Accelerating mine development could be a pressing issue for the country's left-leaning Liberal Party government as it looks to support the energy transition, said Jonathan Wilkinson, Canada's Minister of Natural Resources.

Wilkinson's call to action at the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada conference in Toronto on mine timelines is a rare example of a top Liberal official calling for the need to fast-track more Canadian mining projects, after the government has made critical minerals a priority in recent years.

"Going forward, it simply cannot be the case that it takes up to 15 years to develop and bring into production new mines," Wilkinson said during a June 13 keynote address.

Wilkinson framed the need to develop critical minerals as crucial to breaking the dominance countries such as China have on extracting and processing key commodities including lithium and rare earths. These critical minerals will be central to electrification amid a global push to curb climate change.

The minister cast Canada's mineral endowment as an economic advantage and opportunity to become a bigger player in the metals market.

"As we transition to cleaner, mineral-intensive forms of energy, democratic countries around the world are going to need access to stable and secure sources of renewable minerals," Wilkinson said. "Clearly, rapid development of these sources is urgently required."

Though Wilkinson outlined few specifics on how the government might tackle the slow pace of mine development, the minister pointed to multijurisdictional talks that the government launched June 1. Called regional energy and resource tables, these discussions aim to spur economic growth amid the energy transition. They involve the federal, provincial and territorial governments as well as other stakeholders such as First Nations.

The regional energy and resource tables are expected to produce plans highlighting a region's competitive advantages and economic resources. Wilkinson said they are already on lists for initial meetings with the first three provinces to take part in the process: British Columbia, Manitoba, and Newfoundland and Labrador.

"In many, many regions of this country, I will tell you that one of those opportunity sets will be critical minerals," Wilkinson said. "And, yes, regulatory permitting approaches."

Wilkinson's focus on speeding up Canadian resource extraction for critical minerals struck some as signaling a shift in government strategy.

"It's new," said Pierre Gratton, President and CEO of the Mining Association of Canada. The CEO only started hearing ministers bring up the issue in recent months. "The pressure to supply the metals we need ... to support the development of renewable technologies, generally, has really shone a light on the fact that we can't wait 10 or so years to build a mine. We have to get faster, or we will let our auto sector down, and that will really hurt the Canadian economy."

Gratton told S&P Global Commodity Insights that mine permitting should be at the top of the government's priorities and include more funding to hire people with deeper sector knowledge to run the regulatory process.

"We don't think they're using the tools in the [Impact Assessment] act to implement it well," Gratton said, referring to federal legislation that governs environmental permitting. "And I think there's a growing recognition there is a problem: that due to a lack of tailoring, among other things, it's going slower, not faster. And that there's too much at stake now."

Wilkinson sought to allay environmentalists' fears about an accelerated permitting process in a second set of remarks June 14 after announcing a discussion paper on Canada's critical minerals strategy.

"That doesn't mean cutting corners from an environmental perspective," Wilkinson said in response to Commodity Insights questions during a media scrum. "But it does mean that we have to be smarter about how we do it."

But supporters of more stringent environmental permitting criticized the minister for suggesting the regulatory process could face scrutiny in a bid to hasten aspects of mine development.

"I'm disappointed that he can make that kind of irresponsible insinuation because they've already removed about a third of major mines from the Impact Assessment act," Jamie Kneen, from the environmental watchdog MiningWatch Canada, said in a phone interview with Commodity Insights.

The Liberal government revised Canada's permitting process in 2019 to expand First Nations consultation and climate change considerations after a contentious process that drew criticism from Canada's energy sector. But it also exempted more mining projects from federal permitting requirements and excluded smaller-scale mines under certain tonnage limits. In doing so, Kneen said it has become easier for companies to secure permit for mines in Canada by initially designing smaller operations.

Kneen said regulatory timelines "are already painfully short," noting that slow mine development in Canada is more related to the rollercoaster nature of the sector, which goes through lengthy periods when project backing is harder to come by.

"That has nothing to do with regulatory approval," Kneen said. "That has to do with the market, and companies putting capital together, and the actual viability of ore bodies."

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