John McConnell's +40 years of mining experience is mostly in Canada's northern territories. John has been President & CEO of Victoria Gold since 2010 and has led the exploration, development, and financing of the Eagle Gold Mine in Canada's Yukon Territory. Eagle has been in production since 2019 and at full production will produce +200,000 ounces per year of gold.
Previously, he was President & CEO of Western Keltic Mines until it was acquired by Sherwood Copper; VP, NWT Projects for De Beers Canada primarily responsible for permitting and development of the Snap Lake Diamond Mine; Breakwater Resources Ltd in operations at the Nanisivik Zinc & Lead Mine on Baffin Island; and Strathcona Mineral Services Ltd.
Mr. McConnell has been recognized with the 2024 PDAC Viola R. MacMillan Award, and the 2023 AME Murray Pezim Award for the leadership, management, and financing of the Eagle Gold Mine, and the 2021 AME E.A. Scholtz Award for Excellence in Mine Development for his role in building the Eagle Gold Mine. A graduate of the Colorado School of Mines, with a B.Sc. in Mining Engineering Mr. McConnell is also a Director of Lahontan Gold Corp.
Replay transcript excerpt
And I'm looking forward to the last presentation, corporate presentation of the day. It's Victoria Gold. And as I said, they're a sponsor of the company. We're really close to the company. As I said, we're sharing an office in Vancouver. And I've been to the mine, John, 4 times, 3 times, 4 times. It's absolutely impressive operation. It's been running fairly smoothly recently. And mining is not easy. And you're going to give us an update on how you're doing and how you're building Victoria into a Yukon-focused gold producer and gold mega monster. It's a term I just came up with. John, thank you so much for coming. Cheers. How's that? Good afternoon, everyone. Nice to see a crowd. I assume everybody's sticking around for Lobo, not John McConnell. But anyway, I've got you. Thought I'd try and wake the crowd up with a little joke. You know, I have a 10-year-old daughter, so I have a lot of father-daughter jokes. And she's quite a witty little girl. So anyway, This guy has 2 cats. The first cat is named 123. And the second cat is named Unde Toi. He decides 1 day to have the cats in a swimming race. So he takes them out to the pool, and he puts them in the water, and he goes around to the other side of the pool, and he calls them. Which cat do you think won the race? Think about it. 1231. Undertoil hat sank. Works better in Paris. All right. I assume we're starting early, so I got lots of time. Oh, yeah. Tell me another 1. No. All right. So as Kai said, we're looking at building a mining company focused in the Yukon. And the reason we can do this is the Eagle asset is a large-scale asset with a long life. Current resource or reserve is 11 years but I'm pretty comfortable saying this mine will run for the next 25 years because I'll talk about how the deposit is open. We're...
