Good morning. My name is Carol, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Agnico Eagle Third Quarter Results 2017 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] At this time, I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Sean Boyd. Sir, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us on what is a busy day for all of you. Before we get into the slides, I'd just like to point out that there will be forward-looking statements in the presentation, so please read the cautionary language that's contained in the slide deck. We'll jump right in as far as the third quarter highlights. Very, very strong quarter both from a production standpoint and from a cost standpoint. We set a record quarterly production number of a little over 450,000 ounces at a total cash cost of $546 an ounce and our all-in sustaining costs continued to be below $800 an ounce. That quarterly production was driven by good solid performance on - across all of the mines, but particularly at our LaRonde mine, which has been producing gold since 1988. It had a quarterly record of production of 105,000 ounces and had also set a quarterly production record in September and that's essentially based on the higher gold rates that we have in the lower part of the mine, which we've been developing in for a number of years to get prepared to extract those higher-grade mining blocks. As a result of the strong quarter, we have, again, increased our production guidance for the full year, now expected to exceed 1.68 million ounces compared to the previous target of last quarter, which was 1.62 million ounces. And we slightly lowered our cost-per-ounce numbers, both our total cash costs and all-in sustaining costs by about $10 an ounce. On the project side, we continued to get very good performance in Nunavut, which is our large expansion of that platform, particularly at Meliadine, and we'll talk about the progress we've made at Meliadine with our cladding as we get…

[Operator Instructions] And your first question today comes from David Haughton from CIBC. Please go ahead.

You were talking at LaRonde about the unexpectedly high grade and obviously we saw that in the quarter, likely to come down again in the fourth quarter. How did that compare to your block model? Did it exceed your expectations as to what you'd encounter?

Particularly at a mine sequence period where we mined 3 high-grade stopes mostly in September. Grade for September was close to 7 grams per tonne. We've had some slight upgrade in some of the stopes, but mostly for these stopes, we certainly had more tonnage than planned originally before delineation. So the main impact was on the western side, tonnes and grades. In the other 2 stopes, it was mostly tonnes.

So I guess where I was going at is there a sort of a read through expectation of perhaps in either call that could improve your reserve calc next time you revisit it?

We've been mining in the area for the past year, 1.5 years and the reconciliation so far has been quite good. So at this stage, I wouldn't conclude that for now.

And just moving - thinking now about Lapa, obviously coming to the end of life, going to transition over - effectively over to LaRonde 5 for that capacity. How should we be thinking about that? Because you've got Lapa mining and stockpiling right now. Does it just then feed in as though it was coming from Zone 5?

Well, the whole year we've approached Lapa production on a quarter-by-quarter basis. And I think as we get into October, we've gone to a 4-day mining schedule. If this 4-day mining schedule is successful as we plan it, we're potentially looking at mining at a reduced rate also for two quarters next year. And we would process these tonnes in the first and second quarter and then just continue onwards after that with the production from Bousquet Zone 5.

And just thinking about the reshuffle of the CapEx at your development projects, just to give us a bit of an idea as to what we might be encountering. Say, at Meadowbank, how much should we be thinking about being spent in 2018? Is it like $150 million in the balance in '19? And I've got a similar question like that guidance on Amaruq - on Meliadine and Amaruq.

It's too early to say now, David. We're going through the budgeting and planning process in detail right now for 2018 and also the more detailed life of mine plan and a lot of that has to do with the schedule as well. And so I think what we'd like to do is take the time with our management team and our board to really run through those numbers and decide what makes sense given the preplanning for the schedule, but that would also at the same time reflect on our guidance for 2019 based on whether the start dates change.

Our next question comes from John Tumazos from John Tumazos Very Independent Research. Please go ahead.

Sean, I was going back in time looking at the 2007 column of my model. Since then, the stock price is about at 2007 levels. And gold production was 227,000 ounces at $748 gold back then. The gross profit has grown from about $2 to $5 a share, but the depreciation and interest expense and exploration and G&A and miscellaneous charges after gross profit have all arisen, so the earnings are little less, tax rate's higher, too. Do you think your earnings are understated because you're over-depreciating because only 1/3 of the Meliadine resource is called reserves looking forward a year or 2 and Odyssey and some of the zones at Malartic are not in reserves. I don't think you're managing the cash cost and ignoring total cost, but some of these other charges below the line are eating up the profit.

Yes, I don't think that - when you look at the reserve resource base, it's roughly 20 million ounces of reserve and 30 million ounces of resource. And as we get the production base more established in Nunavut and expand it and are able to open up the underground and get more access to drill it and move our resource into reserve, that certainly helps and also extend the mine life and that would essentially lower the depreciation charge. So that could potentially help us. I don't think we're understating earnings because of that. I think that's just our reality based on our access to drill it. And so we haven't sort of focused on trying to spend more on drilling or tightening up drill spacing. In fact, we went the opposite way at Meliadine where we thought it was best to invest in ramp rather than definition drilling over the last few years just to get things prepared for production. But I think that's our view on the balance of depreciation and resource reserve conversion.

So Sean, I'm just going to why your earnings haven't risen, the net income per share. The depreciation over 10 years went from $28 million to $550 million. And interest expense went from $3 million to $67 million, you don't have a lot of debt, then exploration, G&A - shares went up, but the company got bigger, too. The shares are not proportionate.

Yes, and I think as well when you look at that, we didn't do a lot of big M&A, so we weren't sort of loading up the balance sheet with a lot of capitalized assets through acquisition. And also on the flip side, we didn't, on a relative basis, although we had a write-down at Meadowbank, we haven't had the extent of write-downs that we've seen in the industry. So we have this depreciation charge that we have to, that's on the balance sheet, that were just reducing based on life of mine and production rate. So that's our reality for making good, solid investments. It's there, we take that charge. But I think our approach has been keep the share count down, try to add high-quality ounces to the production base, take a measured approach to M&A and reinvesting in the business and manage the risks. And I think we've done a pretty good job. As you know, we've talked about longevity, and looking back yesterday, we celebrated our 60th year in business and I would suggest that we're probably in the strongest position we've been in, in 60 years to sort of drive cash flow and production and manage our costs over the next several years.

[Operator Instructions] And our next question comes from Steve Butler from GMP Securities. Please go ahead.

On Amaruq, guys, you expect to book reserves at year-end, Sean, at Amaruq. I think the answer might be yes and/or would that be consistent with your mineable resource estimate that you previously provided to The Street earlier this year?

Yes, we expect to convert based on the drill results here at Amaruq and that would be sort of the open-pit portion that we're looking to do. I think we'll likely see based on some of the drillings maybe a potential increase in resource, but we're still doing that work and filing the results. But that's really been the focus is to understand the depth extent, tighten up some of the drilling in the pit, continue to work and refine the economic models on that and we'll have that out in February.

And then same question for Meliadine. I think when we were at the site there, I think a lot of the drilling's been focused on delineating the early mine plan of the underground at Meliadine. So is Meliadine looking at any reserve changes as in one of the materials you've been mostly - the drilling has been focused more in infill or mine plan?

Well, the delineation program will be repeated year-over-year. We're planning to convert anywhere between, I guess, 300,000 to 400,000 ounces per year.

We have no further questions in queue at this time. I'll turn the call back over to the presenters for closing remarks.

Thank you, operator, and thank you, everyone, for participating. We apologize for the sound quality. We've had a little bit of a technical hiccup here and it's not a function of a big party last night to celebrate our 60th anniversary. But thanks again, and look forward to seeing you all soon.

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.