By Stan Chung

Op-Ed Commentary

Prime Minister Mark Carney wants Canada to depend less on the United States. He is moving to approve major projects, open trade corridors, and route more Canadian resources to international markets.

As national risk management, that may be sensible.

From the East Kootenay, it is not yet a development plan.

We already live inside an export-diversified resource economy. Elk Valley Resources operates four steelmaking coal mines in this region. Most of the coal goes to Asia. In 2024, EVR reported $5.3 billion in GDP contribution from its B.C. operations, thousands of jobs, roughly $470 million in government revenues, and $3.3 billion spent with B.C. suppliers.

The jobs matter. The families who depend on the mines matter.

The numbers also raise the question no national plan is currently answering.

After that much wealth leaves this region, what is being built here that will still matter 30 years from now?

In 2024, the controlling interest in EVR was sold to Glencore for $9.9 billion. The coal stays in the East Kootenay. The workers stay. The water responsibility stays.

The ownership and the largest financial returns increasingly do not.

That responsibility is generational. The province’s Elk Valley water-quality work addresses selenium, nitrate, sulphate and other mining contaminants, with new treatment facilities expected to operate to at least 2042.

This is why more extraction, more corridors, and more export destinations cannot be the whole plan.

EVR is running a business. Its job is to operate mines profitably, employ workers, comply with regulation, and return value to its owners. No private company is going to build a regional future that governments have not chosen to fund.

That work belongs to public leadership.

If the East Kootenay is important enough to supply billions to Canada’s economy, it is important enough to receive nation-building investment of its own — investment for every family who calls this region home.

Four foundational investments — what every East Kootenay family deserves.

1. World-beating job training programs. College of the Rockies designated and built out as the East Kootenay Polytechnic, with work-integrated learning anchored in regional industry. Pathways from secondary schools across the region. We still lose our children to other places because they cannot get a placement here. The Polytechnic ends that.
2. First-class schools. K-12 capital, programming, and teacher investment so a fifteen-year-old in Sparwood, Fernie, Creston, Invermere, or Cranbrook can see a future here — and reach the Polytechnic and the Centres of Excellence through dual-credit pathways already in motion in grade nine.
3. State-of-the-art hospitals. Health, mental-health, and substance-use services scaled to the population a resource economy actually requires. Distance from urban care is not an acceptable health policy for the region that supplies billions to Canada.
4. Long-overdue transportation hubs and corridors. CP Rail intermodal capacity, regional airport modernization, Highway 3 and Highway 95 upgrades, and workforce housing alongside — through the federal Trade Corridor Fund and a CMHC envelope ring-fenced for resource regions.

Four regional capacities — what we build here for the world.

5. A Wood Centre of Excellence. Anchored by regional sawmills, regional Indigenous-owned enterprises, and applied research. Mass timber, engineered wood, and low-carbon building products designed and manufactured here, not exported as raw logs. A federal commitment in the range of $300 million over ten years.
6. A Mine-Water and Clean-Resource Centre of Excellence, in partnership with the Ktunaxa Nation. Water remediation science, environmental monitoring, and exportable clean-resource technology developed in the region whose water carries the responsibility. Coal economies around the world need what we can build here. A federal commitment in the range of $400 million over ten years.
7. An East Kootenay Food and Agriculture Strategy. The Creston Valley feeds people. The Columbia Valley feeds people. Federal investment in processing capacity, regenerative agriculture, and value-added production keeps food economies in the region that produces them.
8. A Cultural and Mountain Tourism Initiative, built in partnership with the Ktunaxa Nation and structured for shared, long-term local benefit. Federal cost-share through Destination Canada and the Indigenous Tourism Association of Canada.

This region only works as one region. The Ktunaxa Nation, the settler towns, the miners, ranchers, orchardists, ski-town businesses, teachers, nurses, and their children all share the water, the highways, the hospitals, and the future.

Build for all of us.

None of this is against mining or trade. The region producing the wealth should be the region that compounds it.

The East Kootenay is already contributing to Canada’s future.

Mr. Carney, where is Canada’s investment in ours?

– Stan Chung is a consultant and writer living in Cranbrook. He is a 2026 Governor General’s laureate.

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