National Post (National Edition)
WHY CANADA IS MISSING THE BOAT ON MINING – AND THE FUTURE.
The cost of electing a naïve and inept Liberal government has been inestimable, and our resource-blessed nation is about to miss the boat once more in the world of mining.
Mining built Canada, undergirds the economy, employs more Indigenous workers than any other sector, and pays the highest wages in the country. Canada is a centre of excellence in mining, which is why the world's biggest mining gathering — the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada, launched in 1932 — is once more about to take place this month, albeit virtually.
The buzz in the mining world these days is the new “gold rush,” or the extraction of the strategic materials that will be the backbone for technology and clean energy in the future. These include lithium, rare earth elements, cobalt, nickel and copper, among others. Canada — with the biggest piece of real estate on the planet with a free enterprise system — has plenty of all of these elements going for it, except that Ottawa thinks that mining, along with oil and gas, is a four-letter word.
Last week, U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order to secure America's supply chains, including for metals and minerals essential to making batteries for electric vehicles, semiconductors and computer chips, and pharmaceuticals. A year ago, former president Donald Trump signed a bilateral deal with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to prioritize their production.
The Americans have set aside millions to encourage this, but Trudeau has done nothing, including doing nothing about revising his job-killing Bill C-69 that impedes and strangles exploration or development. Even more embarrassing, Natural Resources Canada's website actually describes Canada's non-starter status: “While not a current producer … Canada is host to a number of advanced exploration projects and some of the largest reserves and resources (measured and indicated) of these metals, estimated at almost 15 million tonnes of rare earth oxides.”
In other words, Canada could be a contender, but it isn't.
Without a change of government, or attitudes, Canada will miss the boat as it has with LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) export projects. There should have been halfa-dozen or so, but instead only one is slowly underway in B.C., thanks to federal and provincial hindrance and unbridled Indigenous meddling.
As for strategic materials, only a handful of projects are underway when there should be dozens. The United States also blew this opportunity; it was the world's biggest producer of many of these until the 1990s when China got into gear and cornered, then manipulated, the market. In 2010, Beijing constricted supply of rare earths, increased prices, then reversed course to drop prices and undercut efforts everywhere else.
By 2019, China controlled 60 per cent of global production and the rest was shared between the United States, Myanmar, Australia and India. The world's largest rare earth mine remains in Nevada, and only a handful of early-stage mining projects exist in Quebec, Ontario and the Northwest Territories. One of the world's largest reserves of lithium exists in Northern Ontario but hasn't become a mine.
Fortunately, Canada does have enormous nickel, copper, lithium and cobalt capability, all critically important for the future, and there are processing and refining facilities underway. Next year, Saskatchewan will open a rare earth processing operation, and cobalt refineries for battery production exist in Ontario and Alberta.
But there should be dozens of mines, processing plants and exploration projects tapping into the U.S. Energy Department's US$160-million rare earths research and development program.
Canada has the resources, the brains, and the track record to accelerate the transition to the New Economy and to cleaner energy. But we are crippled by a useless political class that never ran a pop stand.