Shipping executive Michael Bell had the idea to design and construct the world’s first ice-breaking bulk carrier, the MV Arctic.Courtesy of the Family
Michael Bell, who died in Ottawa on May 17 at age 90, was a dynamic shipping executive and original thinker who fell in love with the Arctic while working on a major project there.
Little Cornwallis Island held a rich deposit of lead and zinc, and Cominco, the company in control of it, wanted to know how to ship up to 300,000 tons of concentrate a year from its mine. Plotting a route from the island to shipping destinations appears deceptively simple on a map, but in reality this is ice-choked water where only a specially strengthened ship could get through.
Mr. Bell had just been made a senior vice-president at Fednav, a Montreal-based shipping company with experience operating ships in the Canadian Arctic. He was in charge of planning how to ship the ore out.
Fednav had helped Cominco import the equipment to construct and operate Polaris, its mine there, including mining equipment and the processing plant, as well as devising a way to store the concentrate, and a method of loading it into the holds of ships. In addition, Fednav delivered accommodation for workers, a plant to generate electrical power, and the material to build an airstrip.
Although the mine operated year-round, the concentrate it produced could only be shipped out in August and September. In order to widen that window, Mr. Bell had the idea to design and construct the world’s first ice-breaking bulk carrier, the MV Arctic, which was able to operate from July to October.
Adding fuel to this commercial development was a policy push by the federal minister of science and technology, Jeanne Sauvé (the future Governor-General), to use government money to encourage expansion in many areas, including the North. The program seemed custom-built to ensure Cominco’s production in the High Arctic would be shipped to world markets.
"When Madame Sauvé made this pronouncement, it was clear that she was telling Canadians to get off their butt and do something. So we decided to focus on that," Mr. Bell told an interviewer years later.
The mine on Little Cornwallis Island operated successfully for two decades, closing in 2002. Mr. Bell’s work there kindled in him a fascination with the Canadian Arctic, and he spent many years promoting other Arctic projects, in particular the year-round shipment of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the Arctic.
Michael Hume Bell was born in Nottingham, England, on Dec. 12, 1929. His father, Geoffrey, was a headmaster at a British public school (known in North America as a private school) and his mother, Margaret (née Carewe), was born in Montreal. Michael went to Cambridge to study engineering, but changed his mind and took a degree in geography instead.
After university, he did two years of compulsory military service. Mr. Bell played rugby for the Army and once played against the All Blacks, the famous New Zealand team. His team lost.
From there, he went to Yale University, in the United States, on a year-long Mellon scholarship. When the academic year ended he and his English wife, Rosemary Ann (née Wilce-Taylor), moved to Montreal, where he worked for Saguenay Terminals, the shipping subsidiary of Alcan, the Canadian aluminum company.
When he joined Fednav, in Montreal, in 1965, he travelled the world picking up sugar contracts on one continent and coal contracts on another. The company operated a significant fleet, and it was his job to keep the ships filled with paying cargo. Mr. Bell was a highly energetic person whom one colleague described as “a force of nature.”
One project involved shipping newsprint from the Canadian International Paper plant at Dalhousie, N.S., and other east coast ports, to Britain and bringing cargo back.
Mr. Bell and his colleagues at Fednav hired a naval architect to design a vessel that allowed the paper to be driven on and off, instead of being loaded and unloaded by crane, which would save time and labour. At the other end, British cars were driven on for transport back across the Atlantic. The system was called Ro-Ro, short for Roll-on Roll-off. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a 1972 article in The Globe and Mail on the Fednav project as one of the first uses of the expression “Ro-Ro” as an abbreviation for “Roll-on, Roll-off.”
Later in his career, Mr. Bell became president of Navios, a subsidiary of Fednav. Around 1990 he left Navios and went into a series of entrepreneurial businesses. All of them were successful, except for a dealership arrangement with Jaguar, the British carmaker.
One of his most successful business ventures came from a chance meeting in a bar in the early 1990s. The man he was chatting with did sleep studies and described how recording each subject’s sleep turned out enormous reams of paper. Mr. Bell suggested he put the studies on an optical disk. That was the start of a profitable friendship.
The company they formed was called Melville Diagnostics, named after Melville Island in the High Arctic.
“If I ever sell this Melville idea, I will take you to the High Arctic,” he told his family at the time, recalls his daughter Pippa Bell Ader. The company was a success, and he took his family to the Arctic twice, once in 1993 and again in 2015.
Michael Bell, centre, with his daughters Pippa and Alexa in the Eastern Canadian Arctic in 2015.Courtesy of the Family
In the last 25 to 30 years of his life, Michael Bell was continually promoting projects that involved opening up the Arctic. He wrote many op-ed pieces for newspapers, including one in 2018 in which he proposed a pipeline from Alberta and Saskatchewan to Hudson Bay to get landlocked Canadian oil to international markets.
“Canada could economically and safely ship oil from Alberta by pipeline to Hudson Bay, where it would be picked up by tanker for transport over the top of Quebec and Newfoundland and delivered to the East Coast – and ultimately the rest of the world,” Mr. Bell wrote.
Mr. Bell filed his final op-ed on the Arctic last fall. He was working on other ideas until weeks before he died.
He leaves his daughters, Pippa and Alexa; his brother, John; and his longtime partner, Anne Burnett.