In 1941, as the United States entered World War II, it turned to Canada for the aluminum it needed to ramp up aircraft production.
Canada ultimately provisioned more than one-third of the base metal to the wartime effort, a deed considered by historians to be one the country’s most important contributions to the Allied victory.
Now, the U.S. needs Canada again, this time to supply the critical minerals crucial to modern life – and modern warfare.
Why We Wrote This
In the West’s race to secure critical minerals, the pact being tested between the United States and Canada over tungsten mining in Yukon might prove influential in mending the pair’s rocky relationship.
The U.S. Department of Defense has invested in a half-dozen Canadian critical minerals projects during the past year. One of them, owned by Fireweed Metals, sits here in Yukon on the site of one of the world’s largest undeveloped high-grade deposits of tungsten – a metal used for everything from filaments in light bulbs to armor-penetrating ammunition.
For many here, this financial partnership is a win-win for the U.S. and Canada. And it continues a century of standing together as allies – today against archrival China. But if the U.S. and Canada were clearly on the same team in 1941, today, this is not as clear for many Canadians, including the Indigenous leaders under whose land so many deposits of critical minerals lie.
Amid President Donald Trump’s trade war with the United States’ northern neighbor and his threats to make it the 51st state, many question the consequences of the American race for critical minerals. While some worry it will threaten Canadian sovereignty further, others say it could fuse the two allies back together following a historic period of distrust.
“Once you get below the headline stuff … there’s still a group of people working in the governments who understand that Canada has a resource base that is very useful to the North American economy,” says Ian Gibbs, the chief executive of Fireweed Metals.
China dominates the world’s critical mineral supply, including about 80% of its tungsten.
While two-thirds of the supply is used for carbides for heavy industry, it is key to the defense sector because of its density – heavier than lead – with the highest melting point of all known elements. Neither Canada nor the U.S. has had a domestic supply since the last commercial mine closed in the mountainous area south of where Fireweed Metals is drilling, in 2015. China, Russia, and North Korea are among the world’s top suppliers.
That’s a problem for the U.S. Because of procurement regulations, the Defense Department is prohibited from buying “bad guy” tungsten, says Matthew Zolnowski, president of Greyfriars LLC, who worked at the Pentagon on critical minerals until 2022.
That vulnerability was brought into sharp relief this year. In the face of trade tariffs imposed by President Trump, China put controls on tungsten exports – and prices surged.
With the postwar order shaken by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and China’s aggression in the Indo-Pacific, the West has been in a race to end its reliance on China.
The U.S. joined India, Japan, and Australia this year to cooperate on critical mineral supplies. At a Group of Seven summit of leading industrialized nations in Canada in June, Western allies agreed on an action plan on critical minerals “to swiftly protect our economic and national security,” their statement read.
Canada and the U.S. had signed a joint action plan in 2020 to collaborate on mining and processing critical minerals and rare earths.
Under the Defense Production Act, a Cold War-era statute, Canada has been treated as a domestic source for U.S. industry – allowing the U.S. Defense Department to invest directly since 1992. But, until last year, the Pentagon had made no such investments in Canada.
To date, six mines in Canada have received co-funding from the U.S. Defense Department and the Canadian government, according to Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), a government agency.
Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press/AP
Fireweed Metals received $22.5 million (Canadian; U.S.$15.8 million) from the Defense Department last December to produce a feasibility study for their tungsten project. In August, NRCan provided $12.9 million to improve access to the site via a road originally built by the U.S. Army during World War II to supply an oil pipeline.
Geoff Atkins, an Australian mining executive who led a rare earths project in Western Canada, says this represents a significant shift in how mines are funded in the West. For years, countries including the U.S. have faced gaps in the minerals supply chain because of the challenges of achieving “bankability” in highly complex projects. China dominates the market today because its government invested heavily in the sector rather than relying on the free market.
Now, Mr. Atkins says, “a lot of projects today are actually being marketed first and foremost to the governments instead of investors.” And among these, the U.S. Defense Department is one of the biggest investors, he says.
The Pentagon’s direct investment in Canadian private mining is considered historic. “You have to go back to the World War II era to see similar direct ties between international resource development and national defense,” says Mr. Zolnowski.
But the U.S.-Canada relationship is nothing like it once was, before Mr. Trump turned America’s closest ally into an adversary nearly a year ago.
When Dawna Hope, the chief of Na-Cho Nyäk Dun First Nation, whose land the tungsten deposit straddles, learned about the Fireweed Metals project, the newly elected Mr. Trump had just started trolling Canada.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
At the time, mining already weighed heavily on Chief Hope’s mind. Her nation is still reeling from a June 2024 chemical contamination at Eagle Gold Mine on its traditional lands, which span thousands of square miles of remote boreal forest and snow-capped peaks.
But her first thought about the tungsten deposit tapped the kind of anxiety that reflects the mood in Canada today, where many simply no longer trust U.S. intentions. “Trump wants my traditional lands,” she says was her first thought. “That’s where my mind went.”
She was not alone.
As Mr. Trump ramped up his attacks on Canada, then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was overheard by a Toronto Star reporter speculating that it was Canada’s vast abundance of critical minerals that had Mr. Trump “talking about absorbing us and making us the 51st state.”
The annexation threats continued, generating anger and resentment in Canada toward the U.S. that was unprecedented in modern history. The mood drove Mark Carney to a resounding victory in national elections with his “Elbows Up” slogan – a hockey fighting reference – and his warning that the relationship with the U.S. that had been “based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation, is over.”
President Trump, Mr. Carney said during his victory speech, is “trying to break us, so that America can own us.”
Chief Hope is suspicious not only of Mr. Trump but of her own government. She has been pushing for a larger say in mining in her territory and recently called for a complete halt to any new claims on her nation’s lands until a land-use planning process has been completed.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Scientists have estimated that, worldwide, more than half the critical minerals and metals needed for a clean-energy transition lie in or near Indigenous lands. In Canada, NRCan estimates that about 90% of current and future critical mineral projects, involving both mining and processing, are located within 100 kilometers (about 62 miles) of Indigenous territories.
That has been touted as a tremendous opportunity for Indigenous peoples. According to Canada’s Critical Minerals Strategy, the mining sector is the second-largest private sector employer of Indigenous peoples in Canada.
Chief Hope insists her caution in this case is not a simple narrative. “We know we need mines,” she says. “But we [society] need to stop failing at mining.”
For the last year, she has been working tirelessly to slow down mining so that last year’s gold mine disaster does not repeat itself, neither on her land nor on anyone else’s.
Now, she fears that the race for critical minerals will encourage the government to green-light major mining projects without proper environmental and cultural safeguards. “We are concerned about them fast tracking under other umbrellas such as national security,” she says.
In this atmosphere, John Steen, director of the Bradshaw Research Initiative in Minerals and Mining at the University of British Columbia, sees the Pentagon investment as an opportunity – but one that comes with uncertainty. “There is a risk that we end up with a feral southern neighbor,” he says, adding that, under those circumstances, “we would not want U.S. investment in critical minerals in Canada.”
Yukon is famous for the Klondike gold rush, and it holds 27 of the 34 minerals Canada lists as “critical.” But it has only one operating hard-rock mine. Jonas Smith, head of the Yukon Chamber of Mines, says the tungsten project could help the territory play its part in Western security.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
He says the tungsten deal shows the reality of cooperation between two longtime allies, whether that is inside NATO, across intelligence agencies, or through military deals. The current war of words, Mr. Smith says, is just that. “That’s something that I call the air war. There’s big explosions in the sky, and they’re very dazzling.” But on the ground, there is no gunfire.
“People probably think there’s just so much mining [in Yukon] and the mining companies are all lined up and they want to extract and pillage the resources and we have to stop them,” says Heather Exner-Pirot, senior fellow and director of energy, natural resources, and environment at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a public policy think tank in Ottawa. “It’s like, no, there’s one mine left.”
Ranj Pillai, who was premier of Yukon when the deal was inked last year, acknowledges that some Yukoners have reservations about U.S. defense spending in the territory. But, he adds, the U.S. government will not have exclusive rights to the tungsten that is mined. “This is going to be an incredibly sought-after supply chain.”
Fireweed Metals, Map data from OpenStreetMap
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Jacob Turcotte/Staff
In fact, Canada’s critical minerals might be the bargaining chip that brings two deeply intertwined allies back together, argues Christopher Hernandez-Roy, deputy director of the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, as Canada and the U.S. negotiate new trade and security deals.
“When China is building up its conventional forces and … has cornered the market on many of these minerals that the U.S. needs”, he says, “the fact that Canada and the U.S. are having these trade tensions is not a good thing if you’re the Department of Defense.”
Mayor Paul Lefebvre of Sudbury, a mining hub in Ontario, penned a commentary amid Mr. Trump’s annexation threats this past winter and spring that called for Canada to “rapidly – and environmentally sustainably – explore and control [its] deposits before the U.S. tries to make them their own.”
Now, as Mr. Trump’s threats have softened, so has Mayor Lefebvre’s view. He thinks together the U.S. and Canada need to work to fortify a North American supply chain. “At the end of the day”, he says, “the competitor in all this … is China.”
