Canada’s EV sector is booming. In 2022, GM Canada opened the country’s first full-scale EV manufacturing plant in Ingersoll, Ontario. The federal government is offering billions of dollars in subsidies to Volkswagen and Stellantis to build EV battery plants in the province. More than 86,000 EVs were registered in Canada in 2021, compared to around 19,000 in 2017. Battery charging infrastructure is improving rapidly too: Telus and the Australian EV company Jolt announced plans to build 5,000 charging stations in five years across Canada.
If we can find a way to sustainably mine and supply metals to EV manufacturing hubs in North America, Canada will be spinning green gold. Though battery chemistry is evolving, a typical lithium-ion EV battery contains roughly 65 per cent nickel and 20 per cent cobalt. Copper is another essential metal used throughout a car’s wiring and its motors. Canada produces all these metals, and we have undeveloped reserves of more.
This isn’t new terrain: over the last century, we became a leader in mining—Canada is the world’s third-largest producer of palladium, the fourth-largest producer of gold and the sixth-largest producer of nickel. We’ve developed a stringent environmental assessment process for new mining projects and have a highly skilled and increasingly Indigenous-led mining service sector and workforce.
But there’s a catch. Most of the underdeveloped mineral deposits required to fuel this transition lie in the far North, stranded by a lack of infrastructure. Ontario’s Ring of Fire, a 5,000-square-kilometre crescent of volcanic rock located on Treaty 9 territory in the James Bay Lowlands, is one of these untapped resources. It houses an estimated $90 billion worth of chromium, gold, platinum, zinc and—essential to electric vehicles—copper and nickel. But these metals remain worthless until the province builds a permanent road to take them to market. Without a road in place, we can’t transport the metals we’ve mined to manufacturing hubs in the south. So even if we were to start mining in the Ring of Fire, the metals for EV vehicle batteries would be stuck there.
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