{"id":141467,"date":"2025-09-13T17:22:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-13T17:22:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/141467\/"},"modified":"2025-09-13T17:22:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-13T17:22:10","slug":"ottawa-is-counting-on-copper-to-be-a-nation-builder-and-canada-has-to-play-catch-up-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/141467\/","title":{"rendered":"Ottawa is counting on copper to be a nation builder \u2014 and Canada has to play catch-up"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ottawa’s list of fast-tracked “nation-building” projects includes<\/a> the development of\u00a0two copper mines\u00a0\u2014 to source one of the world’s most important natural resources as global demand soars\u00a0and supply challenges persist.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Such projects “must strengthen Canada’s autonomy, our resilience and our security. It must have clear benefits for Canadians,” said Prime Minister Mark Carney during the Thursday announcement.<\/p>\n

Enter copper, the world’s third-most widely used metal and a conduit for all things electrical. The\u00a0federal government is recommending regulatory approval for the\u00a0McIlvenna Bay Foran Copper Mine Project<\/a> in Saskatchewan, and an expansion<\/a> of the Red Chris Mine in northwestern\u00a0B.C.<\/p>\n

The critical mineral is used to build electric vehicles and other green energy\u00a0products. But demand is skyrocketing<\/a> amid the global boom of data centres, which house the hardware<\/a> that powers artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

Canada is\u00a0“a major mining power, and copper is one of the most important natural resources of this century,” said Vince Beiser, the Vancouver-based author of\u00a0Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future.<\/p>\n

“All of our digital gadgets need electricity. How does electricity travel? How does it get from the dam or the solar power farm to your home? It travels on copper,” he said.<\/p>\n

Canada is home to copper mines, refineries and a smelter. But the country has fallen behind on producing and exporting copper over the last decade, and even the accelerated projects might be too little\u00a0too late, according to experts who spoke with CBC News.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A small piece of the pie<\/p>\n

The metal is one of the chess pieces caught in the crossfire of the U.S.-China trade war. While copper prices have been rising over the last several years, they spiked and stayed elevated\u00a0earlier this summer<\/a> when the Trump administration threatened a tariff on raw copper.<\/p>\n

Eventually, it instead imposed a 50 per cent levy<\/a> on semi-finished copper products\u00a0\u2014 sparing countries like Canada from the worst of the damage, but hitting\u00a0Chinese refiners that account for roughly half<\/a> of the world’s copper-smelting capacity.<\/p>\n

At least one federal official has pointed to Chinese dominance of the copper market as reason why Ottawa is trying to accelerate\u00a0its metal\u00a0production.<\/p>\n

Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson says Canada has a role to play in copper production “as a democratic country,” and accuses\u00a0Beijing of manipulating copper prices.<\/p>\n

“We have an opportunity to take the cards out of autocrats’ hands and put those cards in Canada’s hand,” Hodgson said Thursday on CBC Radio, arguing that “others” are using copper as a “tool of coercion.”<\/p>\n

\"TheTeck’s Highland Valley copper mine is pictured in the B.C. Interior on March 26, 2017. (Jonathan Hayward\/The Canadian Press)<\/p>\n

Though China has a\u00a0“stranglehold” on rare-earth minerals, it doesn’t have “quite as commanding a position” with copper,\u00a0despite its strength in processing and refining,\u00a0according to Beiser.<\/p>\n

“This is another reason why I think\u00a0it does make sense for Canada to try to strengthen their hand in this particular realm because, hey, we’ve got copper, we’ve got copper mines. We also have copper refineries,” he said.<\/p>\n

Supply challenges<\/p>\n

However, Canada is a relatively small piece of the global copper puzzle, making up just two\u00a0per cent of global production, according to Dennis da Silva, a senior portfolio manager at Middlefield who analyzes the metals and mining sectors.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“Globally speaking, most of the growth that could come in the copper space, in fact, is outside of Canada,” said da Silva, adding that the federal government has targeted “perhaps the only relevant projects for Canada that could be built.”<\/p>\n

Recently, several Canadian mining company have prioritized\u00a0copper over other commodities.\u00a0Barrick\u00a0Mining, formerly known as Barrick Gold, recently sold its last gold mine in Canada for $1.1 billion as it shifts its focus to its copper portfolio.<\/p>\n

That push was led by Barrick CEO Mark Bristow, who projected earlier this year<\/a> that about 30 per cent of the company’s production will be copper\u00a0\u2014 roughly equivalent to the increase it expects for its gold portfolio.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the news that the U.K. mining multinational Anglo American plans to acquire<\/a>\u00a0the Canadian mining company Teck Resources for its copper operations rippled through the industry earlier this week.<\/p>\n

The deal, subject to shareholder and regulatory approval, would be one of the biggest mining mergers in the sector’s history, and according to da Silva, “highlights the dearth of shovel-ready projects” in the supply-challenged copper sector.<\/p>\n

Production has declined ‘significantly’<\/p>\n

Copper production in Canada has declined “quite significantly” over the last few decades, according to\u00a0Photinie Koutsavlis, vice-president of economic affairs and climate change at the Mining Association of Canada.<\/p>\n

Between 2014 and 2023, it dropped\u00a0by more than\u00a022 per cent<\/a>, according to data from Natural Resources Canada. Over the same period,\u00a0copper exports declined\u00a0by roughly 24 per cent, says Statistics Canada.<\/p>\n

“We’ve definitely lost our footing in our global rankings on copper,” Koutsavlis said. “Hopefully these projects are a good start at reversing that trend.”<\/p>\n

The U.S. makes up about five\u00a0per cent of global copper production, while Chile is the world’s biggest producer at\u00a030 per cent. Canada could potentially make up seven\u00a0to eight per cent of production over the next 20 years, according to da Silva.<\/p>\n

But Canada would have “needed to kind of start putting these things on the drawing board probably five years ago in order to properly match the expectations for demand,” he said.<\/p>\n

“You can imagine how long it takes to find it, prove it out, justify the economics, and then ultimately build it, turn on the switch and bring it into production.”<\/p>\n

\"CopperCopper is cast in a furnace at the Canadian Copper Refinery, a copper and precious metal refinery in Montreal, on July 25. (Christinne Muschi\/The Canadian Press)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ottawa’s list of fast-tracked “nation-building” projects includes the development of\u00a0two copper mines\u00a0\u2014 to source one of the world’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":140637,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[45,49,48,46],"class_list":["post-141467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141467\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}