NorthIsle Copper and Gold

Good. Ready to go, Sam.

Hi, everyone. It’s great to be back here at the Mining Forum. This is our sixth year presenting, and through those years, we have transformed into one of the largest and certainly one of the most important copper-gold development and exploration companies in Canada, and the transition has just begun. I will be making forward-looking statements throughout the presentation.

So the underpinning opportunity at NorthIsle Copper and Gold is the value and growth proposition. This is a very scarce perspective in terms of the fact that not only is it levered to one of the most critical commodities in copper, but arguably one of the most critical currencies in gold. And we have raised approximately $150 million to advance this project rapidly through pre-feasibility, feasibility, and FID over the next couple of years. So the market really believes that this is the opportunity that exists, that we’ve always believed we’ve had, underpinned by about 1.2 billion tons of resources.

But the second proposition is the growth proposition. We have about 40 kilometers, 100% owned, of a 50-kilometer bonafide porphyry district, which borders on a historical BHP mine called Island Copper. And this exploration activity has really built us through the years from a $10 million company to about a $1.5 billion company today. So we are gonna continue to develop the exploration thesis and spend approximately 20% of our budget bringing that forward.

And then, of course, nothing happens without good execution. We have built our team to accommodate not only the development, but the aggressive growth strategy moving forward. And coupled with our strong First Nation partners, Quatsino, Kwagulth, and Clayoquot-Seahwiah, we are poised to move forward very quickly.

So on the value proposition, the project itself is a very large copper and gold project. It’s almost equally distributed copper and gold. From a gold perspective, it’s about 16 million ounces of gold equivalent. From a copper perspective, it’s about 10 billion pounds of copper equivalent. As I mentioned, it spans across a 50-kilometer porphyry district. We are on track to issue the PFS by Q1 of next year. The infrastructure that exists around this property was built in the sixties and seventies for the Island Copper Mine, so it is second to none with ports, power, rail, and of course, the town of Port Hardy just adjacent to the project.

Very importantly, we have been identified within Canada and BC as a priority project, with just last week being included in the Summit deal book, where the country has identified approximately 167 projects of importance to Canada. About 45 projects are mining, and only about seven are copper. So this is one of the most highest priority projects that the country is looking to advance forward quickly.

In terms of the resources, it is, as I mentioned, equally copper and gold. From a copper perspective, it’s approximately 4 billion pounds of copper in indicated resources. On the gold side, it’s about 9 million ounces. And so as a result, we have recently just been added to the GDXJ index in recognition of the fact that we are a very large gold project. We just also released our MRE, our mineral resource estimate, which is going to underpin our pre-feasibility study. And as I said, every time we put a hole in the ground, we keep on finding more and more. And so right now, we are standing at about a 1.2 billion ton resource in indicated and approximately 300 million additional resources in inferred.

So on the growth proposition, on the 50-kilometer district, we have dedicated about $20 million, or again, 20% of our budget towards exploration. When we had sequentially started exploring or re-exploring this area in 2020, we went in $10 million increments, where we had to really focus on the higher NSR value per ton rock, the higher margin rock at surface that would allow us to go through a very phased and methodical and low capital-intensive project as we’ve defined today. Well, today, we will continue to do that. We will continue to find higher NSR value per ton rock within the context of the project. But because we’re approximately a billion-and-a-half market cap company, we actually have the ability to look broad and through the district and really understand the overall opportunity. So there will be an allocation towards the district opportunity in addition to continuing to grow out the mineral resources.

So BC is absolutely open for business. This was an initiative that was probably started about sixteen years ago as the Golden Triangle and reinitiated through the development of Brucejack, which obviously was owned by Pretium and then got taken out by Newcrest. And since then, there has been a number of projects, greenfields, brownfields, that have really accelerated through this permitting process. This is an environment where the political will at the provincial and certainly at the federal level has really come into fruition and has set its sights on identifying NorthIsle, our project on the North Island, as one of the top priority projects in British Columbia.

So none of this happens without excellent leadership, and I think we have a second to none group, especially for a company of our size. And the execution of this, what we think is an aspirational, aggressive, but achievable goal, is being led by a gentleman, Kevin O’Kane, who has over 40 years experience, 37 of which with BHP, developing, operating and finding some of the largest mines in the world, including Escondida and Spence. And he’s really built a team of individuals that give us the capability and the capacity to really go after the growth and the value opportunity with additions like Dr. John Thompson, Dr. Gillian Davidson, and most recently, Dr. Maurice Takami.

So 2026 was also a sad year for NorthIsle Copper and Gold. We lost our chairman, our founding chairman, Dale Korman, Mining Hall of Famer, and on a personal note, a mentor to me. We had a progressive succession plan over a two-year period, which eventually saw Alex Davidson join our board last year in May and succeeding Dale in April this year. So we are very fortunate to have an individual like Alex who’s grown American Barrick to Barrick from a $30 million company to the company that it is today. And he has really developed the board in a way that we are able to activate this plan as quickly as possible, including the recent addition of Gerardo Fernandez as our independent director and chair of the technical committee.

So over the past two years, we’ve outperformed our peers almost on every metric, and I do believe this is partly because of our exposure to both copper and gold, which is quite unique and scarce in the market today. But it’s also the fact that we’ve been able to systematically execute our development and exploration plan. We do have about $130 million that sees us well into the feasibility stage and into FID. And currently, we have about six analysts that cover us, from the likes of CIBC and Raymond James being the two most recent that initiated coverage at $7.

So maybe I’ll take off my NorthIsle hat, and I’ll put on my investment banking hat. This is the peer group that we saw five years ago when I started at NorthIsle Copper and Gold. What you can see is there is a tremendous amount of activity in the copper space, and it’s actually created a dearth of opportunities now. The intermediate and junior copper space has always been small, but now it’s just become smaller, just given this insatiable need for the underlying product. What has changed from our perspective is the understanding that we are equally a gold company as much as a copper company. Being included in GDXJ just last week really did identify that association.

And what we are going through today in Canada is one of the most transformational activities from a growth perspective that I’ve seen in thirty years, and certainly my chairman over the past seventy, eighty years has not seen, in the perspective of the alignment of natural resource extractive industries being aligned with political will. And so last week at the summit, there was an announcement around Canada growth, generalist and institutional and pension fund activity, $40 billion being committed into Canada, trillions of dollars looking to be targeted by 2030. And then, of course, tax treatments around capital expenditures being able to be applied and credited to cash flows immediately versus being amortized over the course of the mine life. This, in my mind, is going to make a tremendous impact on not only growth in development projects in Canada but also M&A as well.

So in summary, this year is going to be a very active year. Obviously, last year was a transformational year for us, and this year we are executing that transformation. And we will be looking, as I said, on the development side, to be issuing the pre-feasibility study in Q1 of next year. We are going to be initiating a second-half drill program, approximately $10 million on the exploration side. We still have yet to release some of our results from our first half $10 million program, which I can go into a little bit more detail. That’s forthcoming. And then, of course, as we move forward, we will continue to get more market breadth and depth as the pool of capital continues to expand across borders and into the generalist and institutional community.

So maybe given that I have eight minutes, I could go through a little bit more detail in the project and, for those that have been following the project for the last few years, some of the updates that we’ve had on our drilling. So the BC landscape, as I said, has never been more ripe for development and production. And so as a result, we have been one of the main centerpieces for that focus, given where our location is. We are located on the north end of Vancouver Island, arguably the most westerly part of Canada and British Columbia, where all the roads, the powers, the ports have been established for natural resource extractive industries, including mining.

We’re approximately 500 kilometers north of Victoria, so that distance is effectively a greater distance from Toronto to Sudbury, where they are currently hosting two producing smelters. North of Campbell River over there was effectively built for the Island Copper Mine. And so that’s the roads, the powers, the ports, the town. That effectively was all built in the ’70s to effectively support a mine of the same size, tonnage, scale, and commodity mix.

That is effectively what you see in front of you is a representation of 40 kilometers of the 50-kilometer district that I’m talking about, where as you can obviously see the BHP mine to the bottom right corner representing the remaining five kilometers. This is 100% owned by NorthIsle, and obviously it’s something that we continue to explore and advance very quickly, taking advantage of the ports, of the power, of the infrastructure. Within 20 kilometers, we are contemplating several ports for our study work, which I think is going to show to be extremely impactful as it relates to the economics and the logistics of the project moving forward. We also have access to an abundance of power. So to the north of us, we have about 100 megawatts of capacity coming out from the Cape Scott Wind Farm. And of course, our project landscape presides predominantly in the northern part of our tenements, including Northwest Expo, Red Dog, West Goodspeed, and Hushamu.

So to start on some of the exploration and development work that we’ve been advancing over the last five years. This is Northwest Expo. This is the area where we hit the 2 grams per tonne over 135 meters in 2024, and really started this understanding and possibility around the phase one and phase two development. Because this is much higher NSR value per tonne rock, it’s almost three to four times higher than the rest of the project, we felt it was incumbent on us to develop this pit specifically into our first phase and effectively be able to produce cash flow immediately and pay back capital for the second phase in due course.

The second part of phase one includes Red Dog and West Goodspeed. So Red Dog is the pits on the left. West Goodspeed’s the pit on the right. Red Dog was part of the PEA back in 2025. West Goodspeed was not. So the introduction of West Goodspeed in 2026 in the MRE is a very significant addition to the 1.2 billion tonnes that we’ve obviously defined as part of the PEA. What is very interesting here is that this initially was contemplated as two separate systems. So call it 0.7 kilometers strike on Red Dog and one-kilometer strike on West Goodspeed. Well, we’ve now done enough drilling to really support the thesis that these two systems might be connected, and this is something that we are not going to change as part of our PFS as it relates to how we mine this. Clearly, these are two pits that are connected on the outer limits. But from a geological perspective, this gives us a lot of information of where we are in a system, where we can start to potentially target in the future, and the fact that we are very high up in the porphyry system and going deeper obviously has the potential of achieving higher grade discoveries.

And then finally, in phase two, we contemplate a project called Hushamu. This is the 25-year plus life. This is the high tonnage, long life, copper, gold even mix that we are able to effectively pay off the twinning of the capital expenditure of the mill from 40,000 to 80,000 tonnes per day to achieve these cash flows for the second phase. From an exploration perspective, as you can see, there is actually a high-grade portion. It’s about 100 million tonnes of about 0.5% copper equivalent at Hushamu, which is something that we are now committing approximately $5 million of capital to advance as part of the extension of Hushamu high-grade valley in H2 of this year. So that program will initiate over the next couple of weeks. We’re excited about it.

So in conclusion, this is obviously a very active year for us. I’ve got three minutes left. Perhaps I’ll just stop here and take questions.

Thanks, Sam. Any questions from the room? It’s pretty comprehensive from my side, Sam. Thank you very much.

Yep. Thank you very much. Thank you. [audience applauding]