German Chancellor Friedrich Merz welcomes Prime Minister Mark Carney with military honors before talks at the Chancellery on Aug. 26, 2025 in Berlin, Germany. Photo by Omer Messinger/Getty Images files

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At the G7 summit in Évian, France, in June, leaders of the member nations, including Prime Minister Mark Carney and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, signed a declaration identifying critical minerals as strategic assets essential to economic security.

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More importantly, they named midstream processing competitiveness as a shared priority. It was the right call, and an increasingly important one.

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Allied countries, from Canada to Germany and anywhere in between, can make all the declarations they want about how they are moving at lightning speed to unearth the critical minerals that will help build up pillars of the economy — from EVs to battery energy storage systems and an expanding array of defence capabilities.

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But if we don’t process those resources, we don’t really own or control them. Instead, we are beholden to those countries that do.

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For decades, allied nations operated under a comfortable assumption: extract the resource, export it and let someone else convert it into the materials that power modern industry. That approach produced short-term revenues and long-term dependencies. Today, roughly 90 per cent of global hard rock lithium refining sits in a single country, China. The story is similar for cobalt, rare earths and a growing list of materials that underpin electric vehicles, grid-scale energy storage and an expanding range of defence capabilities. The G7’s commitment to reduce critical minerals dependencies on a single supplier to under 60 per cent by 2030 is an acknowledgment of how far allied nations have drifted from control of their own supply chains.

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Canada has world-class lithium, nickel, cobalt and rare earth deposits. The gap is in what happens after extraction: the processing step that chemically converts ore into battery-grade material. Without that midstream layer, Canadian resources travel offshore and return as finished battery cells. The economic value stays overseas and the strategic dependency on foreign countries remains.

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Lithium is the clearest example of why this matters now. It is essential to not only electric vehicles, but also to grid-scale battery storage, portable power for defence operations, autonomous systems and platforms and the data infrastructure that drives industrial AI. The sectors that depend on a secure lithium supply are growing, and none of them can afford to wait for processing capacity to catch up.

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Canada has been faster than most allied countries to recognize what needs to be built. The federal and provincial governments have put instruments in place and they are beginning to direct capital toward the projects most likely to move. Where there is room for improvement, however, is the engineering expertise and chemical processing know-how that our allied partners have honed over the past number of years. That is what can help us match the speed this moment demands.