Flipping the script

Last week I shared an idea that you probably found laughably at odds with the Yukon economic zeitgeist we have lived in for the last 40 years.

Flipping the script Published 6:30 am Sunday, July 12, 2026 Last week I shared an idea that you probably found laughably at odds with the Yukon economic zeitgeist we have lived in for the last 40 years. My proposal on National Interest Projects in the north was this: instead of trying to talk Ottawa into funding projects that are so uneconomic that we won’t even use our transfer payment to fund them, we instead pitch them on ways we could help Canada.

Ottawa officials are jaded. They know the clichés of territorial meeting theatre: “build it and they will come,” “this isn’t a ‘bridge to nowhere,’” and “investing in the Whitehorse electrical grid is an investment in Canadian sovereignty.” We’ve pitched the BC-Yukon grid connect project.

This has no private sector proponent, would cost around $4 billion and would compete with BC users for increasingly scarce BC power. Yukon Energy’s power revenue in 2025 was only $102 million so even if it shut down all our current power plants – which it can’t for reliability reasons – the math on the investment flails without a large industrial buyer in the Yukon. Which there isn’t, at the moment.

Federal officials see this and hear “build it and they will come” and “grid connection to nowhere.” (More on that large buyer below.) We could pitch the Dempster corridor.

Replacing the Peel and Mackenzie ferries with bridges plus some major roadway upgrades might come in at $1.5 billion. That’s less than half what the competing Mackenzie Valley highway might cost. But there is no private-sector proponent and the air force might prefer to build more fuel tanks at its growing Inuvik base and schedule fuel trucks around freeze up and break up if they could spend $1.5 billion on drones instead.

But let’s flip the script. What geo-economic problems does Canada have that the Yukon could actually help with? To really break with cliché, we would need to come up with projects that meet three tests.

The first is a credible private-sector proponent. If real investors are investing real cash in developing the project, it must be at least close to economic viability. So Ottawa can help make it happen without blowing the budget.

Second, the project must help solve Canada’s geo-economic problems. In the Building Canada Act, the feds helpfully laid out five factors a project can help with: strengthens Canada’s security; provides economic benefits; can actually get built; supports indigenous reconciliation; and contributes to clean growth. Third, the project must be big.

Ottawa doesn’t have enough blazers to waste time with small projects. What kind of Yukon project meets these three tests? Big critical mineral mines.

Take Casino. According to its owners’ economic study it will need $3.6 billion in capital investment. The mine will produce 4.27 billion pounds of copper over its 27-year life, increasing Canada’s copper production by a meaningful 15 percent.

Plus 346 million pounds of molybdenum. Both of these are critical for advanced defense and civilian manufacturing. It also has gold, which isn’t geo-economically important but which helps with the business case.

Is it economic? The 2022 feasibility study has a positive net present value of over $2 billion with copper at US$3.60 per pound (it’s currently around US$6 per pound) and gold at US$1700 per ounce (currently around US$4000 per ounce). Or how about the mines around MacMillan Pass on the NWT border?

Fireweed Metals owns both the Mactung tungsten and Macpass zinc-lead-silver deposits. Its corporate presentation says Mactung is the “world’s largest high-grade tungsten deposit.” Macpass also holds “globally significant gallium and germanium by-product content.”

For those keeping score in the US-China competition, China used its dominance of critical minerals including gallium and germanium as key bargaining chips to force the US to back down during the 2025 tariff crisis. The US Geological Survey says “China accounted for 99 percent of worldwide primary low-purity gallium production” in 2024. Tungsten itself is critical for things like drill bits, wear-resistant steel parts, semiconductors, ammunition and rocket engines.

Fireweed Metals says it already has $35 million in funding deals with government critical mineral programs such as the Canadian Critical Minerals Infrastructure Fund and the US Department of War’s Defense Production Act program. It also has a strategic investment with JX Advanced Metals, a leading Japanese metals company. So what do these companies need?

Interestingly, and importantly for stressed Departments of Finance, government cash may not top the list. These minerals are in high demand. Political leadership from territorial and First Nations leaders to move the projects more quickly through our permitting system might be their first ask.

Casino’s 2022 feasibility study envisages 200 megawatts of primarily natural gas power. That’s more than the current Yukon grid and will involve a lot of LNG trucks on the Alaska Highway. If Casino was actually built, it might be the big industrial load the BC-Yukon grid project needs.

A hard-nosed Ottawa official might even say there will be no funding for the BC-Yukon grid until Casino gets the green light from Yukon and First Nations governments. The Macpass mining projects use the North Canol road, which has become legendary for how it chews up pickups. Large mining projects will be hoping for federal and territorial support for a new bridge at Ross River plus a major makeover for the highway.

Snowline Gold’s 2025 Preliminary Economic Assessment also says that mine envisages using an improved North Canol. These mining companies get such big benefits from an upgraded North Canol, it raises the possibility that their private owners might make substantial contributions to the capital and maintenance costs. This is a very different scenario for government funders than the $1.5 billion Dempster concept above.

Taken together, this pitch should get Ottawa’s attention: major new supplies of Canadian copper, tungsten, zinc; gallium and germanium; substantial portions of the cost born by the private sector; new electrical infrastructure to de-carbonize Casino and future Yukon mines; and an improved fiscal position for the transfer-payment addicted Yukon government. The biggest obstacle to this vision is not Ottawa beancounters but whether we Yukoners want big mining development at Casino and MacMillan Pass. That’s a big decision for Yukon First Nations and Yukon voters.

It may very well be that we don’t want this development. The current transfer-payment status quo is quite comfortable, for as long as it lasts. But if we decide not to contribute to Canada on the copper and tungsten fronts, we shouldn’t be surprised to keep reading in the Yukon News that the feds are spending big bucks in the NWT and Nunavut but not the Yukon.

—Keith Halliday is a Yukon economist and a winner of the Canadian Community Newspaper Award for Outstanding Columnist. The audiobook version of his most recent book Moonshadows, a Yukon-noir thriller, has just been released.