New Brunswick’s mining industry all but died in a generation. A wave of critical-minerals money says it’s coming back—but is this a real revival, or politics and hype propping up projects that don’t pencil out?

A generation ago, mining was one of New Brunswick’s economic pillars.

In 1997, when John Herron was a federal member of parliament representing the district of Fundy Royal, the sector accounted for seven per cent of the province’s GDP.

Today, nearly three decades later, it is under half a per cent. Mining has been overtaken by legal cannabis. In 2023 it sat barely $40 million ahead of arts, entertainment and recreation—a perennially minor slice of the economy. In 2024, Statistics Canada ranked New Brunswick in the bottom half of provinces for annual mineral production value.

That collapse is the backdrop for what may become one of the more improbable turnarounds in Atlantic Canada’s economy. In less than a year, three mining projects have advanced, an industry association has been resurrected, and a provincial government has staked an aspirational target of returning mining to four per cent of GDP by 2030. Herron—now the provincial minister responsible—speaks excitedly about a return to the industry which helped drive the economy in his first political chapter.

“We want to be the most progressive, agile jurisdiction in the nation with respect to the mining sector,” he says.

“We want to attract the most advanced mining companies we would have in the country, and perhaps internationally.”

The question yet to be answered is the one that has followed every previous promise of a New Brunswick mining revival: what’s different this time—and is the financial opportunity real, or are politics and boosterism carrying projects the market alone wouldn’t?

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