“Some places have a way of bringing your life full circle,” Todd Stone wrote from a mountain camp in northwestern British Columbia. The president and CEO of the Association for Mineral Exploration (AME) was standing at Seabridge Gold’s KSM Sulphurets Camp, in the heart of the province’s Golden Triangle—helicopters whirring overhead, crews at work, an entire mine taking shape around him.
Closing out a tour of the region, Stone had returned to Seabridge’s KSM project—the Kerr-Sulphurets-Mitchell property, about 65 kilometres northwest of Stewart, and one of the world’s largest undeveloped gold and copper deposits. It is also personal ground for him.
“Decades ago, I worked on this very project over several summers to help pay my way through university,” he wrote. “Returning all these years later—and seeing the camp, the drill core, and the surrounding mountains much as I remembered them—was something I’ll never forget.”
When Stone took the top job at AME last summer, he described the appointment as “full circle”—a former “dirtbagger” on a Placer Dome crew now representing the 6,500 prospectors, juniors and majors who make up the exploration sector. Returning to KSM made the circle literal.
Time is the hidden gem
Two things struck him standing at the camp, and both cut to the heart of the policy debate now unfolding in British Columbia.
The first is time. KSM has been in the works for the better part of two decades, and it is only now, after an approved environmental assessment and a 50-plus-year mine life on paper, that it sits within reach of a construction decision. In April 2026, the B.C. government named KSM a provincial priority project, unlocking dedicated permitting support meant to expedite timelines.
“Mineral exploration is a long game. It takes decades of perseverance, investment, scientific discovery, engineering, and teamwork to move a project from an early prospect to the threshold of production. That extraordinary journey is rarely seen or fully appreciated.”
That’s a lesson in patience many people, including many policymakers, don’t have the foresight for. The mines Canada wants in the 2040s depend on the exploration decisions made today. That is precisely why Stone has spent his tenure warning that grassroots exploration must be protected, and why he has framed shrinking land access as the sector’s defining threat. “Nothing else matters if our explorers face a smaller and smaller land base to explore,” he told AME Roundup delegates in January. When every lost mineral stake could be a lost major mining project, the decades-long timeline is not an abstraction — it is the reason delay is so costly.
The scale of what’s at stake
The second thing that struck Stone was scale. KSM is one of the world’s largest undeveloped gold and copper projects, holding roughly 47.3 million ounces of gold and 7.3 billion pounds of copper in proven and probable reserves. Ottawa named copper one of six priority critical minerals in its 2022 Critical Minerals Strategy for a reason: a single electric vehicle contains about 53 kilograms of it, roughly four times what a conventional car uses. Copper also wires the transmission lines, wind turbines and solar farms the energy transition depends on. The International Energy Agency projects global copper demand will nearly double by 2035 while mine supply covers only about 70 per cent of what’s needed—the widest gap of any critical mineral. A deposit the size of KSM is not a rounding error against that shortfall; it is the kind of supply that moves the number.
“KSM is one of the world’s great mineral projects. A truly multi-generational undertaking with the potential to create thousands of good-paying jobs, strengthen Indigenous partnerships, generate prosperity for communities, and deliver lasting economic benefits for British Columbia and Canada.”
Stone connected the opportunity to the supply-chain security language now dominating Ottawa and Washington. Prime Minister Mark Carney has built a Critical Minerals Production Alliance that has helped mobilize some $18.5 billion in projects, launched a $2-billion Critical Minerals Sovereign Fund, and named critical minerals a pillar of Canada’s first Defence Industrial Strategy, the logic being that allies should not depend on China for the metals that go into everything from grids to munitions. Carney has gone as far as telling the United States that access to Canada’s critical minerals is “a potential opportunity … but it’s not an assured opportunity”, treating them as leverage.
In that context, Stone is right on the money when he says “This is what building Canada’s critical mineral future looks like. It starts with exploration… And it positions Canada as a trusted ally and a global leader in responsibly supplying the critical minerals the world needs.”
B.C. has already signalled it agrees, designating KSM a provincial priority project in April 2026 to fast-track its permitting.
The gap between ambition and execution
The ambition for projects like these is real and, for once, broadly shared across governments. But ambition at the finish line means little if the starting line is being fenced off. Fewer claims are being registered in B.C.’s staking system, and AME has pressed the province for substantive amendments after a Court of Appeal ruling gave DRIPA a legal force it was never designed to carry. A project like KSM is what success looks like, and like most exploration needed today, it began as a stake, on ground an explorer was free to walk.
As Stone left the site, he wrote, “proud to be Canadian, and proud to work alongside people who are helping strengthen our economy, create opportunities for future generations, and advance Canada’s national and industrial sovereignty.”
That’s something we can all agree on.
Angela Wrigley is the Editorial and Digital Director of Resource Works. This article draws on remarks Todd Stone shared publicly from the KSM Sulphurets Camp and on Resource Works’ prior coverage of the AME and B.C.’s exploration sector.
Resource Works News
