Mining, forestry industries in N.B. could benefit from federal budget

Sam Farley · CBC News

· Posted: Nov 05, 2025 10:12 AM EST | Last Updated: November 5

New Brunswick manufacture is apt to get a boost from the national fund introduced Tuesday, Premier Susan Holt suggests.

Holt highlighted investments successful captious infrastructure and commercialized infrastructure arsenic “positive steps for New Brunswick” successful a connection she made aft the archetypal fund of Prime Minister Mark Carney's Liberal authorities was delivered.

She went connected to accidental her authorities volition beryllium looking to enactment with national partners to guarantee the Sisson Mine task and the ports of Belledune and Saint John “get the investments they request to powerfulness our economy.” 

The Sisson Mine has been a long-debated task to excavation tungsten successful a distant country adjacent Napadogan and Stanley, astir 50 kilometres northwest of Fredericton. 

A backstage institution received provincial support for the excavation successful 2015 and national support successful 2017, but the task hasn't gone up yet. The task drew absorption from biology and Indigenous groups successful the province. 

Tungsten, which is resistant to heat, deterioration and corrosion, is utilized successful alloys for subject applications, engines and turbines.

While tungsten prices slumped astatine the clip of the mine’s approval, the national fund projected adding the tungsten to the database of captious minerals eligible for a mining and exploration taxation inducement for investors. 

Pierre Gratton, president of the Mining Association of Canada, said the Sisson Mine could beryllium well-positioned now, fixed however the fund approaches backing for mines. (Mining Association of Canada)

Pierre Gratton, president of the Mining Association of Canada, called the fund “very favourable” for his industry, with galore incentives that could assistance spur caller growth.

“There's important dollars allocated to enactment infrastructure investments and that tin beryllium a obstruction to caller projects,” Gratton said, and the taxation benefits would hopefully “spur much exploration and hopefully much mines.”

Gratton said overmuch of Canada’s mining imaginable is successful the North, wherever the colonisation is little dense, but New Brunswick is simply a “historic mining district.”

“I deliberation this volition surely assistance pull caller concern into the New Brunswick mining assemblage for sure,” Gratton said of the budget. 

Gratton said that China has tended to monopolize tungsten production, but the caller fund includes a money for supporting captious mining projects facing specified vulnerabilities.

The fund included $2 cardinal to Natural Resources Canada to “make strategical investments successful captious minerals projects and companies.”

“I would accidental that the Sisson Mine could precise good beryllium 1 of those that would beryllium eligible for that benignant of support,” Gratton said.  “We request to wean ourselves disconnected our reliance connected China. So it's a well-positioned project.”

New Brunswick’s overmuch much established forestry sector, which has struggled nether the commercialized war, besides stands to payment from the national budget, said Derek Nighbor, president of the Forest Products Association of Canada. 

While the main precedence is having Canada negociate a commercialized woody with the United States, Nighbor said a 2nd precedence “is ensuring that successful the interim, that our employees and our assemblage and our businesses are protected done backstop backing programs.”

Derek Nighbor, president of the Forest Products Association of Canada, said backing successful the fund to enactment the manufacture is welcome, but much is needed agelong term. (Sam Farley/Zoom)

Included successful the fund is $700 cardinal successful enactment for companies to support and enactment operations and restructuring during “this play of transformation.”

The fund besides included $500 cardinal for marketplace and merchandise diversification successful the forestry manufacture and a committedness to “prioritize Canadian materials successful construction.” Companies contracting tenders with the national authorities would besides beryllium required to root Canadian lumber.

Nighbor said New Brunswick forestry hasn’t seen the layoffs that the manufacture has successful British Columbia and Quebec.

“That said, astatine a 45 per cent work tariff combination, if this continues to drag, it's inevitable that we volition spot impacts successful New Brunswick.”

Recently, New Brunswick Natural Resources Minister John Herron said helium would enactment a headdress connected softwood to unafraid a tariff woody with the U.S. to assistance alleviate the existent 45 per cent successful U.S. surcharges connected lumber being shipped crossed the border.

When asked astir this, Nighbor declined to "negotiate publicly,” but said “we request a fig of originative ideas astatine the fingertips of negotiators to effort to get america to the close place.”

With definite industries observe fund wins, a nonpartisan Canadian conservation radical said the fund was disappointing.

There should person been much investments successful clime action, but alternatively the fund included an volition to destruct the lipid and state emissions cap, said Samanatha Green, incoming president of the Canadian Associations of Physicians for the Environment.

“The authorities is not putting the well-being of radical up of these high-level investments successful industry,” said Green, a household doc successful Toronto who has antecedently tally for the NDP.

“Which frankly, is not going to payment Canadian workers. It's going to payment shareholders of these ample companies."