For 39 days in late 2023, Panamanians blocked roads, ports and a highway to shut down a copper mine. The mine was Cobre Panamá, run by Vancouver-based First Quantum Minerals, and it accounted for a meaningful share of the country’s economy. It did not matter. In November, Panama’s Supreme Court ruled the mine’s contract unconstitutional, and the government ordered it closed. First Quantum suspended production, shelved thousands of contracts, and filed for international arbitration. A Canadian company had just lost one of the largest copper mines in the Americas — not to expropriation in the old sense, but to a court and a crowd.

That is the world Canadian mining now operates in, and it is worth sitting with, because Canada is the mining country. The Toronto Stock Exchange is the world’s leading venue for mining capital; Canadian firms run projects in more than a hundred countries. The model that built all of that — find the ore, extract it at low cost, repatriate the profit — is quietly becoming untenable, and Cobre Panamá is only the loudest example.

A pattern, not an incident

Look regionally and First Quantum stops looking like bad luck. Ecuador has tangled with foreign operators; the Democratic Republic of Congo has forced tax renegotiations on Glencore and Ivanhoe; Zambia nationalized Konkola Copper Mines and then reversed course. Chile and Argentina are writing new lithium royalty regimes as battery demand surges, capturing more of the value their geology commands. In the Sahel, the military governments of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have expelled French mining and security interests outright — and Canadian companies carry exposure across Mali, Senegal and West Africa.

The common thread is a phrase that has come back into fashion: resource nationalism. Governments across the developing world have decided, more or less simultaneously, that the terms on which foreign firms extracted their minerals were bad deals, and that a tighter global market for critical minerals gives them the leverage to rewrite them. They are not wrong about the leverage.

Layered on top is a genuine shift in what “responsible” mining is supposed to mean. Canada adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2021, which created real obligations toward Indigenous communities on Canadian territory — and an unresolved argument about whether those obligations travel with Canadian companies when they operate abroad. Bill S-211, in force since January 2024, requires large Canadian firms to report on forced-labor risk in their supply chains. The Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise can investigate allegations against Canadian companies overseas, though its enforcement teeth are famously limited — it can look, and publish, but not much compel.

The direction is unmistakable even where the mechanisms are weak: the expectation is shifting from “did you follow the host country’s law” to “did you obtain the community’s consent,” and free, prior and informed consent is a far higher bar than a signed concession. Companies built for the first standard are discovering they now have to meet the second.

Ottawa’s contradiction

Here is where the story loops back into Canadian foreign policy, because the government is standing on both sides of it at once. The same critical-minerals diplomacy Ottawa is promoting abroad — the alliances, the sovereign fund, the push to secure Western supply chains — requires new mines. And new mines face precisely the ESG, sovereignty and consent challenges that have been closing the old ones. The First and Last Mile Fund and the Critical Minerals Sovereign Fund are designed to accelerate development. Neither of them, by design, resolves the consent-and-governance gap; they move money faster, which is not the same as moving it more legitimately.

So Canada is trying to be two things simultaneously: the global standard-bearer for responsible, consent-based mining, and the advocate for approving mines quickly enough to matter in a supply-chain race. Those roles are not obviously compatible. A country cannot lecture the world on free, prior and informed consent while treating its own permitting timelines as an embarrassment to be engineered away.

The Canadian mining industry has, for the most part, understood that the old bargain is gone. What has not been settled — by the companies, and least of all by the government funding their expansion — is what replaces it. First Quantum is still in arbitration, hoping a tribunal restores what a court and a country took away. That case, however it ends, will not restore the model. It will only tell everyone how much the old one was worth on the way out.

Reading list

  • Reporting on First Quantum’s Cobre Panamá closure and arbitration (2023–2024)
  • Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise (CORE) annual reports
  • Bill S-211, Fighting Against Forced Labour and Child Labour in Supply Chains Act (in force January 2024)
  • UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and its Canadian implementation
  • MiningWatch Canada project reports