This article originally appeared in The Hill Times.
By Heather Exner-Pirot, June 16, 2025
As the world’s second-largest country, Canada, in theory, has the world’s second-largest mineral bounty. But we also have difficult geography and burdensome processes.
In the past few decades, we’ve punched well below our weight, losing market share across a variety of critical minerals and products. Canada has unfulfilled mining potential.
The silver lining is that as our allies and trading partners look to secure their raw material needs—for the digital economy, the energy transition, defence supply chains, you name it—Canada still has vast untapped reserves that it can develop to satisfy those needs. With just 41 million people, we have more than we could ever use ourselves. We can be that arsenal of democracy, providing the critical minerals needed for our allies’ supply chains.
This begs the question: why aren’t we a bigger player already?
Growing the mining sector is not as easy as deciding to dig up more rocks. The industry is highly competitive and mining is capital intensive, often requiring long timelines to realize returns. The past decade has seen relatively low investment into the sector: global capital expenditures in mining are still well off their 2013 record, even though the world’s population has grown by over a billion humans since.
Suppressed commodity prices, high regulatory burdens, and geopolitical volatility have spooked many investors. According to S&P Global, the average time to build new mines around the world increased to 17.9 years for new mines coming online in 2020-23—a significant jump of more than five years for mine projects started 15 years ago. Canada is not the slowest jurisdiction, but it’s close. At any rate, the biggest competition for capital is from other sectors, not other mining jurisdictions.
In some commodities, where the market is healthy, Canada is attracting investment and is growing. While Canada produces more than 60 minerals and metals in almost 200 mines across the country, the value is disproportionately in a handful of commodities. Gold, potash, and coal lead the way, with iron ore, copper, and nickel coming in behind. Diamonds and uranium fill in much of the rest. We could expand market share by improving the regulatory and tax competitiveness for these products, and ensuring fair benefits for Indigenous nations impacted by development.
These GDP-driving commodities are not the critical minerals we focus on politically; battery and defence metals are more likely to preoccupy bureaucrats and politicians. In fact, most of the mineral products with supply chain risk have small global markets. In many cases, China has been able to secure market dominance through export restrictions, price controls, strategic investments, and predatory pricing.
China’s greatest leverage is not on the production of critical minerals, but on their processing. And that is a gap Canada should seek to fill proactively.
Securing supply chains for niche metals may not be economic drivers. They may even require the government to offer price supports. But where they are essential to our and our allies’ supply chain needs, we should fill the gap where we are able to do so. Amongst NATO’s list of defence-critical raw materials, Canada is well positioned to fill almost all of them, in particular aluminum, cobalt, germanium, gallium, tungsten, titanium, graphite, platinum, and some rare earths. Either we are already a producer, or we produced them in the past, or they are by-products of things we produce today.
The most important place for Canadian governments to intervene is midstream processing, where the market is most manipulated and where our supply chains are most vulnerable. Strategies such as equity, subsidies, contracts for difference, feed-in tariffs, and stockpiles have all been proposed, and in some cases applied. The right tool will vary depending on the market and the stage of the product required (e.g. raw, processed, intermediate, finished). As such, we should develop many tools, and industry and government should work together to apply them most efficiently.
Being a mining superpower isn’t just about mining the most. It’s also about having the ability to supply the material needs of our allies in a reliable and secure manner.
Canada is lucky that it has the choice to be able to produce, process, and sell more critical minerals. But it still needs to choose to do so.
Heather Exner-Pirot is director of energy, natural resources, and environment at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
