CPECN - April 2026

CANOLA DIPLOMACY

Thinking through Canada’s canola export architecture after Carney’s visit to Beijing

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32,000

PDAC 2026 drew over 32,000 participants

Dispatch from the Floor of PDAC 2026

I’m writing this with some distance from the event now, enough to reflect rather than just react. A full day at PDAC 2026 is not a light undertaking. It is dense, demanding, and genuinely taxing. My feet hurt for two days. But it is also one of the more valuable days I spend in this industry.

I started the morning at Coffee Connections in Room 401. It’s a simple format — coffee, open floor, no agenda — but it sets the right tone. Some of the most candid conversations I had all day happened in that first hour, before the programming began and before anyone was in presentation mode. There is something worth preserving about that kind of unstructured contact time, and I hope it remains a fixture.

From there I spent a significant portion of the morning at Saskatchewan Day in Room 202B. Provincial showcases can sometimes feel more ceremonial than substantive, but this one earned its time. The province’s position across potash, uranium, and a meaningful slice of Canada’s critical minerals inventory makes Saskatchewan feel like a rising province. The room reflected genuine international interest.

In the afternoon I attended part of Educate, Elevate, Empower , the Women in Mining Canada full-day event in Room 206B. It was running deep into the afternoon and the quality of conversation had not diminished. The sessions moved past broad statements of intent and into the structural conditions that continue to limit progress on inclusion. That kind of specificity matters, and it was present here.

I closed the day at the Technology and Innovation Keynote, which served as a useful frame for much of what I had heard throughout the day. The industry is being asked to operate in increasingly complex geological and social environments, with higher expectations on environmental performance and shorter windows to establish community trust. The technology conversation is inseparable from that broader context, and the session reflected that honestly.

A word on scale. PDAC 2026 drew over 32,000 participants and now occupies both buildings of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre in full. That footprint is an indicator of where the global minerals industry stands at this particular moment. Anxiety about sup-

ply chains, energy transition, and resource sovereignty has translated into serious engagement, and the floor reflected that. The convention is not without its noise (not every session or booth operates at the same level of rigour) but the overall standard has risen, and the conversations that matter are happening here.

A WORD ON THESE DARK TIMES

As this issue goes to print, the emergent conflict in west Asia between Iran and western powers is fast approaching the end of its first month. While the decent will remain hopeful for a rapid end to hostilities, the observant are beginning to conclude that this could last many more weeks, even months.

When it comes to the economic impact of the war, the director of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, recently drew comparisons between the current energy crisis and both the oil shocks of the 1970s and the disruption caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, describing the situation as a combination of two oil crises and a gas market collapse rolled into one.

He warned that the global economy is under serious threat and expressed hope for a swift resolution, emphasizing that no nation would be spared the consequences if the crisis continues on its current trajectory — and that a coordinated international response is essential.

Birol also noted that at least 40 energy facilities in the region have sustained severe damage as a result of the conflict, and revealed that the IEA is in active discussions with governments across Asia and Europe regarding the release of additional oil reserves. This follows an agreement earlier in the month among IEA member countries to release a record 400 million barrels from strategic stockpiles in an effort to bring down surging global crude prices.

In the coming weeks, CPECN will consider the impact this will all have on Canadian Industry, and will speak to key players on how companies can navigate these headwinds.

Volume 54 No.2 April 2026

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WAR IN THE PERSIAN GULF THREATENS CANADIAN ECONOMIC RECOVERY AS ENERGY COSTS SURGE AND SUPPLY CHAINS FRACTURE

The conflict in the Persian Gulf is delivering a punishing blow to Canada’s economy, threatening to derail post-pandemic recovery efforts and forcing difficult choices across nearly every sector of industry.

Since U.S. and Israeli strikes began the conflict on February 28, followed by sustained Iranian retaliation across the Gulf region, oil prices have climbed past $100 per barrel for the first time since 2022. The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping has severed a maritime artery that carries roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil and natural gas, creating supply disruptions with no historical precedent.

Manufacturing sectors face compounding challenges. Companies dependent on petrochemical feedstocks are watching input costs surge while simultaneously confronting potential shortages of materials now trapped in the Persian Gulf shipping gridlock. Just-in-time supply chains built over decades are proving catastrophically fragile.

The agricultural sector, already operating on thin margins, now faces skyrocketing fuel and fertilizer costs. The UN World Food Programme warns that the conflict is driving significant, long-term increases in global food prices—costs that will flow directly through to Canadian grocery stores and restaurant menus.

DEFENSE COMMITTEE

TESTIMONY HIGHLIGHTS

MAJOR ECONOMIC

OPPORTUNITY IN DOMESTIC MINERAL REFINING

Mining industry leaders presenting to a parliamentary committee outlined substantial economic opportunities for Canada to capture greater value from its mineral resources by rebuilding domestic processing capacity, framing the issue as both a defense priority and an industrial development strategy.

Canada currently exports raw critical minerals for refining abroad before reimporting them as inputs for advanced technologies, effectively surrendering the most profitable segment of the value chain to foreign competitors. Developing domestic refining capacity would allow Canadian industry to capture significantly higher margins while addressing supply chain vulnerabilities that concern defense planners.

Nadia Mykytczuk, executive director of the Goodman School of Mines at

Critical minerals are essential for manufacturing advanced military equipment, including fighter jets, missiles, radar systems, and communication technologies.

Laurentian University in Sudbury, told the standing committee on national defence that Canada possesses strong geological resources but lacks the processing infrastructure to convert them into the refined materials required for modern defense systems, advanced communications, aerospace sensors, autonomous technologies, and electrified military infrastructure.

COURT RULING PRESERVES MARKET OPPORTUNITIES FOR CANADIAN SUSTAINABLE PACKAGING INDUSTRY

A Federal Court of Appeal decision issued January 30 has secured the regulatory framework enabling Canada’s growing sustainable packaging sector, upholding federal authority to ban designated single-use plastics and maintaining market demand for alternative products.

The court overturned a lower court ruling that had challenged the government’s classification of plastic manufactured items as toxic substances under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. The decision ensures continued enforcement of the Single-use Plastics Prohibition Regulations, preserving the business environment that has driven investment in alternative materials and reusable product manufacturing across Canada.

CANADA POSITIONS FOR MAJOR ECONOMIC GAINS THROUGH EXPANDED NORDIC PARTNERSHIP

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s visit to Norway has yielded commitments that could unlock significant opportunities for Canadian industry, as six nations agreed to deepen trade, investment, and defense collaboration in response to global economic disruption.

The meeting between Carney and the leaders of Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, and Finland produced a joint commitment to expand economic ties and Arctic cooperation

at a time when traditional trading relationships have been destabilized by tariffs and geopolitical tensions. The framework positions Canada to benefit from closer integration with some of the world’s most technologically advanced economies.

For Canadian industry, the implications are substantial. The commitment to deepen trade and investment ties opens pathways for Canadian companies across multiple sectors, while the focus on building prosperous and green economies aligns with Canada’s strengths in clean technology and resource development. The Nordic region represents a wealthy market with high demand for advanced goods and services where Canadian firms could expand their presence.

BEIJING ORDERS REFINERIES TO SUSPEND FUEL EXPORTS AS GULF CRISIS DISRUPTS OIL SUPPLY

China has instructed its major oil refineries to immediately halt exports of diesel and gasoline in response to an escalating conflict in the Persian Gulf that has disrupted crude oil shipments from one of the world’s key producing regions.

The National Development and Reform Commission, China’s primary economic planning body, issued the directive to refiners. Officials called for a temporary suspension of refined product shipments and instructed companies to stop signing new export contracts while working to cancel previously agreed deliveries. The order includes limited exceptions for jet fuel and bunker fuel stored in bonded facilities, as well as supplies destined for Hong Kong and Macau.

HODGSON PROJECTS CANADA COULD BECOME MAJOR LNG EXPORTER WITH 100 MILLION TONNES ANNUAL CAPACITY

Canada’s energy minister says the country could export as much as 100 million tonnes of liquefied natural gas per year, a level that would rank it among the world’s largest suppliers.

Tim Hodgson presented this outlook to a parliamentary committee earlier in February, noting demand from Japan, South Korea, China, and India for Canadian gas. He stated that reaching 100 million tonnes annually would establish Canada as one of the top LNG exporters globally.

Hodgson made these comments before Prime Minister Mark Carney’s trip to India, where LNG was discussed. He described LNG projects as among the most economically impactful investments Canada could pursue.

CANOLA DIPLOMACY

Thinking through Canada’s canola export architecture after Carney’s trip to Beijing

By Justin Yule

Canada built a world-class canola processing industry. Then it sent 95% of the output to one customer. With Carney’s China deal and CUSMA renegotiation arriving simultaneously, the bill for that choice is coming due.

On January 16, 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney emerged from the Great Hall of the People in Beijing with what he called a “preliminary but landmark” trade agreement. Prairie premiers celebrated. Saskatchewan’s Scott Moe, who had accompanied Carney to Beijing, called it “a very positive day.” By March 1, canola seed tariffs would fall from approximately 85% to 15%. Canola meal, lobster, crab and peas would be freed from Chinese anti-discrimination levies until at least year-end. Nearly three billion dollars in unlocked export orders were projected to flow back to farmers who had watched Saskatchewan’s canola revenues to China fall by nearly 70% between March and October 2025 (Institute for Research on Public Policy, “Chinese Tariff Rollback,” February 2026). The deal was, on its face, a diplomatic and agricultural success. Almost nobody noticed what was not in it.

Canola oil — Canada’s highest-value processed canola product — is not in the deal. Its Chinese tariff, imposed at 100%

in March 2025, remains entirely intact. Pork, which accounted for roughly 5% of Canadian agri-food exports to China in 2024, remains under a 25% levy. The IRPP calculates that after the deal, the equivalent of approximately 3,100 Canadian jobs remain under Chinese tariff pressure, concentrated not in farming communities but in processing ones. Neepawa, Manitoba, home to one of Canada’s largest pork processing operations, is still exposed. Read carefully, the Carney deal is a restoration of the raw seed and semi-processed meal relationship with China. It is not a processed goods deal. The question this absence raises is worth sitting with: is canola oil’s exclusion a failure of negotiation, or a structural reflection of where Canada’s processed canola actually goes?

LOOKING SOUTH

The answer is uncomfortable in its plainness. Canada’s canola oil does not predominantly go to China; it never did. In 2024, Canada exported $7.7 billion in canola products to the United States, predominantly oil and meal, finished processed goods, and $4.9 billion to China, predominantly seed (Canola Council of Canada, 2024 Annual Report). The Canola Council states the market logic plainly: the biggest buyer of Canadian canola oil and meal is the

Canola is Canada’s most valuable crop, generating over $30 billion annually. As a leading global exporter of canola seed, oil, and meal, it sustains thousands of prairie farmers and drives Canada’s agri-food sector.

United States; for raw seed, the most important destinations are China, Japan and Mexico. China is more inclined to purchase seed because of their own particular and long history of crushing rapeseed. Canola oil was not in the Carney deal because canola oil was never China’s to give back. Canada was not selling it there in any meaningful volume to begin with.

AN ARCHITECTURE PROBLEM

“By 2024, Canada was sending 95.4% of all exported canola oil to the US. That figure is more extreme than the raw seed dependency on China that triggered the 2025 tariff crisis — and it has attracted almost no equivalent political attention.”

Before critiquing the orientation of Canada’s canola processing sector, it is worth establishing its scale on its own terms. Fourteen crushing and refining plants, owned by five companies, operate across the country with a combined capacity approaching 15 million metric tonnes by 2026. A $2 billion investment wave is currently underway. Canola processing and refining contributes $8.2 billion to the Canadian economy annually and supports 8,700 direct jobs. In the last 20 years, processing capacity has nearly tripled (Canola Council of Canada, “The Oilseed Processing Industry”). Canada crushed a record 11.4 million tonnes of canola in 2024, roughly half the total crop. This growth is moving in lockstep with production: investment followed reliable supply, and investment in new capacity has continued because the supply signal has remained strong. This is a sophisticated, well-capitalized, genuinely worldclass processing industry, with investment

driven almost entirely by the North American biofuel and food oil market. Between 2015 and 2024, the share of Canadian canola oil exports going to the United States rose from 62.2% to 95.4% (DTN Progressive Farmer, February 2026). By 2024, Canada was sending virtually all of its exported canola oil to a single country. This concentration figure is more extreme than the raw seed dependency on China that triggered the 2025 tariff crisis. In that crisis, two-thirds of Canada’s total canola seed exports

went to a single market, a dependency that Canadian analysts and politicians rightly identified as a structural risk requiring urgent remediation. The processed goods concentration in the United States is more severe. It has attracted almost no equivalent political attention, because the US has been a stable, reliable, CUSMA-protected buyer. The past twelve months have made the assumption of American stability look considerably less secure than it once did.

The 95.4% figure did not emerge by accident. It was the rational output of a specific policy environment. Canada’s processing investment boom was driven primarily by American biofuel demand, specifically the US Renewable Fuel Standard and the growing market for renewable diesel feedstock. Canadian canola oil became the preferred input for American renewable diesel refineries, and the investment logic was straightforward: a large, proximate, policy-supported market for a product Canada could produce at scale and quality. What this created, structurally, was a processing sector whose market is not diversified but deeply integrated into American energy policy. When US biofuel policy stalled in 2025, as blending mandates and tax credits awaited clarification under the new administration, Canada’s canola oil export share to the US fell from 95.4% back to 76.7% in a single year (DTN, February 2026). The processing sector did not find new buyers. It waited. The vulnerability of the raw seed relationship with China and the vulnerability of the processed oil relationship with the US are structurally identical: one buyer, one policy environment, one point of failure. Canada has two single-market dependencies, not one. China’s preference for Canadian seed over Canadian oil is often framed, in Canadian media and politics, as a deliberate industrial policy designed to strip Canada of processing value. The framing is lazy and the evidence does not support it. A contact at the Canola Council, who has spent decades working with Chinese agricultural scientists, is unambiguous on the history: “They have a long history of crushing oil seeds. It has been part of their culture. It is not like they just started this four years ago.” China has been processing oilseeds domestically for centuries. Its demand for Canadian canola seed reflects an existing industrial infrastructure built around a deeply rooted food culture, not a recent import-substitution maneuver. Beijing’s tariff sequence (100% on oil, 76% on seed, with the January deal ultimately restoring seed and meal while leaving oil exposed) is consistent with a country protecting the processing capacity it has always had. That is not aggression. That is industrial policy. The more pointed observation is that China’s tariff structure articulates a processing-first logic more coherently than Canada’s own trade posture does. The markets genuinely available for Canadian processed canola products lie not in China, but in the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand — markets that are health-conscious, familiar with imported oils, and have no domestic crushing capacity to protect.

A RECKONING

The Carney deal should be understood for what it is: necessary relief, competently negotiated, structurally insufficient. The tariff crisis was real and the political pressure on Ottawa from Prairie farmers and premiers was legitimate. Saskatchewan-based agricultural technology specialist Masood Rizvi, speaking to the South China Morning Post in February 2026, offered the most precise characterization available: the resumption of Chinese canola purchases is “a measured resumption, not yet a structural reset.” The underlying architecture — 95% of processed oil going to the US, seed flowing west to a country that has always processed it domestically — is exactly what it was before the tariff war began. Canada went to Beijing and retrieved what it had lost. It did not build anything it had never had.

The timing of the Carney deal is not incidental. The mandatory CUSMA review, at which the US, Canada and Mexico must decide whether to extend the agreement to 2042, arrives in July 2026, four months after the Beijing deal. American trade officials have signaled that a central focus of the review will be how Canada and Mexico align with Washington’s approach to China (CSIS, “Inside

the Mechanics of the 2026 USMCA Review”). US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said publicly, before the Carney deal was announced, that he thought such a deal would be “problematic for Canada.” Trump threatened

100% retaliatory tariffs if Canada made any deal with Beijing, then appeared to walk it back, then described the situation on social media as China “successfully and completely taking over” Canada. Carney has insisted the agreement

“Canada has built the processed goods tier of its most valuable crop on a foundation that is actively being renegotiated by an administration that views the Canada-China

canola deal as a provocation.”

is consistent with CUSMA obligations. The legal argument may be correct. The economic argument is harder. Canada’s canola oil processing sector is now so integrated into the American biofuel market that it cannot afford to damage the US relationship. And yet the US relationship is the least stable it has been in the postwar era. Canada has built the processed goods tier of its most valuable crop on a foundation that is actively being renegotiated by an administration that views the Canada-China canola deal as a provocation.

A rationally reworked canola export architecture would start with long-term supply contracts with buyers in markets that need finished canola oil and have no domestic crushing capacity to protect: the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates. It would require public co-investment signals sufficient to make Asia-facing processing capacity a rational private investment. It would require storage infrastructure to buffer against sudden market closures (canola, if moisture is carefully managed, can be stored for up to 10 months). The Canola Council’s Canola Forward strategic framework, released in July 2025, identifies market access and value amplification as its central priorities. The framework is directionally correct. Whether the political environment, USMCA review pressure and non-market economy clause constraints, and American biofuel policy uncertainty, permits the investment confidence to act on it is the question the next eighteen months will answer.

Canada grows canola with extraordinary skill. It processes canola with world-class infrastructure. It sells processed canola to one country. Every time Canada faces an agricultural trade crisis, it reaches for the short-term fix — removing the irritant, returning to business as usual — while the underlying dependency remains structurally intact. The Carney deal is another iteration of that pattern. It is not a criticism of Carney to say so; the pattern predates him by decades. It is encoded in the investment decisions, the infrastructure, the trade relationships, and the policy architecture that successive governments built around the continental market, because the continental market was reliable and close and paid well. But in a world where agricultural commodities are routinely weaponized in bilateral disputes, where American trade policy is subject to social media posts, and where the

CUSMA review arrives in four months, “reliable” is doing more work than it can bear. Canada’s canola industry is not facing a China problem or an American problem. It is facing the accumulated cost of its own strategic choices. The Carney deal, whatever its merits, is not a strategy. It is a reprieve. The work of building processed goods relationships in multiple directions, toward markets that need what Canada can produce at the quality and scale it can produce it, has not begun in earnest.

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RESTORING LAND, REALIZING OPPORTUNITY

Cleaning up a century-old copper mine on Vancouver

Island

By Justin Yule

When you drive up Mount Sicker on Vancouver Island, the approach feels like almost any other road through the BC interior: dense tree cover, damp air, the green crowding in all around. Then you break into a clearing and the landscape shifts. The trees stop, the ground is bare, and you come across a barren waste gashed across the landscape. It looks, as Peter Smith puts it, like something out of Mad Max.

“You kind of come through the trees and — wow — here we are in this wasteland,” says Smith, the founder of Sasquatch Resources, the junior exploration firm now proposing to clean up the site. “How did this get here?” He pauses. “And then you realize it’s been there for 120 years.”

What Smith is describing is the legacy of a copper-gold mining district that thrived at the turn of the century, when some 2,500 people called Mount Sicker home. When the ore ran out, everyone left. And no one ever cleaned up the mess.

AN OLD PROBLEM, MEASURED IN FOOTBALL FIELDS

The site covers roughly five football fields. It holds an estimated 300,000-plus tonnes of sulphide-bearing waste rock — the discarded material left over from mineral processing — piled at surface and left to weather. For 120 years, that waste has been slowly reacting with water and air, generating acid that leaches into the surrounding environment. Runoff from the site has tested as low as pH 3 at monitoring points on the

property. This is roughly the acidity of vinegar.

According to Geoscience BC, Mount Sicker is one of up to 2,000 legacy mine sites across the province. Most predate modern reclamation requirements, and many remain either abandoned or only partially addressed. The liability, in most cases, has quietly reverted to the province.

“That’s just what happens to legacy mine sites that haven’t received significant attention from outside companies,” says Smith, who is a lawyer by training, not a geologist. “They become provincial liabilities.” If Sasquatch proceeds with operations, the company will address some of that liability — a question Smith acknowledges will be central to how

the permitting process unfolds, and one with broader implications for whether other companies follow suit at similar sites.

TWO AND TWO AND TWO

Smith and his team did not initially set out to clean up the waste pile. Like most junior exploration companies, they were looking for a deposit to mine. They started sampling the old underground workings at Mount Sicker, trying to assess whether the historic mine could be reopened. But the waste piles were impossible to ignore.

“We kept staring at these two piles of waste as we were up there sampling,” Smith recalls. “And it kind of hit all at once: the waste piles are leaching acid into the environment, still, after 120 years. And we keep getting good values of gold, copper, silver, and zinc from them. And we finally just put two and two and two together.”

What the company found when it looked more carefully was that the waste piles at Mount Sicker might contain residual grades of two to four grams per tonne of gold, alongside meaningful concentra-

tions of copper, silver, and zinc. The reason grades could be so elevated is straightforward: the ore was processed in 1910, using technology that was far less efficient than what exists today. A lot of value was simply left behind.

Applied across an estimated 300,000 tonnes of waste, Smith describes the back-of-envelope economics as striking, though he is careful to caveat that the company has not yet published a formal mineral resource estimate (a requirement under Canadian securities law before specific figures can be stated with confidence). “Using our hundred plus surface and sub-surface samples on a grid pattern, you quickly see there could be substantial value in those waste piles,” he says. “And because everything is sitting at surface, in piles, right off the side of a road, your expenses are extremely low.”

The economic case shifted Sasquatch’s focus entirely. Rather than pursuing the underground resource, they began designing a project centered on removing the surface waste.

SORTING WITHOUT CHEMISTRY

The proposed process is deliberately simple. Waste rock would be crushed and run through a mechanical ore sorter. This uses sensor-based detection, often combining laser and X-ray Transmittance (XRT), to distinguish metal-rich material from lower-grade rock in real time, without chemical additives. The company commissioned a controlled trial using a half-tonne representative sample, processed by Tomra, one of the leading industrial sorting firms, at their facility in Germany.

The results were significant. The trial demonstrated that more than 95% of sulphide-related contaminants — including arsenic, mercury, lead, and sulphur — could be separated from the waste stream. In some test runs, the separation rate exceeded 99%. Post-sorting material scored between 5.3 and 6.3 on the acid-base accounting neutralization scale, compared to the raw waste’s score of 0.2. Site water pH improved from 6.3 to approximately 7.2, a shift that points to a substantial reduction in ongoing acid generation.

What the sorting process produces, in practical terms, is two distinct output streams. Roughly 30% of the starting material ends up as a high-sulphide concentrate containing most of the recovered metals, and most of the environmental risk. That material will be trucked down the mountain to a deep-water port and sold to existing licensed smelting facilities. The remaining 70% is essentially benign rock, stripped of most of its sulphide content, and will be used in on-site reclamation.

No new chemicals enter the process. Water is recycled on site. No new waste streams are created. The ore sorter itself is mobile.

WHY NOTHING GROWS

One of the most visible indicators of the site’s condition is also the most telling. In a province where vegetation quickly reclaims disturbed ground, Mount Sicker’s waste area has remained bare for over a century. Smith sees two reasons: the physical weight of the piles themselves, which suppresses anything beneath them, and the toxicity of the acid drainage soaking into the soil.

“Everything grows in BC; you can’t stop Mother Nature from taking over,” Smith says.

“Except when you’ve got a big high-sulphide mess like you have at Mount Sicker. I’m always kind of awestruck by the thought that this site has remained bald and barren for over a century.”

University researchers from British Columbia, working in partnership with Sasquatch, are conducting ongoing water sampling and metals analysis at the site to support the environmental assessment process.

Removal of the sulphide-bearing material, Smith argues, would set the conditions for

natural revegetation to resume. Whether that happens on a short timeline or a longer one will depend on soil chemistry, but the current obstacles would both be addressed by the proposed work.

CLEANUP AND RECOVERY, IN PARALLEL

The project is structured so that environmental work and mineral recovery proceed simultaneously rather than in sequence. As waste rock is sorted and high-grade material is shipped out, crews will reslope and restore disturbed areas in their wake. Smith describes a natural lag in the outbound shipping schedule that creates space for this reclamation work to happen in real time.

Separately from the waste pile, the site carries a set of physical hazards inherited from early 20th-century mining: open mine shafts, some of them 20 feet wide and 200 feet deep, left unreclaimed when the original operators walked away. “Right now they’re just open,” Smith says. “You could be bombing along on your mountain

“We’re cleaning up a big fat mess... we shouldn’t have too much disagreement along the way.” – Smith

bike and suddenly a chasm opens underneath you.” The company has committed to addressing these hazards as part of the project, through capping, fencing, or other approved closures, independently of the waste removal work.

National mine-closure specialists at Okane Consultants are advising on the reclamation plan, which has been submitted in preliminary form to provincial regulators. Sustainability advisory firm Synergy Enterprises is supporting lifecycle and carbon analysis.

The target end state for the site, Smith says, is something close to pre-1895 conditions: native vegetation, stabilized slopes, sealed hazards. But he has one addition in mind. “We’d like to create a bit of

a reclamation learning centre on the site,” he says. “Before and after pictures. This is the Mad Max Wasteland that existed in 2026. This is what it looks like now.”

The ambition is grounded in the community. Vancouver Island University has a campus in Cowichan, literally ten minutes down the hill from Mount Sicker, and the University of Victoria is roughly an hour away. Half a dozen student groups, including delegations from the Geological Association of Canada, have already visited the site over the past year or two. The accessibility of the location, Smith notes, is unusual: most legacy mine sites are not this close to town, this easy to reach, or this legible as a teaching environment..

FIRST NATIONS, COMMUNITY, AND A COMPLEX QUESTION OF WHO

Consultations with locally impacted First Nations have been underway for more than two years, including site tours and a presentation to elders in at least one case. Smith describes the engagement as substantive. “We’re committed to working closely with them as the project moves forward,” he says. “That means keeping them informed, listening to their perspectives, and ensuring the work is done in a way that reflects shared priorities. Their questions and observations have been astute, and have helped to further refine our approach.”

Local elected officials in the surrounding communities have publicly expressed support for efforts to address the site, and Smith says the project’s cleanup-first character makes broad stakeholder alignment relatively achievable. “We’re cleaning up a big fat mess,” he says. “We shouldn’t have too much disagreement along the way.”

A DOMINO EFFECT?

Permitting materials have been submitted to provincial regulators. If approvals come through, Smith says the company could be operational at Mount Sicker as early as spring 2026. The project could be completed within a year of starting — the combination of surface access,

mechanical sorting speed, and a defined, bounded waste pile means there is no open-ended timeline. Smith is direct about what he thinks happens if the model works.

“I really do believe that’s going to start a bit of a domino effect.” He envisions government eventually stepping in with incentive struc-

tures and permit streamlining to encourage more companies to take on legacy sites, passing on part of the liability in exchange for verified cleanup and responsible oversight. The challenge, he says, is getting the balance right: making the proposition enticing for small companies without removing accountability.

“Junior mining companies can only do so much,” he says. “You’ve got to strike a balance. But the good news for the provinces is that if they can get a lot of mining companies to jump into the fray, they can pass on some of that liability.”

The broader context is hard to ignore. Across North America, hundreds of legacy mine sites containing copper, gold, silver, zinc, and other critical minerals sit at surface, pre-sorted by a century of weathering, accessible without new infrastructure, and actively degrading the environments around them. At a moment when governments are urgently seeking domestic sources of those same minerals, the case for looking at what has already been disturbed (and already causing harm) is becoming harder to dismiss.

Smith, for his part, does not frame what he is doing as an investment pitch. “When I put on the most objective hat I can,” he says, “I don’t feel like I’m selling this. I more feel like I’m telling someone how we need to approach these sites, whether I’m involved or not.”

FROM STOCKROOM TO STRATEGY

How Structured MRO Practices

Reduce Downtime,

Working Capital, and Drive

in Process Plants

By CPECN Editorial

Process industries are built around continuous and semi-continuous operations that move liquids, powders, slurries, and bulk solids through tightly connected systems. Oil and gas, mining, chemicals, food processing, pulp and paper, and water and wastewater facilities depend on equipment that is rarely isolated. Pumps, compressors, heat exchangers, valves, material handling systems, and rotating assets form process chains where a single failure can restrict throughput or bring an entire plant to a halt.

In this operating context, spare parts management cannot be treated as a back-office inventory task. It is a core operational discipline that directly affects reliability, safety, production continuity, and cost control. When spare parts are poorly governed, plants experience longer outages, higher emergency procurement costs, and growing tension between maintenance, procurement, and operations. When managed well, spare parts become an enabling system that supports predictable maintenance execution and stable plant performance.

Much like enterprise systems such as ERP and CMMS, effective spare parts management relies on standardized structures, clear rules, and strong data integration. It must define what needs to be controlled, how decisions are made, and how information flows across functions. Done correctly, it provides the foundation for operation-

“When approached systematically, spare parts management becomes an indispensable pillar of operational excellence, one that supports safety, resilience, and sustainable performance in the world’s most demanding process plants.”

al resilience in demanding process environments.

SPARE PARTS AS A STRATEGIC RELIABILITY LEVER

Process industries operate under fundamentally different constraints than discrete manufacturing. Equipment assets are embedded in continuous or batch processes where failures often have immediate and far-reaching consequences. A failed pump seal in a chemical reactor or an unavailable actuator in a refinery unit does not simply stop a single machine. It disrupts process balance, product quality, safety systems, and downstream operations.

Because of this, spare parts management must be viewed as a strategic element of asset reliability. The availability and governance of spares directly influence mean time to repair, outage duration, maintenance schedule adherence, and overall equipment availability. Plants that struggle with spare

parts availability often see wellplanned maintenance work turn into reactive firefighting. Organizations with mature reliability programs increasingly treat spare parts as a physical risk control layer. By integrating spare parts data with asset hierarchies and maintenance strategies, they align maintenance execution, procurement planning, and operational priorities around shared reliability objectives. Predictive maintenance approaches further enhance uptime by enabling early fault detection. This alignment is essential in process industries where stability and predictability are often more valuable than shortterm cost savings.

COST OF OVERSTOCKING: CAPITAL INEFFICIENCY AND OBSOLESCENCE

Overstocking is a pervasive challenge in process plants, driven by risk aversion, historical purchasing practices, and limited visibility into

true equipment criticality. Excess and obsolete (E&O) inventory often accumulates due to:

• Equipment upgrades and engineering changes

• OEM part supersession and design modifications

• Changes in maintenance strategies (e.g., extended intervals, condition-based maintenance)

• Poor master data governance and duplicate part records

From a financial perspective, overstocking ties up working capital and increases total cost of ownership. In large process facilities, MRO inventory can easily represent tens of millions of dollars, much of which provides no immediate operational value. Operationally, excess inventory adds complexity. Storerooms become harder to manage, inventory accuracy declines, and genuinely critical spares become harder to identify.

COST OF UNDERSTOCKING: DOWNTIME, RISK, AND EMERGENCY PROCUREMENT

Conversely, understocking of critical spares introduces operational risk that is often underestimated during inventory rationalization efforts. In process industries, stockouts of long-lead or high-criticality spares can result in:

• Extended equipment downtime

• Emergency procurement and premium freight costs

• Increased safety exposure during prolonged shutdown conditions

• Environmental and regulatory compliance risks

• Contractual penalties and lost customer commitments

Research from IBM indicates that optimized spare parts strategies can reduce unplanned downtime by as much as 50 percent, cut inventory costs by up to 40 percent, and decrease maintenance budgets by roughly 35 percent when properly balanced between cost and availability.

ENGINEERING-BASED CLASSIFICATION AND SEGMENTATION OF SPARE PARTS

A structured approach to spare parts begins with engineering-based

classification and segmentation. By categorizing spares according to criticality, usage patterns, and integration with asset data, organizations can optimize inventory levels, reduce MRO costs, and improve equipment availability.

1. Criticality-Based Segmentation

Criticality assessment identifies which parts pose the highest risk to production, safety, or regulatory compliance if unavailable. Common categories include:

• Critical spares: Components whose failure leads to immediate production loss or safety risk (e.g., pumps in a continuous chemical process).

• Essential spares: Components whose failure degrades operational efficiency or quality but does not halt production immediately.

• Non-critical spares: Items with low impact on process continuity and limited safety consequences.

This hierarchy allows inventory planners to allocate resources efficiently, ensuring high-criticality spares are prioritized for availability while lower-risk items are managed with leaner stock.

2. Usage Patterns and Inventory Dynamics

Segmentation should also account for how quickly parts turn over:

• Fast-moving parts - bearings, gaskets, filters, require frequent replenishment and benefit from streamlined Kanban or reorder-point strategies.

• Slow-moving parts - specialized actuators or long - lead assemblies, often justify safety stock because stockouts can be particularly disruptive.

3. Integration with Asset and Maintenance Data

The real value of classification emerges when spare parts are linked directly to asset hierarch-

ies and maintenance histories. Mapping parts to specific equipment and failure modes enables demand forecasting based on actual operating behaviour rather than assumptions.

Simple forecasting techniques, such as analysing historical consumption, aligning spares with preventive maintenance plans, or using mean time between failures data, often deliver significant improvements. Plants that integrate spare parts with maintenance planning consistently report fewer emergency orders, higher schedule compliance, and clearer inventory visibility, frequently resulting in six-figure annual savings.

TURNING SPARE PARTS INTO A DRIVER OF OPERATIONAL PERFORMANCE

Effectively managed spare parts impact several key operational metrics that underpin plant performance. Overall equipment effectiveness measures how effectively a facility converts available time into quality output. It combines availability, performance, and quality. Worldclass OEE is generally considered to be 85 percent or higher, while many process plants operate well below that level.

Unplanned downtime is one of the largest contributors to poor OEE. When spare parts are available and repairs are executed quickly, availability improves. Predictive analytics and historical failure data further enhance OEE by allowing maintenance teams to plan part replacements before failures occur. AI-powered monitoring systems can reduce machine downtime, but their effectiveness relies on accurate spare parts data and proper asset mapping.

VALUE CREATION: FROM DOWNTIME TO OEE

Spare parts management is not an isolated administrative function; it directly impacts operational performance. When the right parts are available at the right time, maintenance teams can execute repairs efficiently, reducing MTTR and minimizing unplanned downtime, out-

comes that directly improve Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE).

In environments where uptime is currency, this translates into:

• Fewer production interruptions

• Better alignment of maintenance windows with operational demands

• Higher confidence in executing preventive and predictive maintenance strategies

• Reduced reliance on emergency procurement, which carries inflated costs and uncertainty

A mineral processing operation provides a clear example. By aligning spare parts planning with maintenance schedules, the plant reduced unscheduled downtime by nearly 20 percent. The recovered production capacity delivered immediate financial benefits while improving reliability metrics across the site.

CONCLUSION

In process industries where liquids, powders, slurries, and bulk solids flow through complex and interconnected systems, spare parts management transcends traditional inventory control, becoming a strategic enabler of reliability, cost efficiency, and operational synergy. By embedding structured classification, demand forecasting, asset linkages, and cross-functional collaboration into spare parts planning, organizations can:

• Minimize unplanned downtime and maintenance disruption

• Optimize working capital and reduce MRO costs

• Enhance alignment between maintenance, procurement, and operations

• Improve OEE, inventory turnover, and overall operational performance

When approached systematically, spare parts management becomes an indispensable pillar of operational excellence, one that supports safety, resilience, and sustainable performance in the world’s most demanding process plants.

IS THE FACTORY FLOOR READY TO GET SAAS-Y?

The Case for and against SaaS in the Industrial World

By Ryan Kershaw

SaaS (Software as a Service) has become the preferred way of doing business in the software world and, with that success, other areas are starting to look at it as a viable way of doing business. This includes manufacturing and industrial applications, with IIoT applications leading the way. While this software-centric model has seen some success in the hardware world, there remain some questions around the use of the SaaS model in the industrial world. How many of these industrial applications are actually suitable for the SaaS model? How many are just being pushed because it is the cool new thing? Do those involved, on both the buying and selling side, know how to properly evaluate and define the value of this new model.

THE BASICS

Let us start with what SaaS is. The best example that many people should be familiar with is Microsoft Office. Way back in the ‘90’s and ‘00’s (which is a much longer ago than I am willing to admit), one would buy the latest Microsoft Office version and use it for 3-4 years until the next version was released, at which point that would be purchased and installed. Today, Microsoft has moved to their Office 365 platform, which is a SaaS platform. Rather than buying a new version of Office very few years, Office 365 is based on an annual subscription. Rather than having to install a completely new version every few years, the software is installed once and constantly evolves. You might log on one day to find a new logo, or a tool tip showing off a new feature.

SAAS IN INDUSTRY

So how does this translate into the industrial world? As applications become more connected and rely on continued support, the traditional buy once pay once model is not as viable in all applications. This is especially true in applications that offer cloud or ML/AI solutions,

As SaaS models reshape the software world, industrial manufacturers are weighing whether subscription-based services belong on the factory floor.

“In these cases, the end-users are left feeling like they are paying for a product forever for no reason. There has to be some reason why a company would pay a monthly bill for a product or else the SaaS model will gradually incur a backlash.” – Kershaw

hence the reason why IIoT is leading the way on many SaaS applications. For many equipment manufacturers in this area, there is a cost to be paid for ongoing services; implementing some sort of subscription model is needed to cover those ongoing costs.

While some applications will definitely require the subscription model, others are instead being pushed to adopt it. There are solid financial considerations when looking at this model on both sides of the relationship. On the supplier side, the SaaS model provides an ongoing revenue stream rather than a one-time purchase. On the end-user side, this model means not having to put up significant capital for a one-time purchase. The attractiveness of this type of purchase comes from the perception of value over time — the prospect of money paid later being less worrisome than funds owed now. This type of arrangement also allows for the cost of the equipment to be expensed rather than capitalized (it makes a difference, trust me).

CONSIDERING SAAS AS AN OPTION

So, when does going the SaaS route actually make sense? As with everything, it comes down to perspective.

On the supplier side of the equation, the SaaS model makes a bunch of sense when there are ongoing costs to cover. This could be a communications backbone or AI/ML. It also makes sense when the product could benefit from ongoing development. For instance, in reliability measurement, vibration sensors are typically used and in simpler products, the change in vibration could indicate a problem, while in more advanced ones, AI could be used to help identify the specific problem. As more data is gathered and the algorithm improves, the AI could become better at identifying the issue. This sort of evolution would be difficult under the one-time purchase model. Why keep developing a product that has already been paid for?

From the end-user perspective, this model has its financial benefits, as discussed before, but it also helps to solidify a relationship between the end-user and its suppliers. In a one-time purchase model, the end user has to both rely on the integrity of supplier to support its product and stomach the potential reputation damage if trust is broken. In the SaaS model, end-users and suppliers have an ongoing transaction, and the supplier will need to constantly need to

justify why the end-user should continue to pay their monthly bill. This has led to the creation of customer success teams in SaaS heavy industries. These teams are created by the supplier to work with the end-user to ensure that their product is being properly used, with the idea that a well-used product will be critical to the company, which means they will pay their periodic bills and even expand its usage.

CHALLENGES OF SAAS

With these advantages, why do we not see the SaaS model being used everywhere?

Billing is one issue. A company that is set up for one-time sales might not have the infrastructure in place to bill on a regular basis without it creating excess administrative overhead. Value is another. Sales teams on the suppler side are used to communicating the value of a one-time purchase, and SaaS applications require the sales teams to effectively communicate the long-term value of the solution. Conversely, purchasing teams on the end-user side are not accustomed to evaluating the value of a SaaS model (at least not on the OT side), which could end up undervaluing the solution, or causing them to prefer the one-time purchase mostly through familiarity. There are also incentive problems. Sales personnel and managers in most companies with the one-time model are paid based on the dollar value of sales in a year, while those in SaaS companies are typically compensated based on ARR (Annual Reoccurring Revenue) and similar metrics.

The biggest issue however is the perception of coercion. Many industry professionals now have the experience of knowing a one-time sale could have done the job, but a SaaS model was pushed. In these cases, the end-users are left feeling like they are paying for a product forever for no reason. There has to be some reason why a company would pay a monthly bill for a product or else the SaaS model will gradually incur a backlash.

THE RIGHT ATTITUDE

That said, there is significant potential for the SaaS-type model in the industrial instrumentation space if you think of it more as a MaaS model (Measurement as a Service). Most measurements require ongoing attention in the form of calibration, repair, or ongoing maintenance, and the technology changes on an on-going basis. End-users need the measured value from a process and they put up with the equipment needed to get it. If a supplier were to offer that measured value for a monthly cost, it would give the end-user the data they need without the headache. Do I think this would be applicable in all scenarios? Not really. I cannot see easier measurements like temperature and pressure moving to that model anytime soon, and some inline analytical measurements are too unpredictable from a maintenance perspective to handle easily. There is also

the loss of expertise that an end-user suffers when they offload this type of task. But for some measurements, this makes a bunch of sense. Vibration monitoring, which has untapped potential, advanced measurements like NIR, IR, Ultrasonic Analysis that require specialized skillsets, and others would fit this model quite nicely.

In the end it is going to take the accountants and the engineers sitting down together to figure out which model works best on both the suppli-

er and the end-user side, because it has to work for both. If the model only works for one, then it is only going to create frustration for both. Yes, the SaaS model is different, and it will require change on both sides of the purchase order, but if it fits better in the application, why not use it?

RYAN KERSHAW is the Eastern Canada Representative for IIoT, WEgrid, and Calibration at WIKA Canada Ltd. He is based in Maple, ON.

MANAGING AND PREVENTING MOTOR FAILURES; PART VII

By Michael Wright

Pages and pages can be written on the best practices for the maintenance of motors but, assuming they are installed with good millwrighting practices, it primarily boils down to keeping them from overheating, keeping them properly lubricated, and monitoring them for bearing wear.

In addressing the overheating issue, we first need to realize that the internal temperature of a motor can run as high as 130C if it has “Class B” insulation, and up to 180C if it has “Class H”. It can therefore have a surface temperature hot enough to burn your hand (over 60C) while still operating within its nameplate ratings. Also, ‘shooting’ the motor with an infrared camera will elicit bizarre readings because the heat being dissipated from the windings reaches the surface of the motor through different internal pathways. This means that there is no consistency between the various surface temperature readings and what is happening inside the motor.

The best that you can do to control the operating temperature of a motor is to ensure that it is not overloaded, and that whatever ventilation system it has is kept clean enough to allow for good airflow. And ‘clean enough’ does not mean that it needs to be washed down with a fire hose.

As much as possible, the cleaning of a motor must be done carefully so that you are not pushing dirt into an open-vented motor, and that you are not pushing dirt or water into the bearings. In general, loose buildup on a motor should be removed with a wire brush, a hand scraper, or a vacuum cleaner. If the motor is completely enclosed, (not open-vented or open-drip-proof) loose buildup can also be removed with an air hose.

Where there is a hard buildup on a motor, as much as possible it should be removed with a wire brush, a hand scraper, or at worst, with a needle de-scaler or an air chipper. A water hose should always be a last resort and it can only be used if the motor is totally enclosed (TEFC, TEAO, or IP65/66 rated). Furthermore, it is best done when the motor is running and most of the water is sprayed into the cooling fan and blown

across the cooling fins, so that it is kept away from the bearings.

With the lubrication of motor bearings, it is important to understand that ‘more’ does not mean ‘better’. In fact, the opposite is often the case. Bearings which are over-greased will heat up, and if the bearing journal is not equipped with an external vent valve or an internal grease sump, the grease will heat to the point that it loses much of its lubricity and the associated buildup of pressure will push the excess grease back into the motor windings. As such, it is often better to err on the side of under-greasing as opposed to over-greasing.

In a perfect world, I would say to ‘just follow the manufacturer’s recommenda-

tions’. However, I have a memory of reading the manual for a new 250HP motor where the instructions were to grease it 4 times per year (under our plant conditions) and to do this, you were to remove a relief plug from the bearing journal, pump in grease until it came out the relief hole, run the motor for 30 minutes, and then reinstall the plug. This sounds very simple until you consider that this would require the removal, installation, re-removal, and re-installation of the belt guard along with all of the associated LOTO procedures. At $100,000 per hour for plant downtime, and the fact that the process had to be stopped and started to ensure that the pump was not run dry, it would have been very hard for me to sell a production loss of over $500,000 per year to “maintain” a motor that only cost about $15,000.

The best way to lubricate motors is to use an ultrasonic grease caddy that allows you to ‘listen’ to the different high frequency sounds produced in a bearing as you go from under-greasing to over-greasing, so that you can find the ‘Goldilocks’ level that is ‘just right’.

When greasing motors, or anything else for that matter, it is imperative that you do not push dirt into the bearing along with the grease because this will wreck a bearing faster than if you had

just left it alone. As a matter of course, the grease nipple and the end of the grease gun hose should always be wiped off before you grease anything. Then, when finished, you should always leave a small amount of grease on the nipple to make it easier to clean off the next time.

The monitoring of motor bearings has become an industry unto itself, with both reputable companies and snake oil salesmen lining up to pocket your maintenance dollar. In general, bearing failures will follow a ‘bathtub’ curve where a motor is more likely to fail on the first day than it is on the second etc., progressing to where the failure rate diminishes to a ‘normal’(random) failure rate until the bearings are significantly worn out and then the probability of failure increases by the hour:

“The best way to lubricate motors is to use an ultrasonic grease caddy that allows you to ‘listen’ to the different high frequency sounds produced in a bearing as you go from undergreasing to over-greasing, so that you can find the ‘Goldilocks’ level that is ‘just right’.” - Wright

As a rule of thumb, the infant mortality period for your motors should be very short and each failure should be subjected to root cause failure analysis to determine if you need to improve your installation methods or to start buying your motors from a different manufacturer. Then the ‘Normal Life’ period should be at least 5 years if your plant is generally dirty and corrosive such as a mining refinery or much longer if your plant has a clean environment such as one in the food packaging industry.

So, if the above statement applies to your operation, you only need to be concerned if the motor will last until the next turnaround or maintenance shutdown. And that can be handled with something as simple as a mechanic’s stethoscope or as complex as vibration analysis. But be warned that for every dollar that you spend on your test equipment, you need to look at spending between five and ten dollars on educating your people. Because if your ‘reliability’ techs do not truly understand what the side bands on the 7200 RPM frequency means, then there is no point in making your maintenance supervisors sit through their boring Power Point presentations. And if the question comes down to ‘will it make it to our shutdown next

Thursday?’, vibration analysis notwithstanding, listening to it with a stethoscope will often give you a better answer.

MICHAEL WRIGHT is an electrical engineer with more than 50 years of experience in heavy industry. Although he has done an extensive amount of PLC/DCS programming and upgrading of power systems, he is a very strong generalist with a broad knowledge of hydraulics, pneumatics, power transfer, welding practices, mining

equipment, mobile equipment, process control strategies, pumping systems, rock mechanics monitoring, mechanical maintenance practices, MRO procurement contracts, energy management, and cost control. As such, he specializes in problem prevention as a subject matter expert (or as a fixer on “problem projects”). It is his belief that safety is not a “priority” but is a way of life; that good engineering makes life simpler and easier for others; and that the best ideas come from those with calloused hands and dirty coveralls. He can be reached at: mawright@ sasktel.net

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TALKING DIRTY

A Threat-Risk Analysis of Industrial Communications

By Claudiu Popa

In May 2021, Colonial Pipeline gave the industrial world a lesson it should not have needed. A cyber-attack started in the company’s business network, not in the operating systems that actually moved fuel. But the uncertainty was serious enough that pipeline operations were shut down anyway. The issue was not just where the breach started; it was whether the operator could still trust what was connected to what. Once that confidence was gone, this cyber incident became a supply problem. Fuel shortages followed, along with a very public demonstration of how quickly digital confusion can turn into physical disruption.

If you work in process industry, none of this should feel unfamiliar. Supervisory systems gather it all and present a version of reality that operators trust enough to make decisions on. Most of the time, that trust is justified. The trouble starts when it is not.

That’s really what this article is about. Not malware in the abstract, and not a moral panic about cyber threats. It is about trust inside industrial communications. Who sent the message? Was it altered? Was it delayed? Was it replayed? Was it even supposed to be there at all?

Those sound like technical questions, but they are operational ones. If the answer is wrong, the process can be wrong.

A LOT OF INDUSTRIAL NETWORKING STILL COUNTS ON IDEAL CONDITIONS

Industrial protocols were built to solve engineering problems. They were meant to move instructions and readings quickly, reliably, and with as little fuss as possible. That is why so many of them succeeded. Modbus, DNP3, Profibus, and a long list of vendor-specific varia-

tions became part of the backbone of industrial automation because they worked.

They were also built in an era when networks were smaller, more isolated, and usually trusted. If a controller received a command, the system often assumed the command was legitimate because it had arrived from somewhere inside the environment. That made sense when the environment was physically contained and access was tightly limited. It makes less sense now.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) made that point plainly in February 2026 when it released new guidance on secure industrial communications. The agency’s warning was refreshingly blunt: secure versions of industrial protocols have been available for years, but adoption has lagged, and insecure communications can allow a threat actor to impersonate a device or alter messages in transit. CISA also acknowledged the reasons operators have been slow to move, namely cost, complexity, and the fear of interrupting operations. Anyone who has spent time around production systems will recognize that immediately.

Put differently, a lot of industrial chat still runs on old assumptions. If the message looks familiar, if it comes from the right place, if the system has always behaved that way before, then it must be fine. That is not laziness. It is the residue of how these systems were designed and how they were expected to live.

THE AIR GAP STORY IS GETTING HARDER TO TELL WITH A STRAIGHT FACE

For years, people in industry took comfort in the phrase ‘air gap’. Operations were over here. The internet was over there. The dangerous stuff lived in office networks, laptops, and email systems, while the plant floor went on doing real work. That distinction has worn thin.

Remote access is now ordinary. So are cloud dashboards, thirdparty analytics, condition monitoring platforms, wireless gateways, and vendor support channels that can reach deep into an environment when something important breaks at 2 a.m. Even careful sites that think of themselves as conservative, have added more connectivity than they often like to admit.

There are good reasons for that. Connected systems can help reduce downtime, improve maintenance planning, and give small teams better visibility across large operations. IDC projected that worldwide IoT spending would pass $1 trillion in 2026. That is not just a fun number for a keynote slide. It tells you how thoroughly connected infrastructure has become part of mainstream industrial decision-making. But the bill always comes due.

The SANS State of ICS/OT Security report for 2025 found that 22 percent of surveyed organizations had experienced an ICS or OT cybersecurity incident in the prior 12 months, and half of those incidents originated through exter-

nal connectivity or remote access pathways. One related SANS release added another uncomfortable detail: only 13 percent of organizations had implemented more advanced ICS-aware controls such as session recording or real-time approvals for remote access. In other words, industry has opened more doors than it has learned to watch. That is not a theoretical weakness. In many environments, the fastest route into a system is no longer a dramatic exploit. It is a legitimate pathway that has been left too open for too long.

THE RISK RARELY LOOKS LIKE IT DOES IN HOLLYWOOD

If you ask operators where cyber risk shows up, they often picture something spectacular: screens go black — alarms erupt — a plant goes down in dramatic fashion! Sometimes that happens, but more often the problem walks in wearing a high-vis vest and carrying a service laptop. A contractor connects remotely to help with a drive problem during a turnaround. The work gets done. The remote access stays enabled. A gateway gets installed to feed process data into a dashboard because management wants better visibility. Nobody circles back to tighten the default configuration. A technician plugs in a laptop to collect logs from an engineering workstation. The same laptop was used at another site last week. That fact does not feel especially important until one day it does. A device accepts a message because the network

traffic looks normal enough. The sender is never really challenged. Nobody designed the protocol to be suspicious.

THE SYSTEMS MOST WORTH PROTECTING ARE OFTEN THE HARDEST TO CHANGE

The most important systems in an operation are often the ones nobody wants to touch. Legacy industrial systems may be clunky, unsupported, or impossible to defend in a modern cybersecurity presentation, but they often run processes that people know intimately. They are tied to uptime, throughput, and safety. The cost of changing them is not just financial. It may involve downtime, retraining, retesting, revalidation, and the risk of introducing new failure modes into a process that has been stable for years.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) captures this tension well in its OT security guidance, which emphasizes that operational environments have unique performance, reliability, and safety requirements. That is a formal way of saying that you do not patch a refinery unit or a compressor station the way you patch office software on a Tuesday afternoon.

CISA’s 2026 guidance says much the same thing from another angle. Operators have been slow to adopt more secure communications not because they are foolish, but because live industrial environments punish careless change.

That is the maintenance paradox. The systems most in need of modernization are often the systems

“for years, people in industry took comfort in the phrase ‘air gap’. Operations were over here. The internet was over there. The dangerous stuff lived in office networks, laptops, and email systems, while the plant floor went on doing real work.” - Popa

operators are least willing to disturb, so the old protocol stays. The old assumptions stay with it. And the useful workaround that was meant to be temporary quietly becomes permanent.

WHY THIS MATTERS OUTSIDE THE CONTROL ROOM

For an operator, this is an uptime problem. For maintenance, it is a reliability problem. For engineers, it is a systems integrity problem. For leadership, it increasingly becomes a governance problem too.

In Canada, Bill C-8 (“an Act respecting cyber security, amending the Telecommunications Act”) remains active in Parliament and would create a framework for cyber security programs, incident reporting, record keeping, thirdparty risk oversight, and regulatory direction for designated operators in federally regulated critical sectors. Not every CPECN reader will land directly inside that regime, but the message is hard to miss. The policy direction is toward stronger, more formal cyber expectations for the systems that support essential services.

For public issuers, there is a

second layer of pressure. Ontario’s NI 52-109 requires certifying officers to establish and maintain disclosure controls and procedures, as well as internal control over financial reporting. The instrument defines internal control over financial reporting as a process designed to provide reasonable assurance regarding reliable financial reporting, including controls around records, authorized transactions, and the prevention or timely detection of unauthorized acquisition, use, or disposition of assets. If operational data, access controls, or system changes become unreliable enough to affect reporting or asset integrity, that concern does not stay buried in the plant.

FOUR TAKEAWAYS WORTH CONSIDERING

1. Industrial communications are not background noise. They are part of the process itself. When the conversation is wrong, the process can be wrong.

2. Remote access has become one of the most common pathways into industrial environments. Convenience is not free. It needs supervision.

3. Legacy systems deserve consideration, not contempt. They are productive assets with modern exposure. Treating them seriously means understanding where trust is assumed and where that assumption is now dangerous.

4. This is no longer a niche specialist topic. It belongs in maintenance planning, operational risk discussions, vendor management, and leadership conversations about resilience.

Industry has always known how to take physical hazards seriously. It inspects, calibrates, isolates, verifies, and documents things worth documenting. The digital layer underneath the process deserves the same discipline. The machines are already talking. The real question is whether anyone is listening closely enough to what they trust, what they obey, and who else might be part of the conversation.

CLAUDIU POPA (CISSP, CISA, CRISC, CIPP, PMP, ISO 27001 Lead Auditor) is a cybersecurity strategist focused on protecting operational technology (OT), industrial control environments, and the information assets that keep plants and supply chains running. He is the founder of the Informatica Group of Companies and leads OTSEC Canada, a firm specializing in industrial cybersecurity, OT risk reduction, and practical security programs that scale across vendors and supply chains.

ABB GAS ANALYZER RECEIVES CSA CERTIFICATION FOR HAZARDOUS APPLICATIONS

ABB’s Fidas24 gas analyzer has received CSA certification for use in hazardous industrial environments in the United States and Canada. The Zurich, Switzerland-based company said the certification, awarded by CSA Group, confirms the analyzer’s suitability for operation in potentially explosive atmospheres in oil, gas, petrochemical and chemical industries.

The Fidas24 is a flame ionization detector that measures total hydrocarbons by burning sample gas in a hydrogen flame and measuring the resulting ionized current. The unit is housed in an Ex-p pressurized enclosure and already meets European ATEX and international IECEx regulations for use in areas where explosive gases or combustible dusts may be present. www.abb.com

ARNOLD MAGNETIC TECHNOLOGIES HIGHLIGHTS ROTOR CASTING PROCESS FOR AEROSPACE APPLICATIONS

Arnold Magnetic Technologies has outlined specifications for RAMCAST, a rotor casting process developed for aerospace and high-performance motor applications.

The Rochester, N.Y.-based company said the process was developed in-house through its Ramco Electric Motors division using custom-designed machinery. The company stated it is the only manufacturer globally capable of this level of rotor casting precision.

The RAMCAST process produces

aluminum and copper rotors for electric motors. Aluminum rotors can be cast up to nine inches in diameter with alloy pour weights up to 35 pounds. Copper rotors can be cast up to nine inches in diameter with alloy pour weights up to 18 pounds.

www.arnoldmagnetics.com

TWINTHREAD LAUNCHES AI ANALYTICS SOFTWARE FOR BATCH MANUFACTURING OPTIMIZATION

TwinThread has released Perfect Batch, an artificial intelligencepowered analytics solution for optimizing batch production processes in manufacturing.

The Charlottesville, Va.-based company said the software identifies optimal batch profiles from historical production data and provides recommendations for improving efficiency. The system is designed to enable manufacturers to replicate their best-performing batches, which the company refers to as golden batches.

Perfect Batch connects to existing batch execution systems and analyzes past data to build digital models and apply predictive algorithms. Rather than using manually set parameters, the software learns control limits and process centerlines from actual process performance and historical data.

www.twinthread.com

JET TOOLS INTRODUCES MATERIAL LIFTS FOR CONTRACTORS AND MAINTENANCE APPLICATIONS

JET Tools has launched the S-Series 450-pound capacity material lifts for contractors and

maintenance professionals.

The La Vergne, Tenn.-based company said the material lifts feature a short-stack mast design that creates a compact footprint for maneuverability through tight spaces, doorways and vehicles. The design is intended to facilitate transport, setup and storage. The lifts are designed for applications including HVAC contractors, mechanical contractors, facility maintenance teams and manufacturing environments. www.jettools.ca

ALTECH INTRODUCES PLUGGABLE TERMINAL BLOCKS FOR INDUSTRIAL WIRING APPLICATIONS

Altech Corporation has introduced a line of pluggable terminal blocks for industrial installations, field wiring and equipment testing applications.

The terminal blocks combine spring clamp wire connections with plug-style connectors. According to the company, the spring contacts create wire-to-wire connections without requiring tools. Integrated locking pins are designed to maintain connections during vibration.

The plugs are available as stackable single blocks or can be ordered pre-stacked in configurations up to 15 poles. DIN rail versions mount by snapping onto the rail, with plugs that can be inserted and removed from the opposite side. Coding pins and breakaway stubs insert into base assemblies to prevent incorrect mating.

SERVOTECNICA EXPANDS ENVIRONMENTAL TESTING CAPABILITY FOR SLIP RING PRODUCTS

Servotecnica has expanded its

in-house environmental qualification capabilities for slip ring design and testing at extreme temperatures.

The Milan, Italy-based company said the enhanced testing capacity supports temperature ranges from minus 50 C to plus 180 C, with controlled thermal ramp rates and humidity levels from 10 per cent to 98 per cent relative humidity. The facility allows evaluation of slip ring performance under cold-start conditions, sustained hightemperature operation and combined temperature-humidity profiles.

The in-house testing approach enables engineering teams to assess custom slip ring designs, including material selection, sealing methods, cable assemblies and mechanical tolerances. According to the company, conducting qualification testing internally reduces scheduling and logistical requirements associated with external test facilities.

Servotecnica currently offers low-temperature slip ring products in its standard product range. The expanded testing capability is intended to support development of application-specific variants with defined temperature requirements and validation protocols. www.servotecnica.com/en/

BEST PROCESS SOLUTIONS OFFERS BULK BAG DISCHARGE EQUIPMENT

Best Process Solutions Inc. manufactures bulk bag dischargers designed to handle product discharge from bulk bags while containing dust.

The Brunswick, Ohio-based company offers three models. The Model MTD-2.5K handles bulk bags up to 2,500-pound capacity. The Model MTD-4K accommodates bulk bags up to 4,000-pound capacity. The Model BBD-4K includes a vibratory motor for material agitation during unloading. Options are available for all models.

Best Process Solutions manufactures bulk processing equipment and systems for industries including chemicals, food processing, aggregates and recycling. www.bpsvibes.com