Manitoba must do a much better job promoting mining activity in the province. The post-pandemic economic recovery will depend on it. More broadly, the eventual shift from gasoline to electric-powered cars across the world will generate huge demand for minerals required to manufacture EV batteries like nickel, copper, lithium, and cobalt—for most of which the province has ample deposits to develop.
This is not to say the provincial government is not doing anything to promote exploration and development. It deserves good marks for going out of its way to advance mining. It recognizes that mineral development is essential not just to the long-term prosperity of the north, but the entire provincial economy. However, it has an inconsistent policy record.
For example, the province is providing $300,000 to a mineral exploration company to help fund its drilling program in northeastern Manitoba. On January 7, BWR Resources announced it would be receiving funding from the Manitoba Mineral Development Fund once it received the proper licensing and permits.
Now, this development will be a boon for the Little Stull Lake area and the nearby Indigenous communities of Gods River and Gods Lake Narrows.
However, this is small potatoes. Consider the green-friendly mining bonanza that is required to support the green-friendly EV revolution just over the horizon.
It was only a few years ago that the federal government announced plans to designate the lowlands near Grand Rapids, between lakes Winnipeg and Winnipegosis, a national park. The problem is that it removed a 4,400-square-kilometre area from any development, including mining. The proposed park included the southern extension of the Thompson nickel belt that included feeder ore deposits which could have allowed mines in the Thompson region to remain open.
Manitoba has many irreplaceable ecosystems and pristine boreal forest that deserve preserving, but the province needs to work aggressively with Ottawa and affected Indigenous communities to balance ecological conservation with responsible economic development. Many remote northern Manitoba communities require these mining opportunities to survive and partake in the province’s prosperity. For many of the most isolated Indigenous communities in the region, these are once-in-a-generation opportunities. As far as Indigenous communities across Canada, Manitoba bands are some of the poorest.
The unfashionably un-green idea of plopping a national park on top of rich mineral deposits vital to the coming EV revolution is not a bad idea unique to Manitoba. In an isolated part of northwestern British Columbia, a rich cobalt and copper deposit was removed from development with talks of giving a World Heritage Site designation to the Windy Craggy region. One B.C. government source estimated the value of the metal at $15 billion in mines that had a minimum life of 50 years.
Ironically, the designation was done ostensibly for environmental reasons, but the cobalt mined in the region is again critical to electric vehicles, which the smarter green activists tout as the wave of the future.
As the new Biden government aggressively pushes its climate change agenda with a special focus on the electrification of vehicles, Manitoba is ideally positioned to provide those valuable minerals that will be required to build millions of batteries annually.
The federal and provincial governments need to get with the smart green program on this file.
Joseph Quesnel is a senior research associate with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
