do it now, especially after BreX and the way the markets were, do it slowly. So just don't dip your feet in. But I was like, no, if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it wholeheartedly. So I started looking for projects to support Northern Shield on going public. These were all in Northern Ontario, later on a little bit in Northern Quebec, but all in Northern Ontario. So again, the remoteness, which didn't scare me from having worked in Greenland. Most of them were Kimberlite properties, but our real interest, my real interest at that time was PGEs, the Platinum Group Elements, Nickel Copper, and maybe that again, having been born and brought up right beside the Great Dike in Zimbabwe, which is one of the great

9:23 host, later intrusion hosting PGEs and chromite. I always had an interest in it. And in that process, I identified a geophysical target on an old, you know, 2 mile space, GSC magnetic map of Northern Ontario, piece some other data together and thought this was a layered infusion. And so I drove up to Northern Ontario as far as I could, found

9:45 a float plane outfitter who would fly me 2 hours north and drop me off at the river where I thought this outcrop may occur in the river. And they had some hesitations of taking me up there on my own, but I flew up, I saw the rocks, we realized it was a later intrusion, I came back and rolled this project, which was the High Bank Lake project, into Northern Shield, which was really the backbone of us in our very early days of going public. So it was kind of, you know, I guess a little bit tired of spending a lot of time away from home and realizing that I can find this for myself or for our shareholders and decided to jump into it. But it was a baptism of fire. I mean, Greenland was a baptism of fire into the exploration world and then suddenly going into the business side of things was again completely new and you know learning the ways of the business world and the VSC in those days was quite quite an eye-opener

10:46 and so we launched Northern Shields on really on the backs of the High Bank Lake project. But it was, it was a lot of trials and tribulations, but you know, It was nothing compared to Greenland on the exploration side. And there was a lot of positive in that as well. I mean, I remember shortly after staking Highbank Lake, somebody introduced me to Eric Sprott and he heard about the project. So he said, I will come down to Toronto and tell me about it. So I went down,

11:21 presented the project to him and he said, well, how much are you looking for? So I said, $250,000. He was like, is that all? I'm like, yeah, that's all. And He said, well, if I like a project, I like it a lot. So it's 500,000 or nothing. I said, okay. There was no nickel and diming of a warrants or price. It was okay. Send the subscription form to me. You'll have the money at the end of the week. And he's, as I walked to the door, he said, please never have the inclination of ever giving me insider information. And bang, the deal was done. And it was, so Eric Sprott was one of our first large shareholders. Yeah, that's, didn't know that history. That's super interesting. And you mentioned earlier, just the timing, starting a company right after BreX.

12:10 I mean, that obviously makes the always difficult task of starting an exploration company that much more difficult. Of course, now, in the current period, markets are tough for juniors as well. So I'm curious if you feel that experience of just the post-BREEX start off for Northern Shield prepared you for the cycles of rocky markets that we sometimes run into. Well, you're right. I mean, they were tough times and I thought if I started Northern Shield in those tough times, I could survive everything else. And we have, but it's, I guess they're just different times. Times have changed and it's a different market and perception. So I guess somewhat it did prepare me for it, but you can never always be prepared for what's coming towards you. And there's no doubt it's been a tough slog.

13:01 You just have to be resilient and find a way of pulling through it. It somewhat reminds me of the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo, who was being pounded by French cannons, and he walked into his officers' tent 1 evening and said, gentlemen, it's tough pounding out there, but let's see who can pound the longest. It's kind of that sort of attitude now, it's like, okay, we just, you have to find, not just Northern Shield, but all the juniors, be resilient and find a way to fight through this. So it's a challenging time for sure, but we feel we're well prepared. And it's not a matter of, you could just crawl into your trenches right now and hunker down, but we think it's important to keep chipping away at the advancements of the projects, not only for simply the notion of advancing the projects, but obviously to keep shareholder interest. So it's tough times, but you just have to find a way to be resilient to all this and still progress.

14:03 That makes sense. Let's actually zoom in on the investment thesis for Northern Shield. So now obviously a lot of investors like speculating companies that have kind of defined resource because it's easy to calculate the discount between market value, It's in the ground. But as a greenfield explorer, how should a potential investor today be evaluating Northern Shield? Well, you're right. I mean, all investors need to be careful, carefully or all explorers need to be carefully evaluated, especially in these markets that we're in right now. And Northern Shield is an early-stage project. So exploring areas that have never been explored. And it's at a risky stage of exploration in an already risky, weighted industry. So it all phases of exploration in this game. Obviously, investors need to do their homework, but you know, in the business world, risk is directly related to reward and potential investors need to decide their capacity, their appetite for that reward risk ratio.

15:07 But at whatever stage it's really what keeps investors, you know, keep coming back to the exploration industry is that potential for you reward, whatever multitude it is. And there's a few industries that you can get that sort of return on your investment. And since we're working in Newfoundland, let's take a local example. You look at Newfound Gold, Would you rather be an investor in new found Gold prior to their discovery or in one of those that acquired the land after the discovery? And these are all good companies. I think a lot of them are going to have success,

15:43 but it's often a big difference between being the first one in there, one of the early ones in there and making that discovery.

15:53 And for some people, no, they'll prefer to come in at later on, but others, you just have to look at those returns and that's what keeps us motivated and keeps shareholders interested as well. We were not the first one into the Burn Peninsula, but we have carved out what we think is quite a unique project. While other Gold companies sort of largely packed up and left that area, we've been slowly advancing our understanding of who's seller in the general area. And we keep finding more Gold, even on a very low budget the last year, we keep advancing it. And I think that's critical for shareholders to keep an eye on is the advancement of the project.

16:42 And we are also still exploring the property And that should be meaningful to the investors because some CEOs will tell you that dropping the property is the hardest thing to do. Others will tell you it's the easiest thing to do. It's hard not to sometimes get married to your project. But to me, I have actually always found it a relatively easy decision to drop a project because that means you're no longer spending money on it. And so it's actually easy to drop a project. We did that in several places, including if it's our talk in Greenland, when Northern Shield went back to Greenland in 2013, We did a spectacular Nickel project, high-grade Nickel on surface, very good VTAM anomaly,

17:24 drilled it and came up essentially with nothing, even though we had high-grade on surface. I won't get into details about the geophysics and how that was a little bit misleading, but the bottom line is, our chief geologist at the end of the day plotted up all the data, looked at the geochemistry, looked at the plots and threw it in front of me and said, hey, there's no Nickel deposit here. The chemistry tells you that. And I was like, okay, that's it. Go home. And we even had shareholders saying, no, go back, give it another shot. I was like, no, the data, the science is saying

18:01 it's not there, so it's not there. In other circumstances, I mean, High Bank Lake was a great project. It wasn't so much the technical merits that made us drop, but we saw that in the, and High Bank Lake was discovered before the Ring of Fire, 7 years before the Ring of Fire. You know, we realised that, you know, infrastructure was not going to be built in that area for some time to come. We decided to pull out and that was a hard decision. It was the right one. If I or our geologist didn't think the project had merit, we wouldn't be pounding away on it. The fact that we are, I would hope would give them some encouragement because otherwise we'd drop it. We like very much what we see. I've been spending a lot of time down there, both with the prospectors and the geologists, understanding the prospect and going up prospecting and finding some Gold. So I'm investing a lot of time in it myself to keep up to speed with what's happening in that area. And I think also if you just look at our past, I mean, we've had a lot of joint ventures with some major mining companies or South32 with Huckleberry in Quebec, 2 joint ventures with Impala from South Africa, including on the High Bank Lake project.

19:27 We've had TEC come in as an investor, HADD Bank come in as an investor. So that's, you know, when you're getting these major companies coming in either as partners on the ground or as shareholders, I think it's a good stamp of approval that we're doing something right. I'd say this early stage exploration is the risky end. But we think that's where, you know, the dial can be moved at the end of the day. And we very much like where we see a root seller heading. Nice. I always like to wrap up these kind of interviews with the same question. That's what are you and what should investors be most excited about at Northern Shield in 2024? I think we now say we've done a lot of desktop work and fieldwork understanding, relooking at a whole bunch of different datasets.

20:17 The last drill campaign was a small campaign, but we found a lot more Gold than we did the first drilling. And we basically now have a good understanding of where we should be, the overall structural and the model for the mineralization at Root & Cellar. And I think the next major drill program at Root & Cellar is going to start getting us into the centre of the system. And it is a very large footprint. It's maybe an alkaline or sub-alkaline related systems, which are quite rare. And they have both the size potential and grade potential. And I think it's very different than the other epithermal occurrences that are currently known on the Bern Peninsula. We're very excited for the next big drill program at Boone. So we think that's going to be a key turning point in our history.

21:08 Awesome. Well, Ian, thanks so much for joining me today. I'm looking forward to seeing what this year brings. You bet. Thanks very much for having me.