I had the privilege of being part of the Philippine delegation that accompanied President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. (PBBM) and First Lady Marie Louise “Liza” Araneta-Marcos to Vancouver, British Columbia, for the President’s four-day official visit to Canada.
This was the first trip of its kind by a Philippine head of state in more than a decade. This was not a simple diplomatic courtesy call, upon the gracious invitation of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, no less, but also a working demonstration of how a country rich in critical minerals can build a modern mining sector that investors trust and communities accept.
The Philippines and Canada have maintained diplomatic relations since 1949, ties that have deepened steadily from modest post-war beginnings into a modern partnership spanning trade, defense, education and a Filipino-Canadian community now numbering close to a million.
In recent years, that relationship has gathered visible momentum: an Export Development Canada office and an Indo-Pacific Agriculture and Agri-Food office have opened in Manila, Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro became the first Philippine defense chief to visit Ottawa this past June, and the two countries marked the 75th anniversary of their diplomatic ties in 2024.
President Marcos’s visit to Vancouver, and the elevation of bilateral relations to a full Strategic Partnership that came with it, was the natural next step in a friendship more than seven decades in the making.
The President was joined by Trade Secretary Cristina Roque, Environment Secretary Juan Miguel Cuna, Finance Secretary Deck Go, and Presidential Communications Secretary Dave Gomez, among other Cabinet officials. Their presence signified that the Philippines was not going to Canada merely to exchange diplomatic pleasantries, but to negotiate.
The visit yielded roughly $2.5 billion in investment commitments from Canadian firms, spanning mining, critical minerals, energy and the IT-BPM sector. The Department of Trade and Industry later confirmed that seven Canadian critical minerals and energy companies — OceanaGold, B2Gold, CVMR Corp., Emergent Waste Solutions, AtkinsRéalis, Electra Batteries, and Hatch Ltd. — had put forward concrete investment plans.
OceanaGold alone proposed a staged program projecting nearly $2 billion in cumulative investment through 2037 to extend the productive life of the Didipio gold-copper mine in Nueva Vizcaya. B2Gold and its local partner, Filminera, separately discussed expenditures to expand solar power and exploration at the Masbate Gold Project. These are multi-year capital commitments tied to permits, technical reports, and operating mines already generating local jobs and government revenue.
Just as significant, in my view, was the Joint Declaration of Intent on Energy and Natural Resources signed in Vancouver by Environment Secretary Cuna and Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Anita Anand, witnessed by both President Marcos and Prime Minister Mark Carney. This agreement formalizes cooperation on critical minerals development, responsible mining, clean energy, and environmental stewardship, precisely the framework the Philippine mining industry has been advocating for years.
It is one thing to attract capital, it is another to attract capital bound to a shared standard of responsibility. The Vancouver declaration, as we shall call it, gave us both.
Canada itself already has an international mining standard adopted worldwide: Toward Sustainable Mining, or TSM. Developed by the Mining Association of Canada, TSM is a performance system that holds member companies accountable on tailings management, biodiversity, community and Indigenous relations, and safety — verified by external audit, not self-declared.
It has since been adopted or adapted by mining associations in more than a dozen countries, including the Philippines through the Chamber of Mines of the Philippines, and it offers a proven template as our own industry works to raise the bar on tailings governance and community engagement.
Responsible mining is possible and Canada has proven it. On Vancouver Island, not far from where our delegation met with investors, sits the Butchart Gardens, one of the world’s most visited botanical gardens, and, in its origins, a depleted limestone quarry.
Robert Butchart mined that pit for cement stone in the early 1900s. When the quarry was exhausted, his wife, Jennie, spent years hauling in soil by horse cart and hand-planting ivy into the bare rock walls until the pit became the Sunken Garden that now draws over a million visitors a year.
It is, quite literally, an industrial wound turned into a national treasure. I do not raise it as a novelty. I raise it because it is proof, more than a century old, that a mine’s ending need not be its community’s loss, that closure and rehabilitation, done with the same seriousness as extraction, can leave land better than when an investor found it.
This is the argument the Philippine mining industry has long tried to make. Canada’s example, backed now by a bilateral declaration, by billions in fresh investment, and by more than a century of rehabilitation practice, gives that argument new weight.
If our nickel and copper reserves are to power the world’s clean energy transition, as the President rightly told Canadian investors in Vancouver, then the mines that extract them must be built, operated and eventually closed to a standard the public can trust.
Canada showed us, in the span of four days, both the capital and the credibility that come from getting that standard right.
Under the PBBM administration and through his guidance, it is our task to meet this. *