Can you give an overview of the work National Bank does in the mining space?

ET: National Bank offers a full suite of services to the mining and metals space, including lending, project financing, equity underwriting, and M&A services. Over the past year, we were involved in several transactions where we dealt with companies whose sole assets and management are outside of Canada. National Bank is one of the most aggressive lenders to the mining sector today in Canada. Our mining practices are based in three main offices – Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal.

Can you give a specific example of the work National Bank is doing with a mining client in Québec?

TB: The Osisko family of companies is one where we have had long-standing relationships across their whole family of businesses representing different projects in the province. National Bank recently advised on a three-way M&A transaction for Nomad Royalty, a company whose head office and management are based in Québec, but their assets are essentially outside of Québec. An example of a company we are working with which has its management and asset in Québec would be Champion Iron. National Bank also advised and underwrote the CAD$1.3 billion financing for Nemaska Lithium a few years ago.

Can you elaborate on how National Bank selects the firms that you will partner with?

ET: What is important to us is the management team, the project or idea that needs to be financed, and then the commodity. ESG is always part of the equation, and sometimes one or more of the ESG factors will be more important than the other, but it is a case-by-case situation. National Bank sees mining as a global business and we want to be part of the whole spectrum of the mining lifecycle, from exploration to development to construction, to production. What differentiates our practice is that we are not only targeting the most mature or the most junior companies in the sector, but we can add value across the chain.

What makes Québec an attractive jurisdiction for investment?

TB: Québec has a long mining history which has fostered significant management quality in the region. There is huge untapped resource potential and the variety and quality of the deposits in the province is significant. There are also various complementary financial players in the province, including governmental institutions, which are actively supporting companies to move their projects forward.

What is your outlook for M&A and deal-making particularly in the junior mining space?

TB: M&A and consolidation are inevitable in the junior space as many explorers are operating in the same commodity area coupled with limited sources of capital. It also takes one set of skills to explore and develop a project and a completely different set of skills to build and operate a mine. Increasingly more companies are also looking to vertically integrate and not only want to do the extraction of the mineral, but also want to add value through downstream processing, and this will lead to more M&A. With huge forecasted demands for critical minerals, I believe major players who are not playing in these commodity spaces already will start to turn their attention to these metals.

Where do you see the biggest opportunities for investment in the mining industry?

ET: There is currently significant attention on battery metals, especially copper and nickel, which are commodities National Bank has been involved in for many years, and so we will continue to focus on these. We also focus on the trend of consolidation and earlier in 2023, we advised B2Gold on acquiring their first project in Canada under a corporate vehicle called Sabina Gold, and this was a well-received transaction by the market. National Bank has been involved with some of the most significant equity transactions to date. For example, we were the lead book runner recently on the sell-down by Orion of part of their Capstone Block, which was worth approximately CAD$330 million, representing about 7% of Capstone, and that transaction, as of today, is the largest transaction on the TSX this year across all industries. National Bank will continue to offer a full suite of services to the mining industry.