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by Will Purcell

The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Monday was a weak 70-116-124 as the TSX Venture Exchange rose two points to 550. Dermot Desmond and Mark Wall's Mountain Province Diamonds Inc. (MPVD) lost one cent to 24 cents on 99,000 shares. The company has found some additional good cheer, as it has added more carats to its 2024 guidance for its 49-per-cent-owned Gahcho Kue mine in the Northwest Territories.

The key guidance for a diamond mine is the annual carat count, of course, and Mountain Province and its majority co-venturer, De Beers Canada, have been beavering away on their mine plan to smooth out production at Gahcho Kue. Their long-range production forecasts, you see, had been calling for a bleak 2024 since the latest mine plan was rolled out two years ago.

Gahcho Kue produced 5.55 million carats in 2022 and nearly the same amount in 2023, both figures hampered by processing plant issues, and on one occasion because of COVID-19. COVID was a bigger factor in 2021, when the mine managed 6.2 million carats. COVID was of course a huge problem in 2020, but Gahcho Kue produced 6.5 million carats, as De Beers kept the mine running throughout the crisis despite the market for rough diamonds having dried up.

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