This summer, zinc from a northern Manitoba mine will travel the Hudson Bay Railway to the sub-arctic port at Churchill, where it will be shipped through a mostly ice-free Hudson Strait to a refinery in Belgium. The mine-to-refinery passage will take a fraction of the time it takes to ship it through Montreal — the usual route for Canadian exports bound for Europe. Location was a major factor in the choice to ship from Hudson Bay, said Candace Brule, vice president of investor relations for Hudbay Minerals, the Toronto-based mine owner. \"While there are challenges associated with Churchill, including a limited shipping season, due to its proximity to the mine, we view it as a competitive logistics option, providing a degree of diversification,\" she told Canada’s National Observer. Critical minerals are a large group of materials — including lithium, cobalt, zinc and rare earth elements — needed for energy transition technologies such as solar panels and EV batteries. They are also widely used in technology and defense applications, from armour-piercing bullets to weapons’ guidance systems. Canada — seeking to diversify its trade in the face of US tariff and annexation threats — recently agreed to deepen cooperation with the European Union on critical minerals. As the world scrambles for critical minerals and Canada looks to widen its export alliances, Churchill is poised to be a strategic port again. What will it take to make it happen? As the world seeks more zinc, copper, nickel and even potash — all resources that Canada’s western provinces have in spades — Churchill has the potential to bypass the problematic Panama Canal and funnel commodities to Europe, South America and the Middle East, beyond the north-south US trade axis. In May, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew pitched a 'One Canada Trade Corridor' to Prime Minister Mark Carney — envisioning a multipurpose, multi-modal trade passageway, including new transmission lines and improved rail links, all connected to a Churchill port where icebreakers can extend the shipping season. In making this pitch, critical minerals were top of mind — including a reference to mineral-rich Manitoba as a \"Costco of critical minerals,\" home to 31 of the 34 minerals on Ottawa’s critical minerals list. Jamie Moses, Manitoba’s minister of business, mining, trade and job creation, told Canada's National Observer a key reason for building a new national trade corridor through Canada’s North is to move resources to alternative markets. Ottawa is investing $175 million over five years in the Churchill port and railway, and Manitoba will provide more than $36 million in cash and operating support. \"We’re committed to investing in the Port of Churchill and the northern economy, which means looking at options for shipping commodities to new markets that will treat Canada fairly,\" Moses said. \"The Port of Churchill is integral for Canada to bring more products to markets in Europe and the rest of the world.\"\n\nBack in April, General Manager Shane Hutchins gave Canada's National Observer a tour of the port, driving through four-foot-deep snow drifts in his pickup truck, overlooking a frozen Hudson Bay where the ice was still up to three metres deep. \"Not much is happening at the port right now, but wait a few months, that will really change,\" he said at the time. By July, the long-awaited spring ice breakup of Hudson Bay had come and gone, and tourists and seasonal workers swelled Churchill’s population to over 1,000. There are 60 rail cars worth of zinc oxide sitting inside a newly-constructed 24,000-square-foot storage facility that looks like a giant white circus tent. It’s designed to hold metal concentrates — the end product metal mines sell to refineries — as well as fertilizers, phosphate and potash. Hutchins said the Hudbay zinc shipments represented a new business model that will see Canada’s only rail-connected, deep-sea Arctic port move beyond shipping prairie grain. It’s his job, among many other things, to make sure the zinc concentrate is loaded smoothly. He described how rail cars filled with zinc arrive in Churchill and take a short spur line to a conveyor belt that carries the powder into the new holding structure. An ocean-going bulk vessel, bound for Europe, is then guided by a tug boat, and the powder is loaded into the ship’s hold. A private company working at the port ensures the cargo has the specifications for both the shipper and the end customer. To accommodate more shipments like this, Hutchins said, dredging operations this year will create a new deeper berth at the port. If critical mineral exports are to expand, a new tug boat will be needed too. \"It’s a big opportunity for us,\" Hutchins said. \"There are critical minerals so close that we’re not at the mercy of CN and CP,\" he said, referring to the Canadian National and Canadian Pacific railways in the south. \"The Hudson Bay Railway serves [the region] where the zinc will come from,\" he said.\n\nThe improvements being made now, both at the port and railway, will triple critical mineral storage capacity at the port, said Brad Hartle, a spokesman for the Winnipeg-based Arctic Gateway Group, a unit of the OneNorth partnership of 41 Manitoba First Nation and bayline communities that acquired ownership of the port and railway in 2018. \"The goal is to make Churchill an essential northern hub for Canadian critical mineral exports,\" he said. Map showing critical mineral activity in Manitoba and key railway links. There are 45 active exploration and development firms exploring for critical minerals, according to a 2024 Manitoba government report. Source: Securing Our Critical Mineral Future / Economic Development, Investment, Trade and Natural Resources, Manitoba, November 2024. Churchill is envisioned as an export launching pad for a western hinterland rich in critical minerals, including the Flin Flon greenstone belt, a mineral-rich geological formation straddling central Manitoba and Saskatchewan. The area is part of the so-called Critical Minerals Triangle — a collection of mineral and infrastructure projects expected to receive continued support on Ottawa’s anticipated list of nation-building mega projects. Hudbay committed this year to shipping 20,000 tonnes of zinc concentrate from its Lalor Mine in Snow Lake, Man. via Churchill — a plan that is moving ahead despite production stoppages from summer wildfires that could affect the final amount of zinc that is shipped. The presence of ice on the shipping route (see sidebar below) was not a concern, Hudbay’s Brule said. \"Given that we utilize ice-class vessels for our movements out of Churchill, insurance does not represent a constraint,\" she said. Securing insurance is a barrier to extending the Churchill shipping season, industry experts say, because vessels sailing beyond October could be damaged by sea ice. \"Ice class\" ships, like those used to move the Hudbay zinc, are built with thicker hulls and stronger girders, beams and bulkheads to withstand the perils of sailing through waters with potential free-floating ice.\n\nThe Hudson Bay Railway is also within range of the world’s biggest deposits of potash — among the most critical of Canada’s critical minerals — clustered in neighbouring Saskatchewan, not far from Saskatoon. Saskatchewan has so much potash — a group of potassium-rich minerals and chemicals primarily used to make fertilizers to grow food — the province could meet global demand at current levels for hundreds of years. Almost half of Canada’s potash exports go to farmers in the United States, where most of it enters tariff-free for now — exempted under the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA), the latest iteration of the North American free trade deal first struck decades ago. Canadian potash is also exported worldwide, and therein lies a growing opportunity. \"There’s a lot of benefits for potash to reach [non-US] global markets through Churchill,\" said Feiyue Wang, professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Manitoba’s Clayton H. Riddell Faculty of Environment, Earth, and Resources Centre for Earth Observation Science (CEOS) in Winnipeg. The predominant export route from Hudson Bay explains why. To export potash today to Brazil — which accounts for about 20 per cent of Canadian exports — it must move by rail to the Port of Vancouver, where it is offloaded into a specially-built storage facility at Neptune Terminals. It is then loaded onto ships and sailed through the Panama Canal. \"There are huge problems with the Panama Canal,\" Wang said. \"The area is getting drier, the water is getting so shallow, and ships have to wait in long queues.\" There is also geopolitical risk. Panama has controlled the canal since 1999, but the Trump administration is now demanding more control of the 82-kilometre waterway linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The canal facilitates five per cent of global trade and 40 per cent of all US container shipping traffic. An April 2025 report from the Council on Foreign Relations said increased US control over the canal could \"restrict trade flows of uncooperative actors … and [give the United States] a bargaining chip in negotiations with the many nations that rely on it for critical imports and exports.\" There is a better way, Wang said. For at least six months of the year, once a ship is past the Hudson Strait — which connects northern Manitoba and potential Ontario seaports to the Atlantic Ocean — \"it’s a straight boulevard\" to markets in Europe and South America, avoiding the Panama Canal altogether, he said. Arctic Gateway Group (AGG) said it has been in \"active and very positive discussions\" with multiple companies on moving potash through Churchill, as well as Australia’s Foran Mining on shipping copper, gold, zinc and silver from its new McIlvenna Bay mine in Saskatchewan through the port. The discussions have not yielded firm commitments so far, AGG said, and companies contacted by Canada's National Observer did not respond to requests for comment. Earlier this year, AGG signed an MOU, a non-binding agreement known as a memorandum of understanding, with Genesis Fertilizers, a farmer-led company that is building a fertilizer production plant in Saskatchewan. Prairie farmers currently must import fertilizer feedstocks from southeastern US states. AGG and Genesis are exploring opportunities to import the same commodities from alternative markets in North Africa and the Middle East via Churchill.\n\nIf Churchill could export even 10 per cent of Saskatchewan’s potash output, it could generate enough revenue to be viable as a port and railway, said Barry Prentice, a professor and expert on transportation and supply chains at the University of Manitoba’s Transport Institute. \"One extra ship a year is not going to sustain the railway,\" he said of current plans for zinc exports via Churchill. \"The railway needs about two million tonnes of traffic, and this is where potash comes in, because we have markets in Europe, Africa and South America that would be very nicely served going through the eastern route,\" Prentice said. To become a seasonal potash export hub, Churchill would need to invest in specialized infrastructure similar to Neptune Terminals — which is owned by Canpotex, a partnership of Saskatchewan’s two biggest potash miners — Nutrien and US-based Mosaic — that ships potash to over 40 countries. That investment would include expanded storage space and a \"stack reclaimer\" to move potash from shed to ship — the latter costing anywhere from $500,000 to $5 million. One solution to high infrastructure costs is to look back to when the Churchill port had the most stable operations in its history. Before the demise of the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) in 2012 — when its monopoly on wheat and barley sales ended — the federal marketing board required that a small percentage of western grain be exported through Churchill. This guaranteed a sustaining flow of business to the port. What’s stopping governments — tasked with creating nation-building projects and securing new global markets — from requiring potash and mining companies in proximity to the Hudson Bay Railway to ship a small part of their non-US business seasonally through Churchill, in the same way the CWB did in the past? Prentice is not convinced. \"The answer is not to try forcing companies to use Churchill,\" he said. \"But to invest in the handling equipment, port and rail improvements needed to make it economically attractive.\"\n\nShipping commodities through remote Arctic waters remains a risky proposition from an insurance industry perspective — raising the question of whether Churchill will be a viable export trade corridor any time soon. \"It’s kind of like shipping on the dark side of the moon, I’m not sure if it makes sense,\" Cameron Berrington, national marine leader for Marsh Canada, an insurance broker and risk advisor, told Canada’s National Observer. \"The ice is an issue, but it's also very remote,\" he said. \"What happens if a critical piece of the ship breaks and you're halfway [through Hudson Bay]? There's nothing up there.\" He remembered discussing such a scenario with an insurer. What would happen if a tug boat broke down in the middle of a trip through Hudson Bay? \"I remember the insurer saying to me, 'If something breaks, I may as well just buy a new ship, because it'll be cheaper than sending up a repair man,'\" Berrington recalled. Not only is the seabed not mapped, he said, but transient ice flows force ships to change their routes. \"From an insurance company perspective, first of all, ice moves,\" he said. \"So, what is a good transit [route] this week is not necessarily a good transit next week. And because it's remote, [the seabed] is not charted very well. They don't necessarily know how deep it is in all the spots, not like Lake Ontario, or the Pacific Ocean off of Vancouver.\"\n

Churchill's second act: From grain to critical minerals

The Port of Churchill in northern Manitoba is being developed as a strategic export hub for Canada's critical minerals, including zinc, copper, nickel, and potash. With improved rail and port infrastructure, shipments from mines in Manitoba and Saskatchewan can bypass the Panama Canal and reach Europe, South America, and the Middle East via the Hudson Bay Railway and Hudson Strait. The Canadian government and Manitoba are investing in the port, with Ottawa committing $175 million over five years and Manitoba contributing over $36 million. Hudbay Minerals is shipping zinc concentrate from its Lalor Mine to Churchill, while Arctic Gateway Group is exploring partnerships with companies like Genesis Fertilizers and Foran Mining to export potash and other minerals. Despite challenges such as remote logistics, insurance risks, and uncharted seabeds, the initiative aims to diversify Canada’s trade and reduce reliance on the Panama Canal, especially amid geopolitical tensions and US tariff threats.