By Elena Romero, VP Growth, Mining Search | TPD
The 100th anniversary of the CIM Expo brought roughly 7,000 people to Vancouver in early May. That number alone says something. This was not a defensive industry gathering. It felt like a sector that had made a decision about what it is and where it is going.
The theme was “our mining moment.” By the end of four days, I understood that as something more specific than a conference tagline.
The Argument Canada Is Making
Jonathan Price, CEO of Teck Resources, opened the conference with the macro case.
The demand picture for critical minerals is not a trend. It is structural. Copper, lithium, nickel, rare earths — the materials required to build AI data centers, electric vehicles, and energy infrastructure — are going to be needed in quantities that current supply chains cannot deliver. Global supply chains are moving from just-in-time to just-in-case, and Canada, with its geology, its institutions, and its reputation as a stable jurisdiction, is positioned to be a primary beneficiary of that shift.
The Teck-Anglo merger announcement during the conference added a concrete exclamation point. The largest critical minerals company ever headquartered in Canada, with $4.5 billion committed to British Columbia. The capital is not theoretical.
Price offered one number that stayed with me. A state-of-the-art AI data center can be built in nine months. A new mine can take up to twenty years. That gap — between the speed of demand and the speed of supply — is the central tension the industry is trying to navigate.
The Discipline Question
The Tuesday panel on strategic growth brought some of the harder-earned perspective of the conference.
Karla Mills, EVP and Chief Project Development Officer at Teck, made an argument that became a throughline for the next two days: go slow to go fast. In strong markets there is pressure to force certainty, to commit capital before the picture is fully clear. The companies that have navigated cycles well are the ones that resisted that pressure. They invested in the right things — relationships, process, community trust — before they needed them.
Heather Exner-Pirot from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute put Saskatchewan’s experience in context. The province has been through cycles. What distinguishes the operators who came through those cycles well is largely about what they built during the boom, not just what they extracted. Infrastructure, yes. But also relationships. Community equity. The kind of foundation that sustains operations when conditions shift.
Ron Hyggen, CEO of Kitsaki Management — the economic development arm of the Lac La Ronge Indian Band — offered perhaps the most striking data point of the day. Kitsaki has grown from two employees to more than 2,000 in a single generation. That is not a story about indigenous economic development as a social program. It is a statement about what happens when an indigenous organization is treated as a genuine business partner in a sector with serious, sustained activity.
The lesson running underneath all of it: the returns in this cycle will not be evenly distributed. They will flow to the operators who made the right investments during the quieter years.
Sustainability as Operations, Not Optics
The Wednesday session on sustainable operations shifted the register. The conversation was less about capital allocation and more about what it actually looks like to run a mine well, every day.
Phil Wallace, General Manager at Teck’s Highland Valley Copper, talked about extending HVC’s mine life through an indigenous-led environmental assessment process. The instinct in those situations is sometimes to manage the process, to move it along. What they found was that genuinely centering the community’s role produced a more durable outcome. The social license was not a box to check. It was a precondition for everything else.
Sylvie Tran from Suncor made a point that sounds simple but has real operational weight: sustainability KPIs and operational KPIs are not separate things. Safety culture, emissions performance, community relationships — these are not in tension with production. In a well-run operation, they are the same metrics viewed from different angles.
Where It All Converges
Daley McIntyre, General Manager of Cameco’s Key Lake operation, told a story on Wednesday that pulled the whole conference into focus.
When Key Lake restarted after a period of curtailment, Cameco had to rebuild its workforce essentially from scratch. Many returning employees came from northern Saskatchewan. Many others were new to the operation. And McIntyre described discovering something that is obvious in retrospect but rarely gets named directly: the new hires had to be taught why Cameco does things the way it does.
The 40-year relationship with northern communities. The preferred contractor network. The approach to indigenous partnerships that Ron Hyggen had spent the day before describing from the other side of the table. None of that transfers automatically. It has to be rebuilt, person by person, at the exact moment the operation needs to be running at capacity.
That is a talent cost that does not appear in most project budgets. Institutional knowledge walks out the door and has to be reconstructed under pressure, when the cost of getting it wrong is highest.
McIntyre named one more thing. Competition for people in northern Saskatchewan is new. In her career, it did not exist. Now operators, contractors, and indigenous-owned businesses are all recruiting from the same small pool. A pool that was already constrained before the current cycle of activity began.
Julianne Wriston, who moderated the Tuesday panel, had named the underlying dynamic plainly: the industry knew a decade ago that a workforce shortage was coming. It just did not treat it like the constraint it was.
That is the gap that does not get enough space in the conversation about Canada’s mining moment. Price’s time gap — nine months to build a data center, twenty years to build a mine — has a direct workforce equivalent. The pipeline to develop experienced mining professionals, to build genuine community partnerships, to transfer institutional knowledge across a generation, operates on the same long lead time as the projects themselves.
Canada has the geology. The capital is starting to move. The policy environment is improving. The case Price made on Monday morning was real.
But execution in mining is inseparable from people. The Kitsaki story, the Key Lake restart, the HVC mine life extension — each of them is ultimately a story about what happens when the human side of a project is treated with the same seriousness as the capital side.
The companies that will define this cycle are not the ones who respond fastest when the market peaks. They are the ones who treated talent supply as a long-lead constraint and started planning before the pressure arrived.
Karla Mills had the right frame. Go slow to go fast.
That applies to your workforce too.
A Note on Where We Work
TPD has spent 45 years building the networks and relationships that connect mining operators with the people they need — across direct hire, contract staffing, and the technical and leadership roles that rarely respond to a job posting.
The operators I am watching most closely right now are not waiting for the pressure to peak. They are having the talent conversation now, while there is still time to plan rather than react.
If you are in the middle of that conversation, we would be glad to be part of it.
Elena Romero is VP of Growth, Mining Search at TPD, a staffing and recruitment firm specializing in mining, semiconductor, and industrial manufacturing across Canada and the United States. TPD has been in business for 45 years.