Politicians from the Northwest Territories and companies trying to open new mines are among the attendees at a major mining convention in Toronto this week.
PDAC – the convention of the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada – began on Sunday and runs until the end of Wednesday at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
It’s an annual event generally considered unmissable by northerners trying to encourage mining and exploration in the NWT.
“The NWT is at a pivotal moment in its mining history,” said the territory’s industry minister, Caitlin Cleveland, in a statement as she travelled to the convention.
“With immense resource potential and a commitment to modernizing our regulatory framework, we are working to provide the certainty, clarity and predictability that investors need, while ensuring responsible development in full partnership with Indigenous governments.”
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This year, part of the NWT’s message involves pointing to the disruption caused by the United States’ imposition of tariffs not just on Canada, but also China, which has responded by choking the export of critical minerals like tungsten.
While China has now further restricted tungsten exports to the West, a tungsten project owned by Fireweed Metals on the NWT-Yukon border is reputed to contain one of the largest deposits of the metal on Earth.
Cleveland also highlighted China’s export ban on germanium, used in the likes of semiconductors and fibre optics, which can also be found in the NWT.
“These known deposits already position us as a cornerstone of North America’s critical mineral supply chain,” the minister stated.
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“However, with much of our territory still unexplored, the potential for new discoveries is enormous, offering even greater opportunities for resource development.”
The territory’s message to PDAC this year involves stability accessing critical minerals compared to China and elsewhere, and stability getting projects through northern regulatory processes.
Mining firms have spent years criticizing the regulatory layers they must negotiate to get a mine open, often quoting estimates of 10 to 15 years or beyond for any project to actually get off the ground.
Advocates of that regulatory system say it’s needed to protect the North and its residents from adverse consequences, pointing to the likes of Giant Mine – now one of Canada’s most toxic properties, a federally owned remediation effort costing taxpayers more than $4 billion – as the outcome when not enough scrutiny is applied.
Cleveland has also made the point that the NWT’s regulatory system has to include the voices of multiple Indigenous governments.
“Our system isn’t hard or impossible or anything like that. It’s different, because we have an expectation that our Indigenous governments sit at the table and our Indigenous governments have meaningful participation,” she told a separate northern affairs conference in Toronto last month.
Even so, at PDAC this week, Cleveland will deliver the message that the NWT has “heard the feedback” about certainty in permitting and is taking action.
“Our goal is to establish a clear, stable and predictable regulatory system,” she stated on Friday, “one that minimizes uncertainty and gives investors the confidence to make long-term commitments in the NWT.”
Indigenous governments like the Tłı̨chǫ Government are also represented at PDAC, as are regular MLAs – through Robert Hawkins, chair of a committee on economic development – and northern mining companies like Fireweed Metals, Fortune Minerals, Gold Terra, Li-FT and Pine Point.
