Canada turns its critical minerals into leverage against Trump

Canada turns its critical minerals into leverage against Trump As the trade war escalates, Ottawa is signaling less interest in sharing with the U.S. 09/05/2026 02:00 PM EDT OTTAWA — Canada is no longer talking about critical minerals as an asset to share with the United States, as it slaps back at the Trump administration in its bitterly escalating trade war. “I don’t get mad, I get even,” Energy and Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson said Thursday, capping a tour meant to showcase the mines and electricity projects Canada is racing to build in response to President Donald Trump’s economic aggression. In Prince George, B.C., Hodgson broke ground on the North Coast Transmission Line, set to be running by 2032 — an expansion of the provincial grid that would double electricity capacity in British Columbia, powering new critical mineral mines near the Alaskan border and liquefied natural gas shipments to Asia. “Nothing would make me happier than when the United States asks us for more electricity to say, ‘You know what, we’ve got a lot of mines we need to develop in northern British Columbia,’” Hodgson said. “Nothing would make me happier than just saying, ‘You know what, we’re going to use all our electricity here. We’re going to build new mines, new processing facilities.’” Although Trump keeps insisting otherwise, the U.S. relies heavily on Canadian resources. Canada supplied more than 80 percent of U.S. electricity imports in 2025, according to the Canada Energy Regulator. U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra has singled out potash as something America needs. Shortly after arriving in Ottawa in April 2025, Hoekstra told POLITICO that Trump was “very interested” in Canada’s energy and critical minerals. Washington views Canada’s stockpiles as a bulwark against Chinese dominance of the global market in critical minerals essential to defense, quantum computing, artificial intelligence and virtually every piece of tech. Canada and the United States have a cooperation agreement on critical minerals that took root in the Joe Biden administration and continues under the Trump administration. After walking away from trade negotiations last month, Prime Minister Mark Carney signaled he was losing interest and patience in cooperating with the U.S. on critical minerals. He said he would continue finding deals and keep pursuing them elsewhere, suggesting Washington had squandered an opportunity to cooperate with Canada. “That is something that is a missed opportunity as a consequence of what’s happened, but we didn’t cause it to them,” Carney said when POLITICO asked about the role of critical minerals at his Aug. 22 press conference, the morning after he called his negotiators back to Ottawa. “Kind of thing you do as part of a trade deal,” Carney quipped. “One of the reasons to do a trade deal with Canada.” Ottawa has been courting alternatives. Carney boasted of 50 deals in the past 12 months, “on the order of C$50 billion worth of transactions” including stockpiling. Asked by POLITICO whether that included the demand for exclusive access to Canada’s minerals, Carney shot back: “We would never give exclusive access.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Ahead of this year’s G7, Canada extended a behind-the-scenes offer to alliance members for “priority access” to Canada’s critical minerals stockpile, according to a letter seen by POLITICO from Hodgson. Carney said there had been potential for cooperation based on Canada’s initiative during its G7 presidency to create a critical minerals alliance, along with American efforts led by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. British Columbia Premier David Eby, an outspoken Trump critic, noted Thursday that Americans need power from his province and at the same time, “the president continues to denigrate and insult the massive contribution that British Columbians and Canadians make to American energy security.” Ontario Premier Doug Ford has suggested Canada should threaten to cut off critical mineral supplies. But given their strategic importance to the U.S. — and especially in light of Trump’s reaction to the breakdown in talks, including renaming Lake Ontario — playing hardball risks further attacks on the Canadian sovereignty that Carney seeks to protect. A research paper released this past spring by the Transition Security Project, a U.S.-U.K. nonprofit initiative that analyzes the overlap between defense spending, climate change and geopolitics, raised the specter that the U.S. could coerce Canada into becoming an unwilling supplier of the minerals that it needs. “The constant threat of American escalation turns mineral-rich allies like Canada into policy-takers — integrated suppliers whose investment and regulatory space narrows as the U.S. leverages its economic power over their natural resource industries,” the paper warned. “If that trajectory continues, Canada’s status as a ‘mining nation’ might be better described as ‘mining territory’ for the larger American security economy,” it said. But Hodgson, a former Goldman Sachs Canada CEO, is demonstrating an elbows-up defiance on leveraging Canada’s resource wealth and has repeatedly referred to critical minerals as “an incredible set of cards” in any negotiation with the U.S. This past week, Hodgson began laying those cards on the table in his western Canadian travels that started in Saskatchewan with visits to potash, uranium and copper producers, and rare earth processors. At Saskatoon’s McIlvenna Bay copper and zinc mine, which delivered its first bounty of minerals this summer, Hodgson said the facility would help “underpin our sovereignty as a new source of minerals that are essential to our clean energy technologies, to our advanced manufacturing, and to our national security.”