This article is a sponsored feature from Mining.com.au partner Renforth Resources. It is not financial advice. Talk to a registered financial expert before making investment decisions.
Canada’s Renforth Resources (CSE:RFR) President and CEO Nicole Brewster admits to a “slow and steady” approach to both its Parbec gold and Victoria polymetallic deposits, despite acknowledging the temptation of gold’s inherent sex appeal.
“Parbec’s the girl everybody looks at, but the smart one is in the back of the room doing the work and they know it’s Victoria,” Brewster says.
“The gold is going to run off into the sunset. It’s the one that everybody wants to talk about. It’s the sexy one … the numbers get people excited.
“The base metals … it’s just plodding along. It’s not bad where it sits. Can we make it better? Absolutely. Are we going to make it better? Heck yeah.”
The gold and critical minerals explorer is focused on advancing the Parbec gold deposit and progressing the Victoria polymetallic deposit and other proven mineralised gold and critical mineral assets.
As part of its portfolio, the Parbec open gold deposit in Québec, Canada, is considered its anchor asset.
The Malartic Metals Package nearby hosts the Victoria polymetallic critical minerals deposit and the Beaupré copper discovery.
Other assets include the Lalonde Polymetallic Occurrence north of Victoria and the Nixon-Bartleman Gold Occurrence, west of Timmins, which has been historically drilled and sampled/stripped on surface over more than 500m.
But for now, Brewster has her hands full with Parbec and Victoria.
“I’m working both Parbec and Victoria properties simultaneously. It’s a challenge because it’s very atypical for someone in my position running a micro-cap company to have two material focus assets, so to speak. We have a third one I don’t even talk about,” she says, referring to Lalonde.
“We’re in the field right now at Parbec. We did some channel sampling and we’re awaiting our assay results. We’re pretty confident we will get gold on surface.
“When we stripped it, we found more of it than we thought was in there. We thought it was a narrow thing, and it wasn’t narrow on the surface at least. I have to find capital to drill at Parbec. So, that’s the big picture.”
A tale of two assets
“Victoria, we’re drilling right now. It’s really just to get the stick in the ground. It’s by no means the final statement,” Brewster says.
“Subsequent to that resource I’ve proven that platinum and palladium are consistently present with nickel. Now those are low grade but they’re consistently there and there’s no real North American source for those.
“We have no lack of mineralisation. Victoria when it grows up and puts on its big girl pants is going to be a very large-scale, long-term operation.”
The Victoria deposit contains 125 million tonnes of polymetallic ore: nickel, cobalt, platinum, and palladium, interlayered with zinc, copper, silver, and gold.
The resources were declared in 2025 over a 2.5km open pit within a 20km-long mineralised structure, road access, and hydropower in what Brewster described in an interview with Mining.com.au as “the beginning of the story”.
“We have a lot of this material, on a very large property with road access, hydroelectric power lines with two dams to the south of us, no population, no significant bodies of water, rail line nearby, six hours by road to Bécancour which is the battery ecosystem the government of Québec is building, 12 hours by road to New York, eight hours to Toronto, so very accessible,” she said at the time.
“We are in the heart of the Abitibi which is a world-class and very long-lived mining jurisdiction with everything we might need to develop Victoria.
“We’re quite excited — it’s big, and we’re only just starting.”
But ask Brewster where Renforth currently sits in the Canadian mining ecosystem and she remains humble.
“I don’t watch the whole thing. I don’t know. I’m just busy enough being the chief bottle washer for a micro junior with two stupidly large properties,” she says.
“The fact that we’re in a ridiculously underexplored area beside all these fantastic mines is unique and ridiculous.
“Building a polymetallic … there’s not too many of them on the go around the world, is my sense. And certainly not in Canada and in the southern half of Québec.
“It’s not because I’m a genius. It’s because I read some maps and decided to do what hadn’t been done.”
The timeline
And Brewster’s even more careful, almost coy on the timeline moving forward, reiterating the story is only just beginning.
“It’ll be continued field activities of Victoria and Parbec, for sure, and it’ll be me at certain conferences both with high-net-worth individuals as well as looking for funds but also looking for partners,” she says.
“It’s just a continued exploration. All it takes is one assay result.
“I have no idea what the market will care about and anyone who tells you they know, they’re making it up, because you can’t know, you can’t figure it out. I don’t know.”
Global demand for polymetallic ores
At the end of the day, simply put, Brewster says the world needs metals.
“If you believe any of the talk about what the future holds, the things we have to build, the number of people that are going to be on the planet, etc., we need metals,” she says.
“You’re seeing nickel operations shutting down. You’re seeing Australia’s large, low-grade, high-cost base metals deposits shutting down too.
“And from a North American perspective, that metal is on the other side of the planet, literally. So now you’ve got the US and we’ve got the geopolitics.
“I mean, the mining market hasn’t really changed. The same assets that were out there before are out there now. But what’s changed is the geopolitics. We don’t do just-in-time delivery.
“You want to control the supply lines and ensure access to the supply lines. Commodities have been weaponised. It drives the gold market because currencies are weaponised.”
The Parbec deposit
While Brewster refers to Victoria as a “rediscovery”, she describes the golden child Parbec as an “underexplored asset which I perceived as an opportunity I pursued, established the first resource, and have kept moving on from there.”
“I had an advantage as the 1980s work, the bulk of the work done prior to Renforth, was done under my father as then VP Exploration, with one of our geologists working for him. Our pre-existing property knowledge was unique and intimate,” Brewster says.
“Parbec is a fantastic asset in that it is, if not the last, one of the last unmined deposits on the actual Cadillac Break, certainly in the Rouyn-Val d’Or corridor, which has hosted some of Canada’s most prolific gold mines.
“Our logistics could not be better. We are located in an established gold camp with ample toll-milling capacity. Within an hour’s drive, there are six operating gold mines and another ramping up, along with all the services and expertise that come with them.”
Victoria polymetallic deposit
“We have lots and lots of work we could do. How aggressively can we move it forward? Well, it’s access to capital and market interest,” Brewster says.
“There is no retail for nickel right now. We have copper there too, but it’s hit or miss with copper as well. These are base metals, so a lot of it is not flashy.
“There are no jazz hands when you’re talking about base metals. The jazz hands are for gold.”
Write to Christine Retschlag at Mining.com.au
Images: Renforth Resources
