Michele Beacom - 04 February 2025

Dany Bélanger and Mélanie LaRoche-Boisvert talk about what to expect at CIM’s premier conference

CIM CONNECT 2025, CIM’s annual convention, being held this year in Montreal from May 4 to 7, will offer three days of immersive learning and knowledge sharing, enhanced by professional development courses preceding the convention. CIM Magazine spoke with Convention Chair Dany Bélanger and Mélanie LaRoche-Boisvert, who is Technical Program Co-Chair with Matthew Stewart, about the experience at this year’s CIM CONNECT conference.

CIM: The theme of this year’s conference is “Minerals, Innovation & the Energy Transition.” What can attendees expect to learn at CIM CONNECT 2025?

Bélanger: We have over 275 technical papers that talk to that theme. The convention is going to be very much about learning what the energy transition is, and where we are. We’re kind of at the infancy stage right now. It’s a great thing for the politicians to say, but what does it mean practically? So here we’re going to try to define and educate people on the energy transition.

LaRoche-Boisvert: I think the main thing that they can expect to learn at the conference is how miners, suppliers and technology companies are working towards innovation and the energy transition. So, how are they innovating and how are they applying innovations, maybe from other industries, to the mining industry, and how are they contributing to the energy transition as a whole?

What do you think will be the highlight of this year’s conference?

LaRoche-Boisvert: I think the highlight of this year’s conference will be the sheer variety of topics being covered and the innovations that people will be presenting. We have a big focus on not only best practices in the industry, but innovations in the industry as well, so that we can see what they’re doing well and where they want to go by applying these new technologies or new processes and procedures to do better in the future. We also have added quite a few different sub-topics that we haven’t seen before at CIM conferences, so that should bring new attention or new points of view to the audience as well.

Bélanger: I hope the highlight is that people come out of this conference saying that they’ve received value for their investment of time and money, and that this conference clarified things around innovation and the energy transition. I’m hoping people get out of this convention saying, “I really learned something different here. I picked up something I can bring back to my business and apply it.”

Can you give us a sneak preview of innovations and new things to expect this year?

Bélanger: A new thing we are doing this year is introducing the Innovation Exchange speaker series. We’ll have six sessions in the technical program where, instead of people presenting a paper, we’ll have, for example, operators presenting what they’re doing at their mining projects and how it relates to innovation and the energy transition.

LaRoche-Boisvert: We’ll also have groups from outside of mining presenting at the Innovation Exchange sessions. These sessions will be looking beyond our industry and asking, where else can we find innovations? Because often we are preaching to the choir. We need to bring more people from outside of the industry, and we need to take mining to outside industries and exchange ideas.

Why is CIM CONNECT the premier event for the mining industry?

Bélanger: There are a lot of mining-related conferences out there, but ours is about people actually mining. You’ve got PDAC, where the financing and the project assessment are at. But CIM CONNECT, to me, is where the rubber meets the road. This is the place for mining operators and engineers, from the time a mine is born to the end of its life.

LaRoche-Boisvert: CIM CONNECT brings together the operators, the suppliers, the innovators of the mining industry together in one place to focus on actually mining. We’re not talking about staking claims or doing exploration work. We’re talking about mines that will be built as well as operating mines, which is what I think differentiates CIM CONNECT from other conferences.

Bélanger: Another thing I think differentiates our convention is that CIM is a bilingual institute, and our head office is in Montreal. I understand that roughly 30 per cent of Canadian miners are francophone, so we have to be more sensitive as an association to make sure language is not a barrier for them to participate. This year at the conference we will have for the first time artificial intelligence-powered simultaneous translation of all the technical sessions. That’s very exciting!