Electrification will usher in era for the ‘Revenge of the Miners,’ financier Friedland promises

When the world focuses on infrastructure development, economic stimulation, a green New Deal, it’s apparent that you have to call up those Canadian miners,” Robert Friedland.

The post-COVID-19 economic recovery should ring in “the era of the Revenge of the Miners,” according to legendary mining financier Robert Friedland in opening the Association for Mineral Exploration B.C.’s Remote Roundup conference.

Friedland, in remarks recorded from his own COVID-19 isolation outpost in Singapore, argued that once governments grapple with what a post-pandemic recovery is going to look like “people are waking up to the fact that certain elements in the periodic table are going to be huge winners.”

Copper is going to be needed in massive amounts to electrify greener industries, along with minerals such as nickel and cobalt, Friedland said, especially with governments joining in with infrastructure investment aimed at improving the economic equality of their citizens.

That was a heartening perspective to Bruce Ralston, B.C. minister of Energy Mines and Low Carbon Innovation, who came to the AME’s Remote Roundup with his own bit of good news.

Ralston reported to the conference that prospectors spent $422 million on exploration work in a pandemic-paused 2020 — the best year since 2012 — which is a signal of hope that the province will be a preferred source, from an environmental and social-governance perspective, for a lot of those minerals.

“I was quite taken by that (perspective),” Ralston said about what he had learned of Friedland’s comments, which included a prediction that future commodity markets will give premiums to suppliers that can show a provenance of responsible production.

B.C. mining exploration, like all industry, was suspended in 2020 but picked up pace after government declared the exploration sector as essential. Ralston said the exploration sector did a good job of developing COVID-19 safety protocols that had the support of communities and Indigenous governments, and government included the industry in measures to make it easier for the industry to keep working.

“It’s our hope that B.C.’s mining and exploration sector can leverage the opportunity within our economic recovery package to strengthen their sector and in turn help the province’s overall economic recovery through investments and job growth,” Ralston said in his remarks to the conference.

The federal government is also banking on mining as a source of post-pandemic economic strength, according to Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan, who characterized responsible resource extraction as “our family business.”

O’Regan said government put a focus on stimulus help for resource industries, such as tax relief, the federal wage subsidy, extending tax breaks on exploration and a $250 million investment in early stage companies.

“Many (measures) were a direct result of AME’s strong advocacy and partnership,” O’Regan said via video link from his Newfoundland and Labrador riding, “and they will remain in place as we work on coming out the other side of this crisis.”

And Friedland, whose career has included involvement in cornerstone discoveries such as the Voisey’s Bay nickel mine in Labrador and the Oyu Tolgoi copper mine in Mongolia, sees potential for B.C. in his scenario for mining expansion.

“I think British Columbia has fantastic exploration potential,” Friedland said. “Up there in the Golden Triangle (of the province’s northwest corner), around Kamloops. We’ve looked at some very interesting things.”

As long as mining companies can negotiate the permission of Indigenous communities, “the original, Aboriginal owners of that land,” Friedland sees it as possible to advance mining in B.C.

“You are going to be able to find more (exploration) money in the next few years than you were able to in the past,” Friedland said, “and that’s good for all of us.”

In his remarks, Friedland pondered how much the recovery from the pandemic will resemble the influenza epidemic of 1918-19 that claimed tens-of-millions of lives, but then saw an explosion of world economies into “the Roaring ’20s.”

“When the world focuses on infrastructure development, economic stimulation, a green New Deal, it’s apparent that you have to call up those Canadian miners,” Friedland said.