Who Stands to Win in Poilievre’s Canada: Mining Companies
In 2021, the federal government established an official list of 34 critical minerals and metals—including nickel, cobalt, copper and lithium—that are essential to Canada’s economic security and our role in global supply chains. They’re found in almost every province and territory and used in products like smartphones, photovoltaic cells, semiconductors and electric vehicles. Their extraction is the missing link in Canada’s multi-billion-dollar investment in EV battery plants: the whole idea is for Canada itself to supply those critical minerals, not import them. But, for the most part, the deposits remain in the ground. According to the mining industry, that has to do with issues under government control, including slow permitting, lack of infrastructure and confusion around Indigenous rights in areas with deposits.
The Ring of Fire—a huge deposit of critical minerals in northern Ontario—has come to symbolize the problem. Since its discovery nearly 20 years ago, nothing has been extracted from its boggy depths. The region has also come to symbolize Pierre Poilievre’s aggressive promises about fast-tracking mineral exploitation. He’s sworn that he’ll immediately greenlight federal permits in the region. He’ll also repeal Bill C-69, the Impact Assessment Act, introduced by the Liberals in 2019 as a new framework for evaluating the environmental, economic and social effects of resource projects. Critics have blamed it for slow-rolling new extraction ventures, and Poilievre has sworn to replace it with an approval framework that will kickstart the jobs faster.
That would mark a major shift in federal policy. Under the existing process, it took five years just to define terms of reference for the Ring of Fire’s assessment—in other words, to create a plan for how to evaluate, without actually beginning that work. Repealing Bill C-69 would also stand as a victory for Canada’s mining industry and financiers, likely to result in a boom in new projects and faster approvals of long-planned ones. To pull it off, he’ll need the co-operation of Indigenous peoples, on whose lands so many resource deposits are located.
But if Poilievre’s aim is to negotiate deals swiftly, he has a new card to play: Donald Trump. Critical minerals have become the crack cocaine of global geopolitics, their value trampling traditional alliances. American allies watched recently as Trump put the boots to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on camera, demanding a cut of proceeds from Ukraine’s critical minerals as payback for America’s support in its war with Russia. Poilievre had better prepare himself, because it’s not hard to imagine Trump subjecting Canada to a similar shakedown: America gets our critical minerals in exchange for Trump easing tariffs. The best way to avoid it is to get our own shovels in the ground first.
