After years in the 'wilderness,' gold bugs get sweet vindication at the annual mining event amid bullion's historic run
By Gabriel Friedman
National Post / Financial Post, Toronto
Thursday, February 26, 2026
https://financialpost.com/commodities/mining/gold-bugs-pdac-new-credibility [1]
John Ing has been bullish on bullion for more than five decades, and he's not about to change his tune as gold rips to US$5,000 per ounce.
"I keep on telling everyone the best is yet to come," the chief executive of investment adviser Maison Placements Canada Inc. in Toronto said. "Yeah, it looks like a bubble, but when you look at the supply and demand, my sense is we haven't seen anything yet."
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Gold in 2025 turned in its best annual performance as an investment since 1979, rising 65% to US$4,547 per ounce by year-end. But it wasn't done yet, as it kept smashing records to briefly hit nearly US$5,600 per ounce before settling down about 10% to around US$5,000.
But one thing is abundantly clear as tens of thousands of geologists and mining professionals from all over Canada and the world converge in downtown Toronto this coming week for the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) conference: After years of optimism about bullion, even as its price sat in the doldrums, gold bugs have finally been vindicated as just about everyone else has now bought into their beliefs.
Ing said gold's sudden surge will likely be a motif at this year's PDAC, a convention he hs attended for decades, and the mood may be more celebratory than in previous years.
He recalled attending PDAC in 1987 when a Timmins, Ont., man shot and murdered another Timmins man with a .38 calibre pistol at the event. That was when it was still small enough to be held in the Royal York Hotel in downtown Toronto, not far from the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, where it takes place today, typically drawing at least 25,000 people.
"It was really rough and tumble," he said of the event back then.
The point, Ing said, is that gold bugs have suffered through some rough patches and some quiet periods, but, ultimately, everyone who invests makes money over the long term.
By his account, gold's current bull run, though historic, would barely qualify as one if it ran out of steam now. Despite bullion's meteoric rise since early 2024, he described it as just the "third" best gold run he has witnessed in his career.
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The first big boom took place in the 1970s, when gold rose to US$850 per ounce from around US$35. A nearly two-decade lull followed in which gold dipped back to US$250 per ounce. During the 2000s, gold heated up again, peaking at US$1,900 per ounce in 2011, followed by a long period of middling prices until more recently, when things went into overdrive.
"For a while, I and others were in the wilderness," Ing said. "We've always said gold is a hedge against uncertainty, against inflation. It's a barometer of investor uncertainty. For a while I've been writing that and now others have adopted it."
He predicts gold will run even higher in 2026, suggesting a 20% rise to US$6,000 per ounce is reasonable by year-end, with a combination of rising geopolitical tensions, rising United States debt levels, central banks diversifying foreign asset reserves by purchasing gold, and stock market uncertainty driving prices upward.
Gold's price rise has also finally spilled over into the gold mining sector in particular and the mining sector in general.
In 2025 mining companies on the Toronto Stock Exchange and TSX Venture Exchange turned in their best performance in a decade, raising $16 billion in equity capital, up 60% from the $10 billion raised in 2024. It also accounted for about 48% of the $33 billion in total raised by all listed companies in 2025. But that's still below the $22 billion the mining sector raised in 2009.
Numerous commodities have caught fire, but the mining sector is being dominated by about 800 gold-, silver-, and copper-focused companies, which accounted for $13 billion of the equity capital raised in 2025, according to data from TMX Group of Cos., which owns the TSX.
Gold outpaced all the major asset classes in Canada, including technology stocks, according to Angelo Kourkakas, a senior global investment strategist at Edward D. Jones & Co.
He calculates gold rose 57% in Canadian dollars, compared to a 32% rise in the S&P/TSX composite and a 13% rise in the S&P 500.
The rapid pace and sustained rise in the price of gold have surprised even many gold miners, whose companies' profit margins are swelling. Many of them are now dusting off long-forgotten exploration projects that suddenly make economic sense at present gold prices.
"Two or three years ago I went into investor presentations and it was crickets," John Burzynski, who spent the past decade developing the Windfall gold mine in Quebec as chief executive of Osisko Mining Inc. "Now they're there. It's a whole audience everywhere you go."
Calls are being returned and Burzynski said he is suddenly seeing familiar faces in restaurants around Toronto's Bay Street.
"It used to be all the bitcoin guys and the cannabis guys and stuff," he said. "But it's nice; the business is back."
For those companies that bought gold mines or development projects recently, the timing could not have been better.
In September Toronto-based Carcetti Capital Corp. announced a deal to purchase the Hemlo mine in Ontario from Barrick Mining Corp. for up to US$1.1 billion when gold was still below US$3,700. The deal closed in late November, Carcetti changed its name to Hemlo Mining Corp., and about one month later gold's price had risen above US$5,000.
Jason Kosec, chief executive of Hemlo, said his team always had a view that gold would go up, just not as quickly as it has. In analyzing how much it could invest to purchase Hemlo, the company used a price of around US$3,200 per ounce for 2026, about 36% below the current spot price.
What's more, his team figured gold prices would gradually decline to US$2,610 by 2030. Now they're reconsidering.
"We always knew that gold would approach US$5,000, potentially US$10,000," Kosec said. "If you use the 1970s as an analogy, which I think were very similar times economically, it's not crazy to say gold's price is going to be US$10,000 by the end of the decade."
There are, of course, plenty of people counselling caution to anyone thinking about buying gold, even within the gold mining sector.
John Hathaway, a senior portfolio manager at Sprott Asset Management USA, said there are too many "Johnny-Come-Latelys" who bought gold when it surged and will be just as quick to sell it at the first hint of trouble.
"Everybody can talk about it and say, 'Central banks are buying it; geopolitical risk,' but most people have missed the trade and now you have to be careful," he said. "People getting in, if they don't have a long-term view, they're going to be shaken out."
Gold's surge to US$5,000 happened so quickly that most gold mining companies are still not using $5,000 per ounce pricing for internal planning purposes.
But assumptions about future gold prices are slowly inching up.
In December Toronto-based Kinross Gold Corp. increased its gold price assumptions to US$2,000 per ounce from US$1,600 when calculating its mineral reserve estimates.
Such assumptions are critical because a higher gold price makes more material economic to mine and it can directly affect company valuations.
In general, the industry uses a three-year average of gold prices, so that number is unlikely to shift too rapidly. But companies are using higher gold prices in other places as a reference point for investors.
For example, Kinross in January announced construction decisions on three projects, citing an internal rate of return of 59% that assumed a US$4,500 per ounce price.
"A lot of stars aligned on gold price this year," David Shaver, senior vice-president of investor relations at Kinross, said. "Geopolitical events and turmoil -- we're not hoping for that, but it does affect the gold price and there are reasons for that to continue, so we remain bullish on the gold price."
Ammar Al-Joundi, chief executive of Toronto-based Agnico Eagle Mines Ltd., said one of the things that makes gold prices difficult to predict is the unusual supply and demand dynamic.
Unlike many other commodities, such as, say, oil, gold is not consumed and it doesn't deteriorate, he said, which means pretty much all the gold that's ever been produced is still around.
"From a commodities side of things, it's difficult to predict," he said.
But the biggest believers see gold prices on an inevitable climb upwards.
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Harvey Organ, a retired pharmacist in Toronto, has spent more than two decades dutifully blogging and reporting on gold trading activity on the Commodity Exchange Inc. (Comex), where investors and speculators can buy or sell derivatives such as future contracts to bet on the price of gold.
He said he has found evidence that banks, including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, are using Comex to artificially depress gold prices.
"I would say with the amount of debt the U.S. has, US$10,000 an ounce, that's where the gold price belongs," he said.
Organ said he sees a growing trend of Comex investors asking for physical delivery of gold rather than settling contracts through fiat currency -- paper money.
In the meantime, as the gap between physical gold deliveries and available gold supply grows larger, Organ said he is able to calculate the directional price of gold.
"The stair-step of gold leads me to believe we'll be at US$6,000 by December, and then it'll go to US$8,000 and then US$10,000," he said.
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