Sean Magee used to introduce his company as Taseko. Before lunch at Get It Done B.C., he stepped up to the microphone wearing a new badge: Trekor Metals. The company’s footprint is expanding across North America. Gibraltar, near Williams Lake, remains Canada’s second-largest copper producer. Florence Copper in Arizona began production this year, while Yellowhead, outside Vavenby, is navigating parallel provincial and Simpcw-led environmental assessments. Together, these assets position the Vancouver-based company to potentially become the largest Canadian copper producer on the continent.
That is the story once a mine is running. The panel was about everything that comes before a foundation is poured.
Jack Middleton of the Association for Mineral Exploration moderated. On stage with him: Chuck Downie, who grew up in Trail and Kimberley, cut his teeth with Cominco at Pine Point, Polaris, Snip and Sullivan, and now runs Eagle Plains out of Cranbrook. Angela Brand Danuser, mayor of Stewart since 2022, who has lived there since 1989, raised two children there, and ran a local business for 20 years. Greg Bury of Finning, who started at 14 on a pipeline crew and now supports every developing mine in Western Canada that needs a machine, a quote or a path through capital costs.
The hour-long discussion covered extensive ground across the provincial sector.
499 in winter
Stewart is 500 people. In winter, Brand Danuser said, it is 499. Come summer, motels and B&Bs fill with exploration crews, and the town that depends on them overlaps with the one that depends on tourists chasing the same rooms. Both are good problems, but neither fits a planning cycle for a council of 500.
Brucejack sits on the community’s back door. Red Chris is right there. Concentrate from both rolls through town to the Portland Canal Marine Terminal. It is B.C.’s first majority Indigenous-owned port, opened the week before this forum by the Nisg̱a’a and Tahltan Nations with Arrow Transportation. Middleton and Bury had been standing in the burger line at that opening. About six per cent of last year’s exploration spend in the province went into ground around Stewart.
Brand Danuser put a number to it: each truck rolling down Stewart’s main street carries about a million dollars’ worth. That is wealth leaving the Golden Triangle. Bury calls it the Copper Triangle, and he has a point. It is also wear and tear on a town that cannot tax a mine outside its boundary.
The Resource Benefits Alliance was built for exactly that gap. Twenty-one local governments from Vanderhoof west secured a five-year, $250-million agreement with the province. Stewart’s share is about $3.3 million. Brand Danuser was precise about what that buys: a bridge, and a little work on water and sewer. It does not put the whole bill on 500 taxpayers, and it does not last. The east of the province has a similar arrangement in perpetuity. The northwest has a term that ends. She wants the RBA signed forever, and she is right.
She wants Victoria to stop treating Stewart as a town of 500 when the hospital and health centre serve a much larger summer population. Census numbers do not run a northern main street in July.
Seven months to stake a claim
Downie’s business is the first link. Eagle Plains is a project generator. It acquires ground in B.C. and Saskatchewan, does the early work, and looks for partners, companies like Trekor, to carry a project forward. The old line is that one discovery in 1,000 becomes a mine. Downie thinks the real number is closer to one in 10,000. Either way, the pipeline only works if people can get on the ground.
Until recent court rulings reshaped the process, staking a mineral claim in B.C. was a quick online transaction. You filed, received title, and went to work. In the wake of the Gitxaała decision, miners must submit a formal application instead. Downie reports that his average wait time for a claim has stretched to 222 days—nearly seven months. If an application lands in November, winter delays can extend that timeline beyond a year before anyone turns a shovel.
Then comes the permit. That takes 18 months to two years, in real time, not the posted timeline. From acquiring ground to the first drill hole, three years is the baseline.
Half of Eagle Plains’ projects sit in Saskatchewan. The same sequence there takes 90 days.
That is the competitive-jurisdiction lesson Victoria should not need explained. B.C. saw record exploration spending last year, but Saskatchewan still moved ahead into third place nationally, thanks to uranium. Money moves.
Antimony in a park
In July, the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship put an Environment and Land Use Act order and a staking ban over ground Eagle Plains has held since 1996. Close to $1 million has gone into that property. Local people did the work. The reclamation was done. One of the commodities on the ground is antimony, a defence metal everyone in Ottawa now claims to want.
Downie’s question was the right one. Did anyone run a metallogenic study before the line went on the map? A basic search of the B.C. geological database would have shown historic mines and high mineral potential. High potential is a reason not to draw a park.
The mines are where the minerals are. You cannot move them to a more convenient valley. Access keeps shrinking. A five-year permit comes with a list of conditions. Snow, huckleberries, birds, goats, and caribou, sometimes in places that never had caribou, take another four months off the year. The workable window shrinks. The land base shrinks. The talk about building more does not.
Prospectors feel it first. Pulling together a permit, wildlife plan, First Nations agreement, bond, and the rest costs $50,000 to $80,000. A public company can pay. The classic prospector cannot. In ten years, if nothing changes, Downie says, those people will be gone. Mid-sized companies and producers will be left talking to each other. The people who walk the ground and make the first discovery will be out of the picture.
Middleton named one from the floor: Sean Kennedy, from a long line of prospectors. These are the people who sell a showing to a Downie, who sells a project to a Trekor. Lose the bottom rung and the top has nothing to stand on.
Three pillars and a highway
Bury uses three tests for any new project: Indigenous community support, a path through permits, which looks different in every Western jurisdiction, and finance, which arrives last and leaves first. Project money goes where it wants. Canada, he says, is not yet known for being easy to do business with.
AME is pushing Ottawa to expand the Canadian exploration expense so that tax treatment reaches engineering and feasibility work, not only the early holes. Bury’s view is that CFOs will use that tool the moment it exists. When a company is short of cash and trying to get far enough down the path to attract real capital, a “small” deduction is not small.
He is blunt about B.C. Excluding the oil sands, this is the busiest mining jurisdiction he covers: Saskatchewan, Alberta, Yukon, the Northwest Territories, British Columbia. It is also one of the hardest. Saskatchewan broke ground with the community, Indigenous nations, and the province all together. Alberta takes resource revenue and funds society with it. B.C. has the inventory, but not the path.
Yellowhead is the low-hanging fruit. It sits on the highway. You can drive to it now. The mill at the base of the hill is shut, but the people are still there. Their children would work the mine if it opened. Compare that to Seabridge or Galore Creek, where the road is an engineering project through some of the toughest ground in the province. Support the one that can move first. That is not a slight on the others. It is about sequence.
Bury’s grandfather mined gold at Cassiar in the 1960s. Brand Danuser, quick to correct a highway name, points out Cassiar is on the Stewart-Cassiar. Sixty years later, Cassiar is an exploration project again. That is what a missing path looks like over a working lifetime.
What five years would look like
Middleton asked the panel for a picture of success.
Bury wants to see movement from the 30 or so Western Canadian projects that could actually become mines soon, and he wants the hundreds of exploration companies below them to survive long enough to feed that list. Brand Danuser wants the RBA made permanent, because a town with no new housing starts last year cannot tax its way into water, sewer, and a bridge. Downie wants land-use certainty: here you can stake, here you can build, here you cannot. The first two categories need to stay large, because the third keeps growing.
Middleton had already raised the other half of the problem. Forest service roads are being closed because forestry companies cannot afford to keep them open. Explorers use those roads. So do the people Brand Danuser wants to send fishing and hiking from downtown Stewart. When forestry is in trouble, the mineral sector loses its driveway. These are not separate issues. They never were.
Municipal consultation is not a separate issue either. Brand Danuser pointed to the Heritage Conservation Act. Two years in the making, and two days before it was set to become law, the Union of B.C. Municipalities learned it existed. AME and UBCM demanded the draft be made public. They asked for a meeting with the minister and refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement to see legislation that should have been debated openly. Middleton noted the resource sector had talked about it for a long time. It moved when the municipalities stood up.
That is the point of putting mayors in the same room as the people who stake claims.
Bruce Downing was in the back of the hall with the stickers AME hands out at the Pioneers lunch. They ask a simple question. What have you done today that did not involve minerals?
For anyone in that room, virtually everything relies on mined materials. Yet provincial policy continues to complicate the process of finding new deposits.
Yellowhead is in assessment. Gibraltar is pouring copper. The trucks are already rolling down Stewart’s street. The claim that could feed the next mine is sitting in a 222-day queue, or under a new line on a map, or behind a road about to be decommissioned.
Find a path. Then keep it open.
Ian Biana writes for the Resource Works Accelerate team and can be reached at [email protected].
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