How Canada Sells the Copper It Mines

Members of United Steelworkers Local 7619 began strike action at Highland Valley Copper near Logan Lake, British Columbia, on Saturday morning, October 24, 2026. Teck Resources, which owns the mine outright, said the same day that operations were continuing at reduced capacity and that the effect on production would depend on how long the action lasts.

Highland Valley is the country's largest copper mine, as Natural Resources Canada describes it. It produced 127,100 tonnes of copper in 2025, according to the production tables in Teck's second-quarter report. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that all Canadian mines together produced about 500,000 tonnes that year. One mine carries about a quarter of the national total.

The strike matters beyond Teck because of how Canada sells its copper. Most of it leaves the country as concentrate, and the price a Canadian mine receives depends on two things it does not set: the exchange price of copper, and what a smelter charges to turn concentrate into metal. Both have moved a long way this year.

A quarter of Canadian output comes from one valley

Canadian copper is concentrated in British Columbia. Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) puts 2024 mine production at 514,582 tonnes and attributes 48.3 per cent of it to British Columbia. Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador follow well behind, and NRCan groups the remaining provinces together without a breakdown.

The national figure has been falling for a decade. NRCan reports that output in 2024 was 26.2 per cent below the 697,322 tonnes mined in 2015, even after a rise from 2023. Canada ranked twelfth in the world in 2024, with about 2 per cent of mined supply. Chile, the largest producer, mined an estimated 5.3 million tonnes in 2025, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The Highland Valley share above compares two figures from the same year, 2025, but from different publishers: Teck's reported tonnage and the USGS estimate for Canada. NRCan has not yet published its national figure for 2025.

The contract at the mine expired on September 30, 2026. Teck said on October 21 that it had received strike notice and that the union could act from 8:00 a.m. Pacific on October 24. In its release on the day the strike began, Teck said its contingency plans give priority to safety and environmental management and that it is committed to a collective agreement that is fair and reasonable for employees and supports the operation's ongoing viability. The union's bargaining committee told local broadcaster CFJC that it had made every effort to avoid a dispute and was seeking competitive wages, stronger pensions and measures on staffing. No date for further talks has been published.

One production change was already in Teck's plans before any labour action. In July the company said it expected lower mill throughput and recoveries at Highland Valley late in the third quarter and through the fourth, as the plant processes less ore from the Lornex pit and more from the Bethlehem and Highmont pits. Recovery is the share of the copper in the ore that the plant captures.

Most of the copper leaves before it is metal

A concentrate is the product a mine ships: ore that has been ground fine and floated until the copper minerals make up a large share of it, with sulphur, iron and rock still mixed in. Turning it into copper cathode, the refined plates that trade on exchanges, takes a smelter and a refinery.

Canada has little of that capacity. NRCan lists one primary copper smelter and refinery in the country, in Quebec, and two other sites, in Ontario and Newfoundland and Labrador, that produce limited refined copper while processing other metals. The trade figures follow from that.

The concentrate exports were worth more than twice the refined ones, and they went across the Pacific. The refined metal went south. The U.S. Geological Survey lists Canada as the source of more than 99 per cent of American imports of copper ore and concentrate and 16 per cent of its imports of refined copper.

American demand for imported metal jumped in 2025. The USGS estimates that U.S. refined copper imports almost doubled from 2024, to 1.7 million tonnes, and links the higher New York price that year to uncertainty over the implementation of tariffs on U.S. imports of copper materials.

What a mine is paid for its concentrate

A copper mine does not sell copper at the screen price. It sells concentrate to a smelter or a trader, and the invoice is built in three steps. The buyer pays for the copper the concentrate contains, less a contractual share it keeps; that remainder is called payable copper. From that it deducts a treatment charge for smelting each tonne of concentrate and a refining charge for each pound of copper refined, together known as TC/RCs. The price itself is usually set provisionally on shipment and settled later, against the exchange average for an agreed period.

Teck's own balance sheet shows how much money sits inside that last step. At June 30, 2026, Teck reported outstanding copper receivables of 270 million payable pounds, valued at a provisional price of US$6.07 per pound. That is about US$1.64 billion of copper whose final price was still open at the end of the quarter. Each move of US$0.10 per pound in the settlement price changes the value of those pounds by about US$27 million, before the final adjustment Teck books when they settle.

The charges are the part of the invoice that has moved most this year.

Smelters ran short of concentrate

In its second-quarter report, Teck described the copper concentrate market as very tight, with spot treatment and refining charges falling to new record lows. The company gave two reasons. Global mine supply of concentrate was short of what smelters could process, leaving smelter utilisation below its average of the past decade. Smelters also had an economic incentive to maximise output to boost sales of sulphuric acid, a by-product of smelting, and were willing to accept lower treatment charges to secure raw material. Teck reported that copper smelter processing charges across its operations were negative in the second quarter of 2026, which means the deductions that normally come off a mine's invoice became, on balance, a credit.

The exchange price moved the same way. Teck reported that the London Metal Exchange copper price averaged US$6.05 per pound in the second quarter of 2026, 40.0 per cent above the same quarter a year earlier. The USGS puts the 2025 average LME cash price at US$4.40 per pound.

For a Canadian mine selling concentrate, both changes raise what it earns per pound of copper shipped. For Canada's one primary smelter, the same terms work in the opposite direction, because treatment and refining charges are what a smelter earns for its processing. The country sits mostly on the mining side of that negotiation. On Teck's description of the second quarter, that is the side the terms favoured.

A strike at Highland Valley takes concentrate out of a market that was already short of it. Teck has not put a number on the lost output.

Where the next Canadian-controlled copper is being built

Highland Valley's next phase is already under construction. In July 2025 Teck approved construction of the mine life extension, which it said would keep the operation running from 2028 through 2046 at an average of about 132,000 tonnes of copper a year. Teck's second-quarter report kept the capital estimate at C$2.1 billion to C$2.4 billion, with detailed engineering nearly finished.

The week's other copper decision was made in Arizona. On October 21, 2026, Hudbay Minerals and Mitsubishi Corporation approved construction of Copper World in Pima County, Arizona, which Maple covered on October 22 in Hudbay and Mitsubishi Approve a US$2.07 Billion Copper World Mine in Arizona. Hudbay put initial growth capital at US$2.07 billion and expects average output of 102,000 tonnes of copper a year over the first decade of its base case. First production is targeted for the second half of 2029. The base-case plant is a concentrator producing copper and molybdenum concentrates. Hudbay described a concentrate leach facility that would produce copper cathode in Arizona as a permitted future option, which it has not decided to build.

Hudbay's Canadian copper comes from its Snow Lake operations in Manitoba and the Copper Mountain mine in British Columbia. Set beside the national figures, the decision shows where some of the new copper controlled by Canadian companies is being built. Canadian mine output has fallen since 2015, and Copper World's concentrate will be produced in Arizona.

Thursday's report and the national count

Teck releases its third-quarter results before the TSX opens on Thursday, October 29, 2026, with a webcast at 8:00 a.m. Pacific, according to its October 6 release. The quarter ended on September 30, so none of its production figures will include the strike; the release is the first scheduled occasion for Teck to discuss the strike beside its 2026 copper guidance of 455,000 to 530,000 tonnes, which it left unchanged in July.

NRCan's next national production figure will show where 2025 actually landed against the USGS estimate. The fourth quarter will be settled at Highland Valley, by the length of the strike, and in the smelter contracts that decide what each pound of Canadian concentrate is worth.