Agnico Eagle Mines

But you got to put that into context.

I mean, I did some, I did some work on, um, energy impacts, and you look at a company like Agnico Eagle, for instance, which has a lot of open pit mines, it is a big consumer of diesel.

Diesel as a percentage of operating costs are...

They break it down by mine.

Who do you think is the best capital allocator amongst the publicly traded gold producers?

Um, well, probably one of the biggest has been Agnico.

They've, uh, you know, they've taken a lot of positions and a lot of companies, and that's probably what you have to do is you have to, you know, take a lot of positions.

I mean, you know, we've seen B2 Gold take, uh, you know, positions and, uh, things like Snowline and, you know, they also, you know, are down in, uh, um, South America too, taking some positions.

They're getting that back into development.

We're seeing Lake George, uh, now being pursued with a new partnership with Agnico Eagle.

So we have natural resources that are of value to, uh, to our allies around the world, uh, and they're attracting investment, uh, from folks around the world.

We wanna make sure that New Brunswick's natural resources are being used for the benefit of New Brunswickers and with our allies and partners, uh, that we can do good business with.

I mean, there's, there's, there's certain types of assets, certain type of operators that, that typically struggle bringing assets in production.

You know, a, a single asset junior producer is gonna have a much more difficult time having access to the resources, the capital, the people to, to successfully take a mine from, uh, exploration through development to production, right? When you, when you're dealing with the, you know, the Agnico Eagles or the Barricks or the Tecks or, you know, the Alamos Golds or, or other major operators around the world, you know, these companies are very well-versed in bringing mines into production, and they've got balance sheets to support-

Mm

... where if there's an issue, then, uh, then they can, they can have that, um, you know, issue sorted and, and, and maybe there's a delay, but they'll continue on, uh, you know, bringing that asset in production.

But I think the big takeaway is we really want to kind of put the foot down and move this forward as quickly as we can.

Graham, could we just talk about your treasury and your funding? You do have an exploration alliance with Agnico Eagle, which is funding $5 million of the 2026 field season.

You expect that to continue?

Absolutely.

We should exit this year and be well funded with approximately six to seven million going into next year to get started.

And that's correct.

Agnico Eagle did a concurrent financing a couple months ago along with a strategic alliance to look for copper gold or gold deposits within the Stikine Terrain in the Yukon, which is just absolutely underexplored.

So that's an exciting side piece to what we're doing.