The Overlap Has No Minister

Canada's defence, energy, and mining ambitions meet in projects no single ledger can justify. The value lives where the circles overlap, and the overlap has no owner.

There is a road in Canada that does not exist yet. About 230 kilometres of it, running from the edge of the Northwest Territories across western Nunavut to a deepwater bay on the Arctic coast that most people could not place on a map.

Ask Ottawa what the road is for and you will get three answers. It is a mining road, unlocking the copper and zinc of the Slave Geological Province. It is a trade and energy corridor, the first all-season link between Nunavut and the national highway system. And it is a sovereignty asset, ending at a port and airfield with dual-use (civilian and military) potential, language drawn almost directly from the government’s own project page.

All three answers are true. That is precisely the problem. In the machinery of government, a road that is three things at once is, on any single ledger, not quite worth building. The Inuit of the Kitikmeot region, who hold equity in the project and have championed it for years, have watched it be not quite worth building for a long time.

This year, something shifted. In March the Prime Minister referred the road to the new Major Projects Office under a plan whose own announcement pairs the words defend and build. I want to explain why that shift matters more than almost anything else happening in Canadian infrastructure, and why it is still only half the answer.

Three ambitions, three clocks

Canada is currently pursuing three nation-building ambitions at once.

The loudest is defence. At The Hague last June, Canada and its NATO allies pledged to spend five per cent of GDP by 2035, split between 3.5 per cent for core military capability and 1.5 per cent for defence- and security-related investment, a category that explicitly includes critical infrastructure and other dual-use projects. This spring, Canada reached the old two per cent benchmark for the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the latest federal budget committed $81.8 billion in new defence spending over five years.

The second is energy. I spent July writing about it, so I will not repeat the argument here beyond its conclusion. The wires, storage, and generation Canada needs are not constrained by technology. They are constrained by markets that fail to price what these assets provide and by institutions that cannot allocate costs across their own borders.

The third ambition is quieter, and it is the subject of this article. Everything in the defence and energy categories depends on mined materials, and mining operates on the slowest clock in the industrial economy. Globally, a mine that came online in the early 2020s took, on average, almost eighteen years to travel from discovery to first output. For Canadian mines, the journey averaged about twenty-seven years, among the longest in the world. A mine opening in Canada today was typically discovered in the late 1990s.

And these averages count only the mines that made it; the projects still stuck in the process are not in the sample. Worse, the trend is moving in the wrong direction. Research published by S&P Global in early July 2026 found permitting delays pushing projects that have already passed feasibility towards thirty years, roughly five times longer than in the 1990s.

Now consider the arithmetic that rarely appears on a Gantt chart. The defence pledge comes due in 2035, just nine years from now. A Canadian mine takes, on average, twenty-seven years to reach production. The mines that Canada’s defence and energy ambitions quietly depend upon would have needed to begin under governments that many of today’s engineers were too young to vote for.

When multiple ambitions depend on the same project, that project inherits the slowest clock among them. That is why mining, the least discussed of the three, ultimately determines whether the other two arrive on time.

A confession about diagrams

Here I must make a confession. I love Venn diagrams. I love taking subjects that appear unrelated, mapping where they truly are, and finding the place where they intersect, because the intersection is usually where the insight lives.

Governments are built on the opposite instinct. The discipline is the one management consultants call MECE, categories that are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. Every dollar in one bucket, no dollar in two, nothing left out. It is a powerful discipline, and I want to be careful not to caricature it. Clean buckets are how a cabinet assigns accountability, how a Treasury Board prevents double-counting, how an estimates committee audits anything at all. MECE is not a failure of imagination. It is the price of accountability, and it is worth paying almost everywhere.

But notice what it does to the road.

Each department scores only the benefits that appear in its own column. The defence ledger sees an Arctic port and airfield it could certainly use, but not urgently enough to justify funding the road needed to reach them. The energy ledger sees a corridor that unlocks hydro expansion and connects a handful of remote communities, valuable but insufficient on its own. The mining ledger sees mineral deposits that cannot justify the road’s cost alone, which is precisely why no single mine has ever built it.

Add the columns together and it may be the highest-value project on the national agenda. Read them separately and it becomes the lowest-priority project on every ledger it touches.

The buckets are fine. The problem is that the overlap between them has no owner. Institutions optimise for what they are asked to optimise, and for seventy years, nobody in Ottawa has been asked to optimise the intersection.

The overlap has no minister.

Where the circles meet

Look at the three overlaps one at a time and you find that each one is already visible in the official record. Nobody has joined them up out loud.

Defence and energy.

NATO’s new 1.5 per cent category names, in its own definitions, critical infrastructure and dual-use investment. Ottawa’s own Grays Bay project page uses the same language, describing the project as dual-use, subject to assessment by National Defence. The March announcement that referred the road for review also referred the Taltson hydro expansion and a hydro project for Iqaluit, grouping them as Northern Resilience Projects that support an expanded military presence in the North.

An Arctic that Canada intends to patrol is an Arctic that needs power, especially in places where communities still rely on trucked diesel for electricity. For the first time in my career, there is a fiscal category through which defence ambition can legitimately help pay for wires. Whether it actually does is a choice we have yet to make.

Energy and mining.

The grid I spent a month writing about is, physically, a copper machine. S&P Global’s latest study projects that, by 2040, the world will need 150 per cent of today’s copper production, while mine output is expected to peak around 2030. This will leave an annual shortfall of roughly ten million tonnes. For every four tonnes the world needs, only three will be mined. Then read the study’s title and notice what it identifies as the forces behind the acceleration: the race for AI and rising defence spending. The circles are already colliding in the source material.

The dependency runs both ways, which is what makes it a true overlap. The grid needs the mines’ metal; the mines need the grid’s power. British Columbia’s North Coast Transmission Line sits on the national list largely to electrify the northwest, including the mines. In July I argued that no single load ever justified the wire, and that a gigawatt customer changes the answer. In the North, the mine is the gigawatt customer.

Defence and mining.

In April 2025, China restricted exports of heavy rare-earth elements and the permanent magnets made from them. In October it went further, denying export licences to any company affiliated with a foreign military. A partial truce suspended some of the escalation, but the magnet controls stayed, and those magnets sit inside F-35s, submarines, and precision munitions. The country that makes the magnets has now demonstrated, twice, that it will treat them as an instrument of statecraft.

Canada’s answer to this is not a subsidy program. It is a comparative advantage we already possess. We are the allied, rule-of-law, treaty-based supplier in a world that has just discovered what supplier concentration costs. The advantage is real. It is also perishable, because it belongs to whoever builds the mines in time, and our clock runs at twenty-seven years.

The centre of the diagram

If the thesis is right, we should see it in the data. So I counted.

Canada’s Major Projects Office currently lists eighteen projects of national significance, from New Brunswick to the Arctic coast. Five are mines. Nickel in Timmins, copper in Saskatchewan, tungsten in New Brunswick, graphite in Quebec, a copper expansion in British Columbia. Three more are Arctic corridors whose principal purpose is to unlock mining regions. One is a transmission line built substantially to power mines. That is half the national list, either mining or the infrastructure that exists to make mining possible, sitting alongside the nuclear, hydro, LNG, pipeline, and port projects that make up the rest.

Nobody campaigned on that sentence. There was no press conference announcing that half of Canadian nation-building is now mineral logistics. The government has, quietly and perhaps without fully saying it to itself, conceded the argument of this article. The intersection projects are the national projects. The buckets just have not caught up.

And the road? The proponents believe Grays Bay could be operational by 2035.

Read that date again. The one project explicitly designed to serve all three ambitions at once is racing the same deadline as the pledge itself, and it is the rare project on a Canadian clock that might actually beat it, because someone finally started counting all of its value at the same time.

None of this is assured. The review is still running and most of the money is not yet found.

The fix is an owner, not another strategy

Canada does not lack strategies. We have a Critical Minerals Strategy, a defence policy, and more energy roadmaps than provinces. What is missing is a strategy for where they intersect. And, as with everything in this series, readers should be able to disagree with every part of it.

Count all three ledgers. Make dual-use appraisal the Major Projects Office’s explicit mandate rather than a fortunate by-product. When a corridor serves a mine, a grid, and a battalion, the assessment should total all three columns. Likewise, the NATO 1.5 per cent roadmap should count new investment, not relabelled spending. The accounting critique is fair, so disarm it. If the category merely rebadges what we were already doing, it is a gimmick. If it gets a port, a hydro expansion, and a transmission line built that otherwise would not exist, it is nation-building with an honest invoice.

Make defence the anchor tenant. Last July, the Pentagon became the largest shareholder in a rare-earth miner, guaranteed a ten-year price floor, and committed to buying every magnet a new facility produces for a decade. Agree or disagree with the terms, the structure answers the oldest question in project finance: no long-term contract, no project. Defence is the one customer with a constitutional mandate, a thirty-year horizon, and now a Defence Investment Agency built to sign exactly this kind of agreement. Canada’s version need not copy Washington’s equity stake. It needs bankable offtake agreements for the minerals the pledge requires, priced honestly and signed early.

Fix the clock. S&P’s research is blunt about what has stretched mine development timelines fivefold since the 1990s, and it is not geology. It is process: overlapping federal, provincial, and territorial reviews, each requirement reasonable on its own, stacked in sequence so that the clock restarts with every layer.

The answer is not to bulldoze review, and the projects in this essay show why. Grays Bay includes Inuit equity and an Inuit proponent. The transmission line connecting remote First Nations in northwestern Ontario was majority Indigenous-owned. That kind of partnership is not what slows projects down; it is what makes speed legitimate. The fix is better sequencing and shared ownership: one process instead of many, equity instead of consultation theatre, and a clock that starts only once.

The country in the diagram

None of this requires Canada to invent anything. It requires us to notice something we have already half-noticed, and then to assign it to someone.

The government is organized MECE. The country’s problems are organized Venn.

Somewhere north of the treeline there is a road waiting to be three things at once, with a decade to run and three ledgers that have finally, tentatively, been read together. Get the machinery right and the same dollars buy the mine, the grid, the port, and the pledge. Get it wrong and each department will keep politely declining to fund the most valuable projects in the country, one clean bucket at a time.

The overlap has no minister. Yet.