Canada Mining's Moment is Here, What the Capital Investment is Signalling.

Somewhere in northern Ontario, a geologist is reading core samples that could change a small town's economy for the next twenty years. In Nunavut, a millwright is finishing his third week on rotation at a gold mine that did not exist four years ago. In central BC, a former mill worker just started her first shift as a haul truck operator on a mine site that will run for twenty-two years.

None of this happens without money and right now, the money is moving into Canada.

Canada sits on one of the most significant mineral endowments on earth. Nickel, copper, cobalt, lithium, graphite, gold, uranium, chromite, palladium. The list reads like a procurement list for every technology the next thirty years will require, from EV batteries to defence systems to AI data centre infrastructure.

What Canada did not always have is a federal government willing to treat mining as a strategic priority rather than an environmental regulatory problem to manage.

That changed in 2025.

Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the first five major nation-building projects in September 2025, committing to reduce approval timelines to a maximum of two years and referring them to the newly created Major Projects Office for coordinated funding and review. By November, seven more initiatives had been added, bringing the combined value of the two announcements to more than $116 billion according to government figures.

Mining sits at the centre of the list. The first batch included the expansion of the Red Chris gold and copper mine south of Dease Lake, BC, a project the Major Projects Office says will increase Canada's annual copper production by more than 15%. The second batch added the Sisson tungsten mine in New Brunswick, Nouveau Monde Graphite's Matawinie mine in Quebec, and the Crawford nickel project in Ontario, each chosen, in the government's framing, because their impacts would be amplified as part of broader national strategies to boost Canada's competitiveness.

The government projects the second batch of initiatives alone will represent more than $56 billion in new investment and support 68,000 jobs, on top of the $60 billion announced in September.

Where the Money Is Coming From

Announcements are easy. Delivery is harder. Capital is the signal and the capital picture for Canadian mining in 2025 and 2026 is more substantive than the headlines suggest, because it is coming from multiple directions at once.

The Federal Government

At the 2025 Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada convention, the government announced a two-year extension of the 15% Mineral Exploration Tax Credit for investors in flow-through shares, carrying it through March 2027 and later confirming it in the November 2025 budget. That extension is expected to provide $110 million to support exploration investment across Canada, including in discovering new mineral deposits, developing mining sites, and driving regional economic growth, particularly in Indigenous, northern, and remote communities.

The federal budget also introduced a $2 billion Critical Minerals Sovereign Fund to make equity investments, provide loan guarantees, and enter offtake agreements for critical minerals projects. Export Development Canada and the Canada Infrastructure Bank are providing direct project financing, including to the Generation Mining copper and palladium project near Marathon, Ontario, a nearly one billion dollar mine projected to run for thirteen years in a town of three thousand.

Who Believes in Canadian Mining More: The World or Canada?

In 2024, foreign multinational enterprises accounted for 51% of all capital investment in Canada's mining sector, according to Natural Resources Canada. Canadian multinationals contributed 40%, and domestic firms without foreign operations made up the remaining 9%. Foreign firms are are the majority builders of Canadian mining.

The trend accelerated in 2025. Statistics Canada reports the mining, oil and gas sector led foreign direct investment growth with an $11.5 billion increase, driven mostly by foreign owners reinvesting the earnings from their existing Canadian operations rather than taking profits home. Foreign investors are looking at their Canadian mining assets and choosing to double down.

Qatar's sovereign wealth fund put US$500 million into Ivanhoe Mines for a 4% stake. Glencore, Nippon Steel, and POSCO acquired Teck's Elk Valley coal business for a total enterprise value of roughly US$9 billion. Manara Minerals, the joint venture between Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and Ma'aden, holds 10% of Vale Base Metals, the company that owns Voisey's Bay and the Sudbury nickel operations. Japan's state metals agency JOGMEC and trading house Marubeni took options on stakes in Hudbay projects near Flin Flon, Manitoba, funded through exploration commitments, and Sumitomo Metal Mining bought 9.9% of FPX Nickel in BC.

Behind the equity comes state-backed financing. Germany's export credit agency issued a letter of intent for up to US$500 million in loan guarantees for the Troilus copper-gold project in Quebec, contingent on a long-term offtake agreement with German smelter Aurubis, part of a debt package of up to US$700 million.

Behind the financing comes a queue of commitments. Canadian and Japanese companies signed more than CAD $1 billion in critical minerals agreements at Canada's largest-ever trade mission to Tokyo. France, Italy, Norway, Luxembourg, Australia, and Ukraine all signed offtake arrangements and co-investments under Canada's Critical Minerals Production Alliance. IFM Investors, the Australian pension-backed fund, says the right policy settings could unlock up to C$10 billion in Canadian investment over the next decade.

Equity, guarantees, and purchase commitments are not the same thing, but they point the same direction. Foreign governments and their investment vehicles are locking up positions in Canadian minerals through every channel available to them.

They are doing it because they need a reliable trade partner. Eighty percent of Japan's rare earth imports come from China. When Beijing tightened export controls on gallium and germanium in 2023 and expanded restrictions to heavy rare earth elements through 2025, the governments of Japan, Germany, France, and South Korea looked at their own supply chains and saw a single point of vulnerability. Canada, with its stable jurisdiction, rule of law, and enormous mineral endowment, became the alternative they needed.

What Canada's Own Money Is Doing

Canada's eight largest pension funds, the Maple 8, manage more than $2.5 trillion in assets. The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board alone held $781 billion at the end of 2025. OMERS has a portfolio 55% weighted to US investments. PSP is about 41% US. CPPIB has $366 billion in the United States and $98 billion in Canada. The funds are not invested in Canadian mining at any scale that reflects either the opportunity or the urgency.

In 2024, when more than 90 Canadian business and financial leaders signed an open letter calling for pension funds to invest more domestically, the funds pushed back hard. Their argument was fiduciary: their obligation is to the beneficiaries, not to a national industrial agenda.

The argument is technically correct and strategically awkward. The same pension funds whose members are losing jobs in the trade war, whose members work in the mills and plants affected by tariff retaliation, are parking their retirement savings in the US market while foreign sovereign wealth funds build the mines that will employ the next generation of Canadian workers.

HOOPP's chief investment officer told Reuters in March 2026 that the capital is available right now and they are waiting for the right opportunities to manifest themselves. OMERS says it sees significant opportunities to advance transformative, nation-building projects. PSP's CEO asked publicly whether her fund has been underleveraging its home-ice advantage. The CPPIB CEO said unity and coordination will initiate the nation-building projects Canada requires.

They are opening the door. They have not yet walked through. (Friday's article is on what these pension funds are looking for when choosing investments for Canadians' retirement years. Subscribe to the newsletter.)

The gap between what foreign governments are doing and what Canadian pension funds are doing is a sovereignty story similar to the brand sovereignty series. The minerals are Canadian. The jobs will be Canadian. The environmental footprint will be Canadian. But the capital that makes it possible, and therefore the returns on that capital, are flowing to Tokyo, Doha, Oslo, and Berlin, not to the 22 million Canadians paying into the CPP every paycheque.

The federal government's November budget set a target of mobilizing over $1 trillion in new investment over five years. The pension funds are the most logical domestic source. The projects now exist. Natural Resources Canada's Major Projects Inventory counts nearly 140 mining developments planned or proposed through 2034, worth a combined $117.1 billion, including $72.4 billion in critical minerals projects. The regulatory streamlining is underway. The question the pension funds are waiting to answer is whether the projects are bankable enough to satisfy fiduciary duty without political pressure.

Canada is still deciding.

Canada's Unique Financier of Mine Builds

While the pension funds deliberate, Wheaton Precious Metals, a Vancouver company, has committed more than a billion dollars to building Canadian mines over the past four years, a level of direct commitment to the sector that no domestic pension fund has reportably matched. It uses a streaming model that gives mining companies large upfront payments in exchange for the right to purchase a fixed share of future gold or silver production at a discount. The mining company gets the capital without giving up equity or control. Wheaton gets a long-term price guarantee on future production.

The results are significant. Wheaton provided US$125 million to the Goose Mine in Nunavut, which reached commercial production in October 2025 and is now fully operational. It committed US$441 million to Artemis Gold's Blackwater mine in BC's Cariboo region, a 22-year operation that created 825 direct full-time jobs during construction and 450 permanent positions. In November 2025, Wheaton put up US$300 million to keep the Hemlo gold mine in northern Ontario operating under new ownership. And it has committed C$240 million to Generation Mining's Marathon copper and palladium project, with construction expected to start in 2027.

The Tariff Effect

The tariff environment that threatened to hurt Canadian industry has accelerated the case for domestic mining investment.

Gold became Canada's second largest export after crude oil in 2025, with exports to the UK alone surging 76%, a nominal increase of $17 billion. RBC's economists found that stronger non-US demand, particularly from the UK and driven primarily by gold, emerged as the critical offset to weaker US trade flows under tariffs.

In an uncertain trade environment, the insulation gold provides matters to investors.

The Jobs Are Here. The Workers Are Not

According to the Mining Industry Human Resources Council, mining and quarrying employment has increased over 56% since 2022, with September 2025 showing a record level of employment that surpassed 100,000 people. The sector is not waiting for the Ring of Fire road or the next federal announcement to create jobs. It is already at historic employment levels and running short of workers to fill them.

MiHR's 10-year labour market outlook projects the industry will need to hire between 191,000 and 256,000 new workers over the coming decade, accounting for growth, retirements, and turnover. This means how we educate our teens needs to change if they want good paying jobs. Trade income has outpaced white collar jobs consistently for a decade and schools still focus on university education as the most lucrative path. Things have changed and the schools need to catch up if Canadians are going to be positioned to fill these roles.

The federal Mining and Minerals Workforce Alliance, announced at PDAC in March 2026 and formally launched in June, is designed to bridge that gap, coordinating governments, industry, and training institutions with MiHR as the lead delivery organization. BC has its own piece of that bridge already built: the College of New Caledonia runs a Transition to Mining program that has trained displaced forestry workers from across the BC Interior alongside Indigenous learners and women. Heavy equipment operators move to haul trucks. Welders and millwrights move into mine maintenance. Electricians step into mine power systems.

It is a documented, funded transition, moving people from mill floors to mine sites. The Blackwater mine in BC alone created 825 direct construction jobs, built in partnership with the Lhoosk'uz Dené Nation, the Ulkatcho First Nation, and the Carrier Sekani First Nations. Its Phase 2 expansion adds another 1,500 direct construction jobs at peak and the mine will employ approximately 1,200 direct employees and contractors once complete.

At the Goose Mine in Nunavut, a Senior Multi Equipment Operator earns an estimated $118,508 annually, on a three-weeks-on, three-weeks-off fly-in rotation, with Kitikmeot Inuit, Nunavut Inuit, and Nunavut residents receiving priority hiring consideration.

These are not speculative jobs attached to a policy announcement. They exist now, and there are not enough qualified people to fill them.

Canadian mining stocks are returning to the spotlight in 2026, positioned for a potential new commodities supercycle tied to inflation hedging, energy transition demand, geopolitical supply-chain shifts, and rising gold and silver prices.

The International Energy Agency projects global demand for critical minerals to double by 2040. The long-term outlook remains constructive due to the energy transition, AI infrastructure build-out, and Western supply-chain diversification efforts. Canada's advantages in stable jurisdiction and resource endowment position its mining sector for potential outperformance.

This is Canada's moment. The minerals are here. The capital is moving. The workforce transition is underway. The federal government has, for the first time in a generation, aligned its regulatory and investment posture with the scale of the opportunity.

What happens next depends on how well Canada can deliver on what it is promising. The $116 billion in nation-building projects needs roads, power lines, and Indigenous partnerships to move from announcement to production. The labour shortage needs a training pipeline that does not exist at the required scale.

Nothing is guaranteed. But for the first time in a long time, the conditions are in place for Canadian mining to build something that lasts longer than the next commodity cycle.

The millwright in Nunavut knows. He just signed on for another rotation.

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Shannon Peel is a Brand Narrative & Communications Leader based in Vancouver, open to senior roles in brand strategy, marketing, or communications leadership.