Billionaires Back Power Metallic Mines Inc. in Quest for Canada’s Next Polymetallic Giant

Canada’s next polymetallic mine is being mapped foot by foot beneath a quilt of muskeg and black spruce in Québec’s James Bay, where the drills of Power Metallic Mines Inc. (TSXV: PNPN | OTCQB: PNPNF) chew through ultramafic rock at a pace few juniors can finance, let alone sustain. Power Metallic Mines—formed around the Nisk Project Area and now expanded to encompass the Nisk-Lion-Tiger corridor—controls roughly 213 km² of prospective ground, a land position that swelled to three-and-a-half times its original size after a deal with Li-FT Power earlier this summer. “We went out and made the deal with Li-FT and acquired all that land,” Chief Executive Terry Lynch told InvestorNews host Tracy Hughes. “That was our biggest move.” Then the company put steel in the ground: by mid-September the drill meters will stand near 22,000, just the first leg of a 100,000-meter campaign budgeted over two years.The scale of the assault is backed by an investor registry more reminiscent of a mid-tier producer than an exploration story. “We raised $50 million in February,” Lynch said, reeling off names like Robert Friedland, Rob McEwen and Gina Rinehart—15 billionaires in total. “In this very tough mining finance market, if we didn’t have the support of those key individuals who can write big checks without worrying, we wouldn’t be here.” That capital freed the team to chase the orthomagmatic Lion Zone, where step-out holes have returned intervals that made Power Metallic the top-performing mining stock on the TSX Venture in 2024. “We were getting 32 meters of 7 percent copper equivalent,” Lynch said, “numbers that are unheard of.”Those numbers also demanded fresh political and technical horsepower. Former federal minister Seamus O’Regan—with cabinet stints in Natural Resources and Indigenous Affairs—has joined the board. “He understands how government looks at these issues and who to talk to,” Lynch noted, pointing to federal permits and community partnerships that will frame the project’s next phase. The company has already begun liaising with Québec’s assay labs, though Lynch admitted the backlog is real: “Honestly, I thought we’d be out with some assays by now, but there was a delay. It looks like next week we’ll start to get the assays out, and after that they’ll be out every three or four weeks.”If Nisk and Lion define the present, Saudi Arabia may frame the future. A two-year courtship with Riyadh culminated in Power Metallic winning the Jabul Baudan exploration license—over 200 km² in the Jabal Sayid belt. The kingdom, eager to seed its nascent mining sector with experienced explorers, promised introductions to five family offices whose capital bases dwarf most institutional funds. “The smallest guy we met was $50 billion,” Lynch said. While he insists that “95 percent of our focus is on Nisk,” the Arabian franchise is insurance against the tyranny of single-asset risk.Back in Québec, the science is catching up with the share-price narrative. July 23 mineralogy scans by IOS Geosciences confirmed that the high-grade copper and PGEs at Lion sit in coarse chalcopyrite and cubanite—sulphides familiar to Sudbury and Norilsk concentrators. Most of the precious-metal species are locked within or attached to those copper minerals, suggesting they will travel together in a conventional sulphide concentrate. It is precisely the kind of metallurgy a financing committee wants to see before writing the next cheque.