Northern Miner editorial: dualities

The start of a new year brings a lot of dualities with it, especially if one is writing when the year isn’t quite over as The Northern Miner team rushes to put its print issue to bed before Christmas. At that point it’s a time of reflection, while one also shifts gears to consider the dawning months ahead under new digits, 2025.

December marked a year for The Northern Miner Group in the portfolio of the innovative EarthLabs with a new studio and colleagues at CEO.ca. The month also saw The Northern Miner’s most well-attended London conference with several hundred delegates from as far away as Mongolia.

We honoured TNM Lifetime Achievement Award winner Ross Beaty, our Mining Persons of 2024: Adam and Jack Lundin, and attracted industry heavyweights such as Sean Roosen, Rob McEwen and Rick Rule. Amparo Cornejo of Teck Resources earned our first Operator of the Year honour for her strong sustainability credentials at QB2 in Chile.

Big and small

Attendee Terry Salman, who led Salman Capital in raising some $20 billion for the mining industry over the years, praised the event on LinkedIn with some dualities of his own.

“Intimate in an attractive venue, it had a mixture of small and larger companies with excellent numbers of buyside funds,” Salman said. “Sean Roosen’s presentation without notes or slides was inspiring.”

Another of his highlights was hearing about Osisko Metals’ potential revitalization of the Gaspé copper mine in eastern Quebec. He worked there as a high school student and has fond memories of Murdochville, then a bustling town of 5,000. He also enjoyed the conference’s one-on-one chats featuring industry leaders with mining veteran Andrew Cheatle, myself or our globe-trotting podcast host, Adrian Pocobelli.

“London before Christmas is always magical,” Salman said. “It’s good to be here.”

Greenfield vs brownfield

Our London coverage includes quips from Roosen and investment advice from Rule. Sean exposes the duality of greenfield versus brownfield. He’s clearly in the latter camp after probing misinterpreted geology first with Canadian Malartic in Quebec and then in B.C. with Cariboo, which just got its environmental permits.

Easier funding for brownfield over greenfield projects was one of the themes emerging from the London symposium. It ties in with the second-life duality that some mining districts are experiencing as high gold prices support new looks at old discoveries.

There’s also the clamour for critical minerals raising interest as longer-term opportunities, even while prices for some of those metals, especially lithium and nickel, collapsed last year.

Part of Rule’s duality lies in his contrarian advice. Find good people and strong assets in commodities the market hates, he says. Millions view his videos and he drew strong crowds to several panels and chats.

The Lundin brothers offer a duality of their own — splitting the management of the company started by their grandfather into chair for Adam and president and CEO for Jack. Their $4.8-billion deal with BHP is one of the news highlights of the past year. The companies’ partnership over developing the Josemaria and Filo del Sol projects shows another duality.

Politics coming, politics going

Another theme running through the London panels concerned the second coming of U.S. president-elect Donald Trump on the one hand, and the likely demise of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Canada on the other.

There was cautious optimism about the Donald’s pledges to deregulate industries coupled with an impatience for the Conservatives in Canada to gain power and follow suit.

Erin O’Toole, the former leader of the Conservatives who now helps lead an international business intelligence firm, described a split in the West’s approach to critical minerals. Is it going to be driven by the metals needed for defence, or the green energy transition? Either way, he sees a growing use of sanctions, tariffs, export limits and forced divestments as resource nationalism ratchets up.

Environment and mining

Another thread in London was the acceptance and evolution of environmental, social and governance standards. Sure, there was complaining about lack of uniformity among ESG benchmarks. But there was also an integration, a sense that ESG equals sustainability, that this is what it means to be a Canadian miner.

Ross Beaty brings his own successful dualities to mining. The serial entrepreneur has amassed billions for shareholders across more than a dozen companies. But he’s also an ardent environmentalist leading the British Columbia Parks Foundation in its quest to acquire some 100,000 sq. km for green space.

“I’ve had just a dream career,” he said during a panel discussion. “I was paid to travel, I was paid to climb mountains. I just thought, this is, you know, pinch me. I would have done this for free.”