Saudi taps Canada for mining engineering expertise

Canada is buying into Saudi’s mineral ambition with the one thing the Kingdom can’t build fast enough in-house: engineering depth. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s visit to Jeddah last week — the first by a Canadian PM in 26 years — produced 13 agreements and MoUs that the two governments valued at over USD 1 bn, signed at the Saudi-Canadian Investment Forum last Thursday. The agreements span mining, health technology, infrastructure, and defense, but the big concentrations are in mining and infrastructure engineering — the area where Canadian capability can feed Saudi’s most capital-hungry ambitions.

Two agreements are key. The Royal Commission for Riyadh City is set to sign two contracts worth USD 440 mn, while a partnership between Maaden and Canada’s Hatch is valued at up to USD 700 mn. (Carney’s office hasn’t confirmed the total, with one account pegging it at “more than CAD 1 bn,” or roughly USD 710 mn.)

The Hatch deal is the one to watch. It makes the Canadian firm an engineering partner for Maaden’s planned USD 110 bn mining expansion — the strategic delivery partner Maaden named back in February. The Kingdom is building mining into the third pillar of its economy, and executing that needs project-delivery depth Maaden doesn’t have in-house at the scale a USD 110 bn program demands. Canada, squeezed by US tariffs, is has exactly that expertise and is looking for trade and other opportunities away from its neighbor to the south. Saudi Arabia now puts its untapped mineral wealth at some USD 2.5 tn.

It’s not the first time Canada has invested in Saudi rocks. Ivanhoe Electric and Maaden run a 50-50 exploration joint venture across roughly 50k sq km of the underexplored Arabian-Nubian Shield, hunting copper, gold, silver, and other metals. Ivanhoe is running exploration, while Maaden would take over any viable deposit for development. Two days before Carney landed in Saudi, the two companies extended their JV venture through July 2033.

Canadian engineering capabilities could help debottleneck the Saudi mining opportunity — but Ottawa has to debottleneck things in Canada, too, if it wants to tap significant Gulf interest in its economy. In Abu Dhabi last November, Carney came away with a UAE pledge to invest USD 50 bn in Canada — a headline number an order of magnitude larger than anything signed in Jeddah. Nine months on, none of it has been deployed. Canada’s Major Projects Office reportedly told the UAE in mid-June that it didn’t yet have ready investment opportunities for the Emirates. Carney faces pressure in the Gulf to get investable projects ready — a critical-minerals deal he announced on that same November trip still hasn’t materialized.

The difference comes down to who’s sending what, where. When Canada is the seller — engineering, project management, mining know-how — it plugs into Saudi programs that already exist and are already funded or fundable. When Canada is the destination, it has to supply bankable, permitted, shovel-ready projects. That’s the piece Ottawa doesn’t — yet — and industry groups quoted by the Financial Times say the delays are regulatory red tape (which Carney has promised to quash) and interprovincial trade barriers (a much longer, complicated political game).

BACKGROUND- The Saudi visit is as much a diplomatic repair as commerce. Riyadh cut off diplomatic ties with Ottawa and froze trade and investment in 2018 after a prominent Canadian cabinet member criticized the kingdom’s human rights record. Five years passed before the two began restoring relations in 2023. The rebuild is now moving fast — a Canadian trade delegation came away in January with roughly USD 600 mn in commercial partnership agreements. More than 30 Canadian companies worked the Jeddah forum, many circling the contracting pipeline around the 2034 World Cup and Riyadh's Expo 2030 build-out.

What’s next: Carney has invited Gulf investors to Toronto in September for an investment summit pitched as the venue to generate USD 1 tn over five years — if he can have those shovel-ready projects lined up. On the Saudi side, Carney’s office said the energy strand — LNG, hydrogen, and carbon capture — would be finalized next year, and a delegation of Canadian pension funds will return to the Kingdom in a few months in search of opportunities.