The New Face of America - PDAC

What was the PDAC conference like last week?

(YouTube Audio)

A week ago I was in Toronto for two conferences, the Metals Investor Forum on February 28 and March 1, where I gave a presentation called "The Golden Bridge away from America", and conducted Backstage Interviews with the three companies in my session, and the PDAC, which stands for the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada, which ran from March 1-5. My presentation and those of my companies, Silver North Resources Ltd, TDG Gold Corp, and Trifecta Gold Corp, have now been posted on the MIF YouTube web site and can be accessed directly through the links in my March 11, 2025 KRO post, MIF Presentation March 2025: The Golden Bridge away from America. The theme was gold's unusually strong uptrend since February 2024 which is not reflected by market activity involving the GLD ETF nor in what should be a major emerging bull market for resource juniors which have been stuck in a bear market since 2011 with only a few brief rallies in 2016, 2020 and 2022. The continuing strength of gold appears to be a stealth move by the rest of world as a bridge away from an increasingly unpredictable, unreliable, untrustworthy, destabilizing and reckless America under the leadership of Donald Trump.

The conference week was preceded by an extraordinary display of thuggishness by the United States toward what are supposed to be its allies which culminated in the brutish humiliation on Friday of Ukraine's President Zelensky that brought a rousing cheer from American Putin Poodles. So naturally there was much talk in Canada about what it means to be "Canadian", for which the historical response has been the vacuous "we are not American", though increasingly the answer was trending toward, "we are the true Americans", what America's enlightenment era founders had in mind when in 1776 they launched the most radical experiment in humankind's history with regard to a democracy geared toward liberty with rule of law guardrails against the restoration of autocracy.

Particularly disturbing was Trump's wishful embrace of Russia as America's solution to its feeble raw material supply capacity. I went to PDAC with optimism that the resource juniors would soon be called upon to find new deposits in North America to help wean the Global West of its heavy dependence on supply from Global East nations like China and Russia, but went home with a gloomy feeling that this will not happen under Trump.

As people engaged with each other at PDAC they would look for clues on where the other person stood with regard to Trump (believe me, there are plenty of Canadians who are Trumpers), and they would recoil with horror when words like "Soros" would slip into the conversation and they realized that the other person's mind had been snatched by Trump. It reminded me of the final scene of the 1978 movie The Invasion of the Body Snatchers when the character Nancy encounters Matthew, played by Donald Sutherland, a great Canadian actor who passed away in 2024, with whom she had been investigating the alien invasion, only to realize his mind too had been snatched.

PDAC is the world's biggest mining and exploration conference which takes place annually in early March, with 27,353 delegates attending this year. Having just turned 65 I qualified for a non-member All Access pass for only CAD $140 compared to CAD $539 for PDAC members and $849 for non-members, so I looked forward to attending presentations in the technical program. In recent years I have bought only the $25 per day Exhibit's Day pass which gives access to the Investors Exchange where companies exhibit and the Trade Show where government agencies and service providers have their booths and pavilions.

When I picked up my badge I grabbed 2 pamphlets, an 8 page foldout called "Schedule at a Glance" and a 32 page booklet called "Exhibitor Listings & Floor Plans" which turned out to be the only printed material made available by PDAC. The first thing I checked out was the technical program section so that I could highlight the talks I was interested in and arrange my schedule so as to not miss any of them. Much to my dismay it consisted of a 2 inch strip across the bottom of the Schedule at a Glance listing only the general topic such as "10:30 am - 12:30 pm Room 701: Porphyry copper-gold deposits". The titles and times of the five 24 minute talks were missing.

PDAC used to have a large room set aside for all of Sunday in which newsletter writers gave presentations. This was organized and sponsored by Peter Botjos for a couple decades. I was a perennial presenter for at least 2 decades. During the 2000s these newsletter talks were very well attended and when I was finished I would be swarmed by fans outside the speaker hall asking about this or that. By the time the resource junior bear market was underway in 2012 this was no longer the case. Attendance at the newsletter session was still decent though by 2020, the year the covid pandemic began, the audience had shrunk to a third of the room's capacity. Since then they have shrunk the newsletter session into what they call the "investment hub theatre" tucked into a corner of the Investors Exchange and given it the new name "Investment Leaders Forum" to reflect a wider range of experts. I don't participate in these newsletter sessions any longer because it is a lot of work for nothing. But I was curious to see who was presenting when and perhaps sit in on some of the talks.

The Schedule at a Glance had a half inch at the bottom which listed "10:30-5 pm Investment Hub Theatre". No list of speakers and times. They didn't even bother to list Peter Botjos as a sponsor. The schedule had a QR Code which took you to the PDAC web site where you could drill down through several web pages to find both the technical program and newsletter session detail in separate paths that you could scroll through until the cows came home. What was I supposed to do with that? Use my smartphone with its tiny screen every time I needed to check when and where a talk was coming up? What is wrong with provided a printed list of the talks and times? Maybe include a QR code in the Schedule at a Glance for each program session?

I went to a PDAC information desk to ask if perhaps there was a more comprehensive schedule I had simply missed. No, this was it. When I asked why they would leave out the program detail I was told it had something to do with "sustainability", namely minimize paper printing. I wondered why there was so much more space devoted to the Indigenous, Student and Sustainability Programs. I also wondered why the Exhibitor List booklet needed 32 pages to list the exhibitors plus 3 pages for 15 exhibitor spotlights. Could they not have used a small font and added 3 pages to list the 61 technical talk titles with time and place plus speaker, as well as the 19 "investment leader" 20 minute talks? Fortunately I had researched the technical program before I left for Toronto and made printouts that I was able to use during the conference. If every delegate had done this they would have wasted far more paper than if the PDAC schedule had been better organized or included an extra page. This is what is called "cost dumping", what Canada's anti-mining lobby engages in when it organizes protests against mining in Canada using devices whose physical parts are sourced from parts of the world where there are no enforced environmental rules.

Beyond being penny wise and pound foolish, what is the message PDAC is sending the global mining and exploration community through its war on "ease of access"? I think it is that knowledge which comes in the form of the technical program no longer matters. What is the message PDAC is sending the investment community, especially retail investors who would have paid $25 to attend on Sunday? It is that investors no longer matter. Only First Nations matter, 3% of Canada's population elevated by UNDRIP to a DNA based aristocracy which claims all of Canada as its ancestral territory with a final say on what happens to Canada's natural resources. At the start of each technical talk the moderator had to acknowledge this, in effect saying that only this tiny minority matters. At the PDAC opening ceremony on Sunday the First Nations speaker emphasized that this land is their land, not your land.

PDAC is clearly not reading the room. In the wake of Trump's thuggish attempt to humiliate Canada even First Nations are waking up to the peril facing Canada as a sovereign nation. First Nations groups are becoming much more interested in collaborating with the mining sector to see development in their backyard that creates self-esteem generating jobs. They are beginning to realize that when Canada is a conquered nation their rights will be as worthless as those of everybody else. Trump's effort to destroy Canada's manufacturing sector will force Canada to focus on its natural resources, which need to be developed if the Global West is to survive the Global East juggernaut whose control of raw material supply gives it a strategic advantage.

Penny wise and pound foolish was also on display when I dropped by the US Geological Survey booth in the Trade Show where service providers and government agencies are located. I was stunned to see an empty booth. Elon Musk's Doge war had apparently cancelled the USGS presence. Geological surveys from around the world had a presence at PDAC, except Zimbabwe, which was there last year, but has proven incapable of a granting a single mining license under its new mining law and wisely decided to stop pretending it is open for business. The United States has a critical raw material import vulnerability, and it makes no sense to kill government agencies that can help solve this problem, especially when it comes to exploring and developing America's mineral potential. I heard that numerous technical presentations by various government agencies at the 2025 SME Annual Conference in Denver during the prior week were a no show because the DogeMaster is trying to save a few pennies. SME stands for "Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration". This year's conference theme was "Meet the Future of Mining". Well the New Face of America seems to be the same as the old one, Not In Our Backyard.

None of this makes any sense. The industry hope was that the Trump administration would take steps to shift the face of permitting bodies such as the BLM and USFS away from their health insurance styled "deny and delay" approach to exploration and mining in America. Chainsaw Musk has been destroying government agencies which make up less than 14% of the $7 trillion federal budget. If Trump were serious about reducing the federal deficit he would instruct Musk to tackle the elephants in the room: the elderly, the poor and the sick who represent 68% of federal spending.

Such a move could easily be justified in the name of efficiency, and Chainsaw Musk is chomping at the bit to proceed, though Trump seems to sense that this is a third rail that will fry him if he touches it. Here is the logic. The elderly who are not spending wealth accumulated through merit are no longer productive members of society. The poor are poor because they lack merit, as a result of which they are also not productive. The sick are sick because they have bad genes or habits, as a result of which they also cannot contribute much to society. Nearly $5 trillion is spent on keeping them alive with no return visible to those who paid taxes. The budget can easily be balanced by simply eliminating funding for social security, health, Medicare, and income security which would accelerate the demise of these unproductive members of society. This, however, is not what most voters had in mind when they endorsed Trump's promise to make America great again.

There isn't much that can be done about the $1.8 trillion spent on interest and national defense, though Putin did helpfully suggest he would reduce Russia's $100 billion defense spending by 50% if America would do the same for its $900 billion defense budget. The problem with this deficit reduction goal is that much of America's GDP consists of services, and keeping unlucky Americans alive and well is a huge source of employment for people who are not retired, sick or poor. What are they going to do when they get fired? Perhaps when millions of undocumented workers are deported the fired workers can find jobs working in slaughterhouses, cleaning toilets for Americans full of merit, picking lettuce, and working in the hospitality sector for wages that no longer have a minimum.

Maintaining America's military superiority also employs an awful lot of people, especially when you consider everybody involved in providing technology and hardware to the military. This is a sector that does have a critical vulnerability to many metals the United States does not produce in proportion to the size of its $28 trillion economy. That empty USGS booth at PDAC was a truly depressing testament to the new penny wise pound foolish face of America.