A big thanks is due to the Carney government for releasing its first federal budget on the eve of CIM’s latest Capital Projects Symposium in early November. The event was launched to focus on the practices and processes needed to get mining projects built, and Budget 2025 was great fuel for discussion.

It’s the first broad look at how this new government with its new leader intends to spend public money in this unfamiliar reality where mineral development projects and downstream processing are now understood to be geopolitical concerns.

Regular contributor Kelsey Rolfe gives an excellent overview of the federal spending plan, which includes a Critical Minerals Sovereign Fund to support such projects.

Johnna Muinonen, president of Dumont Nickel and a symposium panellist, was encouraged by the announcement of this fund, which could provide financial support to development projects such as the nickel project her company is trying to get built in Quebec. “I do think that the federal government needs to play a role if we want to get these minerals extracted from the ground,” she said.

Co-panellist of Muinonen, Alden Greenhouse, whose job as vice-president, critical and strategic minerals at Agnico Eagle is to help the company decide where it should spend its money, argued against acting on the ambition to try to build projects all along the minerals supply chain.

“One of the challenges we face in Canada is, yes, we have the resources, but we’re a small country with a small balance sheet, and you watch the U.S. putting billions and billions and billions of dollars into [critical minerals]—we just can’t do that,” he said.

Beyond the financial limitations, he said that we as a country also need to contend with the limits of our available workforce and access to energy. The answer he offered: “Focus.”

Speaking later that day as to how project proponents might position themselves to draw federal investment, Alison Manzer, a partner at law firm Cassels, Brock & Blackwell, had her own rallying call: “Defence.”

The budget, which includes a multi-billion-dollar Defence Industrial Strategy, explains that “defence spending entails investment in strategic assets—including dual-use infrastructure, advanced technologies and sovereign capabilities—that durably boost the economy’s productive capacity.”

The task for miners looking for financing, said Manzer, is to “figure out the political agenda and aim for the heart of it.” Given that world powers are jostling to secure supplies of key minerals and materials, the expansive concept of “sovereign capabilities” presents a wide target for those in the mineral resources sector ready to shoot their shot.

This latest Capital Projects Symposium boasted record attendance and, given all the energy being directed at getting projects under way, there should be much more to spark discussion when the symposium returns.