Canada will launch its action plan to speed up the mine permitting process within a few months and it may include new guidelines about how long the regulatory process should take, Jonathan Wilkinson, Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, said March 4 at the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada conference in Toronto.

The action plan is part of the country's broader initiative that aims to speed up mine development to meet demand for energy transition metals.

"We actually have to find ways to do things more quickly if we are to have a hope of meeting the targets that we've set for ourselves with respect to reducing carbon emissions," Wilkinson said, speaking on a panel with mining executives.

Canada launched a ministerial working group a few months ago to tackle the issue. The group is looking at ways to reduce redundancy between federal and provincial permitting regimes, run more concurrent regulatory processes, and make the process more transparent and accountable, Wilkinson said.

The working group is also tackling revisions to Canada's federal permitting laws, after the country's Supreme Court found it unconstitutional in 2023.

Meanwhile, the government may outline new guidance on how long the permitting process should take.

"We're looking at the establishment of some kind of service standards," Wilkinson said, noting they wouldn't be legislated timelines. "And if it's taking longer than that, then you have to ask the question, why?"

Permitting is among the key issues that industry and governments have flagged as obstacles to boosting metals output to meet energy transition demand and net-zero goals.

During the panel, Rag Udd, chief commercial officer at BHP Group Ltd., underscored fiscal and regulatory certainty as crucial to industry, while noting there is sometimes a mismatch between energy transition goals and regulatory timelines.

"People talk about critical minerals — the urgency that they want to bring [them] in," Udd said. "And yet at the very same time that society is putting that forward, we find governments and societies actually making the permitting process a lot more cumbersome."