British Columbia has launched a critical minerals fund to back early stage projects in the province, Northern Miner reported, as the permitting argument between Ottawa, the provinces and Indigenous governments becomes the binding constraint on Canada’s minerals strategy.
The fund is small against the capital the sector needs, but it is aimed at the right gap: the pre feasibility stage where Canadian projects die slowly for want of a few million dollars of study money, years before the larger argument about mine permits begins. British Columbia holds copper, nickel and molybdenum assets that appear in every Western supply chain strategy document, and very few of them are permitted.
The announcement lands in the same week as the Cygnus merger, in which a Quebec explorer gave up its independence to a foreign producer for want of financing, two data points in the same story about the distance between Canada’s minerals rhetoric and its capital formation.