Ontario budget bolsters critical minerals funding

Ontario’s new budget expands the critical minerals innovation fund by $15 million as the province prepares to enact streamlined mining permit approvals next week.

The critical minerals innovation fund aims to spur technology advances from mining to processing to manufacturing in the transition to cleaner energy. The new funding is spread over three years, Ontario’s Mines Ministry said on Wednesday. It extends the program at its $5 million-a-year current rate.

It wasn’t exactly a huge budget day for the mining industry, with higher interest rates forcing Queen’s Park to nearly double its forecast deficit to $9.8 billion compared with the autumn economic update of $5.3 billion.

Even so, industry players supported the new funding and looked ahead to quicker permits under the Building More Mines Act passed last May. Ontario wants to feed battery metals to the GM, Ford, Honda, Stellantis and Toyota factories manufacturing its number one export.

“The province’s on-going work facilitating connections between our mining sector and automakers is ensuring a robust supply chain for the materials needed to build electric vehicles right here in Ontario,” Canada Nickel (TSXV: CNC; US-OTC: CNIKF) CEO Mark Selby said in prepared remarks. “The opportunities for growth and innovation in critical minerals are unlimited.”

Crawford project

Canada Nickel, backed by investments from Agnico Eagle Mines (TSX: AEM; NYSE: AEM) and Anglo American (LSE: AAL), is advancing the world’s largest nickel sulphide project, Crawford, near Timmins. It wants to build two processing plants nearby for nickel and steel that could cost more than US$1 billion and be North America’s biggest.

The continued critical mineral innovation funding strengthens collaboration among government, industry and research schools to help the sector, Frontier Lithium (TSXV: FL; US-OTC: LITOF) CEO Trevor Walker said in a statement.

“We commend today’s announcement,” Walker said. “This investment underscores the importance of research, development and technology commercialization.”

In Ontario’s far northwest near Manitoba, Frontier and Mitsubishi are partnering to develop the roughly $1.5-billion PAK lithium project and hydroxide plant. It would be Ontario’s first integrated lithium mining and processing operation with the continent’s highest-grade spodumene resource.

The Mines Ministry is also running the $35 million junior exploration grant program to foster discoveries.

The new regulations coming into effect April 1 under the Building More Mines Act will slash environmental deliberations around mine projects from two to five years to a few months, Mines Minister George Pirie told The Northern Miner in interviews last year and again this month. The plan is to use industry experts instead of government officials to evaluate projects, he said.

Exploration permits

The act also gives the minister leeway to approve exploration permits when that was held previously only by the ministry’s director-level officials. The new stance makes Ontario as flexible as other provinces such as Quebec and Newfoundland, Pirie said.

There are also changes to reclamation allowing for more tailings reprocessing, and more lenient closure plan financing. Companies can now provide financial assurance of their plans in stages matching a site’s development, instead of demonstrating the ability to pay all at once up front.

“There’s not a word changed in two very important things: Ontario’s world class environmental standards and the duty to consult,” Pirie told The Northern Miner this month. “Capital is mobile. We want to be as good as the best jurisdictions in the world.”