Canada digs, grows and refines things, ships them abroad to be finished, then buys them back. Each line below is one of those leaks and the plant that would keep the value at home: fundable in one large round this year, scaled to many facilities if it works, and a profitable factory for a decade if it does not.
How to read a flow. Blue is what Canada already produces. Orange is the step that happens abroad. The orange dot marks where the proposed plant sits.
Cash-flow floor is the worst-case test: does the plant still pay if the upside never comes? Scores are 1–5; the composite is weighted by the sliders, which you can move.
Each thesis had to pass four tests. The leak is real and documented (a Canadian raw material is processed abroad and re-imported, or an import substitutes for a step Canada could do). A named buyer exists who can sign offtake or a framework agreement. A named program, rule or procurement pulls the plant forward in 2026–27. And the worst case is still a plant that earns its keep for ten years.
Facts come from Natural Resources Canada mineral fact sheets (2024 data), the Defence Industrial Strategy (Feb 2026), Budget 2025 and the Spring Economic Update 2026, OPG, Bruce Power, Hydro-Québec and Hydro One plans, the Canada Energy Regulator, the Canola Council, FPAC, ISED and Health Canada, plus company releases. Links sit inside each thesis.
Capex and round sizes are estimates built from comparable projects and are labelled as such; treat them as ranges to be replaced by a feasibility study. Where a fact could not be confirmed from a primary source, the thesis carries a ⚠ flag. This session's web search allowance was spent on the earlier summit work, so verification relied on direct reads of official and company pages; a few company statuses (PowerCo, NextStar, Umicore Loyalist) are marked unverified.
This is research to help decide where to spend a founder's or investor's autumn, not investment advice. Scores are judgements, and the sliders exist so that you can disagree with them.