The money may be there. The demand is certainly coming. But if the mining industry can’t figure out how to do more with what it already has, all the capital in the world won’t be enough. That’s the sobering message a McKinsey partner delivered at PDAC this year — and for Northern Ontario, a region sitting atop some of the most strategically important mineral deposits on the continent, it lands with particular weight.
The numbers are staggering: $7 trillion Canadian needed by 2035 to meet the metals demand driven by the global energy transition. McKinsey’s analysis suggests the industry can likely raise those funds. But the harder wall to climb is productivity — the grinding, unglamorous challenge of getting ore out of the ground faster, cheaper, and more reliably than the industry has managed in recent decades. In a region like Northern Ontario, where new projects in the Ring of Fire and beyond are being counted on to supply the cobalt, nickel, and copper the world increasingly needs, this isn’t an abstract consulting-firm talking point. It’s the difference between those deposits becoming generational economic engines for Indigenous and Northern communities — or sitting in the ground while the window closes.
There’s a reason this conversation is happening at PDAC in 2026 and not ten years ago. The urgency is real, and the stakes for places like Timmins, Sudbury, and the communities rimming James Bay couldn’t be higher. Northern Ontario has the geology. It has the people who know how to work it. What it needs now is an industry willing to honestly confront why productivity has lagged — and bold enough to change it. Click here to read the full story.