The M&E DISPATCH // 189

So is this it? Will Alberta finally get their way... to the ocean?

July 03, 2026

The Friday Dispatch

It's been a busy week for Canadian resource news, and there's a lot to get into, so let's start with the good stuff.

First Mining Gold closed out June with the kind of announcement a junior gold developer waits years for. On June 30, the company got federal environmental approval for its Springpole project in Ontario. $957 million in capital investment, one of the largest undeveloped gold resources left in the country, and eight years of review to get there.

The review pulled in Indigenous communities, the public, and a full slate of federal agencies, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Natural Resources Canada, Transport Canada, and Fisheries and Oceans among them. Springpole is planned as an open-pit gold and silver mine with an on-site mill, and First Mining is now moving into engineering and design work toward construction.

Canada's Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, Tim Hodgson, put it plainly:

"Canada has the minerals the world wants."

Nice line. But here's the question worth sitting with. Eight years is a long time to wait on an approval, even a positive one. Is Springpole proof the system works, or proof it's just slow and occasionally generous? I'd argue it's a bit of both, and that's the uncomfortable part.

The Other Side of the Ledger

For every Springpole, there's a project stuck in the mud, and the best example is still sitting exactly where it was in April. Up in BC's Golden Triangle, Seabridge Gold's KSM project hit a wall over its Mitchell Treaty Tunnels this spring. The province postponed a ruling on permit modifications, indefinitely, because roughly 12.5 kilometres of the planned tunnel route crosses mineral claims held by Tudor Gold on its neighbouring Treaty Creek project, and Tudor has taken the fight to court. Seabridge has already put C$1.2 billion into KSM, including more than C$650 million since 2021 on roads, camps, and infrastructure. Months later, nothing has moved.

Tudor's CEO, Joseph Ovsenek, has warned that without predictable permitting, clear land access, and workable infrastructure:

"The ounces will remain in the ground."

That's the quiet part of the permitting reform conversation nobody likes to say out loud. You can fix government timelines all you want, but what happens when the holdup isn't Ottawa or Victoria, it's two companies who can't agree on whose ground the tunnel runs under? How many other projects are sitting in that same kind of limbo, waiting not on a ministry, but on each other?

Eby, Smith, and Carney Make Their Move

The bigger story this week might be the one with no shovel in the ground yet at all. On Thursday, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced her government has submitted a formal route for a new pipeline running from Bruderheim, northeast of Edmonton, to a terminal in Delta, BC. It has a name now, the West Coast Pipeline, with Trans Mountain Corp. and Pembina signed on as partners. The proposal calls for more than one million barrels per day, with tankers moving the oil to Asian markets, and a price tag Alberta pegs between $35.2 billion and $43.7 billion, contingency fees included.

What made it possible was a separate deal Prime Minister Mark Carney struck with BC Premier David Eby earlier the same day. Ottawa agreed to keep the northern tanker ban in place, take on financial risk for any environmental issues or spills, and make sure BC gets compensated for the risk it's carrying. Eby was careful with his words, saying the agreement doesn't force him to support the pipeline, but conceding his province won't fight it in court either.

Carney called the arrangement more than just an accord, framing it as:

"An approach that gives certainty to our businesses to build."

Smith, for her part, said the pipeline would enrich Indigenous communities that choose to partner in it and generate billions in government revenue over the coming decades.

Not everyone's convinced. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre used the announcement to take a shot at Carney over the tanker ban itself, calling it a policy that's standing in the way of the whole project.

So here's the question for the weekend. Is this the start of the federal-provincial cooperation the industry has been asking for, or just the newest chapter in a fight that's been going for a decade? Watch this one. It'll tell us a lot about how the next round of nation-building projects actually gets built, or doesn't.

The New Site

If you haven't seen it yet, MiningandEnergy.ca has a brand new look, live for a few days now, and already tracking well. I'm not moving everyone over to daily updates automatically. If that's your speed, go opt in and get the Dispatch every day instead of once a week. Signup is on the homepage and you can set your ideal delivery time and cadence one you’re in.

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