The Royal Canadian Mint Expanded Its Gold Programme. What Do Investors Actually Own?

The Royal Canadian Mint sold 501,175 more gold exchange-traded receipts on 24 September 2026 at C$65.82 each, C$63.01 of which went into gold. Holders own the metal directly, but it is stored unallocated and the Mint expects to use some or all of it in its refining and coin-making; the Crown stands behind the Mint’s obligations, not the price paid. A cash redemption pays 95% of the lower of market price and gold value, and redeeming for metal takes at least 10,000 receipts.

Published October 2, 2026 · Updated October 4, 2026 · 16 min read

Key Takeaways

• The Royal Canadian Mint closed a follow-on offering of 501,175 gold exchange-traded receipts (TSX: MNT and MNT.U) on 24 September 2026 at C$65.82 each, for gross proceeds of C$32,987,338.50. Of each C$65.82, C$63.01 was applied to buying gold; the other C$2.81, about 4.3%, paid the costs of the offering.
• A receipt is a direct co-ownership interest in gold — 0.0103490 of a fine troy ounce on 24 September 2026 — not a share in the Mint or a unit of a fund. The gold is stored unallocated, and the Mint expects to use some or all of it in refining and coin-making while keeping at least as much unallocated gold on hand as holders own.
• The receipts are obligations of the Crown, so a holder can enforce a redemption against the Government of Canada — but holders have no recourse to the Mint or the government for any loss on the investment. The offering was priced at a gold price of US$4,318.10; a week later the Mint’s own valuation page was using US$4,180.79.
• The 0.35% annual service fee is paid in gold, not cash. The Mint’s own table shows the metal behind one receipt falling from 0.0103490 ounces to 0.0099926 after ten years and 0.0093166 after thirty if the rate is unchanged.
• The exits are not equivalent. A cash redemption pays 95% of the lower of a five-day average market price and net asset value; a physical redemption needs at least 10,000 receipts — about 103.49 ounces, or C$658,200 at the offering price — plus fabrication and carrier costs. On 21 September 2026 the receipts closed at C$68.30 against a net asset value of C$63.02, a premium of 8.4%.

On 24 September 2026 the Royal Canadian Mint closed a follow-on offering of 501,175 gold exchange-traded receipts at C$65.82 each, for gross proceeds of C$32,987,338.50 — about C$33 million. It was the third follow-on offering in just over a year, after 833,200 receipts in September 2025 and 638,583 in February 2026; before those, the programme had issued nothing since 2013. The new receipts are identical to the ones already trading under the Mint’s Canadian Gold Reserves programme, which began in 2011, so this is an expansion and not a new product. They trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange as MNT in Canadian dollars and MNT.U in US dollars. Amounts in this article are Canadian dollars unless marked US$, gold is measured in fine troy ounces, and the information is as of 30 September 2026.

C$33.0 million Gross proceeds of the Royal Canadian Mint’s follow-on offering of gold exchange-traded receipts, closed 24 September 2026. 501,175 receipts at C$65.82 each — C$32,987,338.50. Of that, C$31,578,985.50, or C$63.01 a receipt, was applied to buying 5,186.661 fine troy ounces of gold. The rest paid the underwriters, the gold purchasing agent and the other costs of the offering.

That raises a question for anyone comparing ways to own gold: what does an investment held at the Royal Canadian Mint actually give you? The answer is more specific than either “a gold ETF” or “my own bars in a vault”. It turns on things the offering documents spell out and a product label does not: who owns the metal, how it is stored and used, what the Crown’s backing covers, what the fee is paid in, and what it costs to get metal or money back.

What does a receipt holder actually own?

A holder of the Mint’s exchange-traded receipts, or ETRs, owns a proportionate share of gold bullion held in the Mint’s custody in Ottawa — not shares in the Mint, and not units of a fund or trust. The certificate describes each ETR as an “equal undivided direct legal and beneficial interest” in the programme’s gold, held with the other holders as co-owners in proportion to the receipts each one owns, and states that it does not make its holder a shareholder of the Mint. The Information Statement adds that the gold “is legally and beneficially owned by the ETR Holders and not by the Mint”, and that at no time will the Mint hold legal title to it. The programme’s website draws the same line against other products: “We do not offer units or shares in a trust, Exchange Traded Fund (ETF), or mutual fund.”

Two things follow. An investor is not buying a stake in the Mint’s earnings or its coin business: the Mint is a Crown corporation whose shares are held in trust for the Crown by the Minister of Finance, and its Act does not allow it to issue shares to the public. And the name Canadian Gold Reserves is not an announcement that Canada is rebuilding its official gold reserves. The gold belongs to the receipt holders. On 24 September one receipt represented 0.0103490 of a fine troy ounce. On 29 September the Mint’s website showed 18,716,872 receipts outstanding and a programme net asset value of about C$1.15 billion — by our arithmetic roughly 193,700 ounces, or about six tonnes, of gold.

Does direct ownership mean individually allocated bars?

No. The gold behind the receipts is stored on an unallocated basis: a holder’s metal is not held separately from the other unallocated gold at the Mint, including the gold behind other receipts, and no bar is identified to any holder. The documents go further. In the ordinary course of its refining and coin-manufacturing business the Mint uses unallocated gold that it holds for third parties, and it “expects to do the same with some or all of the gold bullion evidenced by the ETRs”. The undertaking that goes with this is that the Mint at all times keeps at its facility unallocated gold equal to or greater than the total owned by ETR holders.

That is a different arrangement from one in which numbered bars are set aside for an investor and left untouched — something the Mint says it does provide to “certain gold customers on a fully allocated basis”. It does not follow that the gold is imaginary, or that the required backing is missing. It does mean that three questions the word “ownership” tends to bundle together have separate answers here: who owns the metal (the holders), whether it is segregated (no), and whether the custodian may use it (yes, within a stated limit).

It is also a different arrangement from the unallocated account of the London bullion market, which is how we have used the word elsewhere. There, as we set out in our guide to storing physical gold and in our article on where central banks keep their gold, an unallocated balance is a claim on the provider: the LBMA’s guide to the London market says the account holder “has a contractual claim against the clearer – rather than a specific bar”, and so carries credit exposure to the institution. The Mint’s documents use the same word for pooled storage of metal that the holders themselves own. Commentators who stress physical ownership, George Gammon among them, treat the line between allocated metal and an unallocated claim as the one that matters most under stress. The Mint’s programme shows why the adjective alone does not settle it. The terms do.

Sources for the comparison: the LBMA’s guide for the first two columns, which describe general market arrangements rather than any particular contract, and the Mint’s Information Statement and certificate for the third. The Information Statement adds a qualification about verification. Unallocated gold in the Mint’s care, including that of ETR holders, “is not held separately or audited or inspected on a stand-alone basis”. That is narrower than saying the Mint is unaudited — the Auditor General of Canada audits its financial statements — but there is no separate inspection of the receipts’ gold as a distinct holding. Nor are those financial statements filed on SEDAR+, the securities regulators’ public filing system: Ontario Securities Commission orders exempt the Mint from the prospectus requirement and from many of the continuous-disclosure rules that apply to other listed issuers. The same passage says that if unallocated gold suffered a loss that could not be compensated, every owner of it, ETR holders and others alike, would share the loss pro rata.

Letting a custodian use metal within a stated limit is one arrangement; lending it out is another. Under a lease, bullion passes to a borrower for a set term and is owed back as equivalent metal, not as the same bars. What that changes for the owner is the subject of our article on Tether’s bullion lending.

Does the government’s backing guarantee the investment?

No. What the Crown stands behind is the Mint’s obligations under the receipts, not the price an investor paid. The Mint is an agent of the Crown, and the documents state that, subject to the terms of the receipts, they are direct unconditional obligations of the Mint and therefore of the Crown, backed by the full faith and credit of the Government of Canada. If the Mint failed to make gold or cash available on a redemption, holders would be entitled to enforce their rights against the government.

The same documents are just as plain about what that does not cover. Holders “will have no recourse to the Mint or the Government of Canada for any loss on their investment”, and an investor “could lose all or a significant portion” of it: the receipts follow the price of gold, less fees. The price does not wait. The offering was priced on 22 September at a gold price of US$4,318.10 an ounce; a week later, on 29 September, the Mint’s valuation page was using US$4,180.79, about 3% lower.

Responsibility for the metal has limits too. The Mint bears the risk of physical loss or damage while the gold is in its care, except where the cause is one of the “Excluded Events” beyond its reasonable control — the list includes acts of God, war, terrorism, government orders and the malicious use of computer systems — and those losses fall on the holders as owners. The backing also depends on the Mint remaining a Crown corporation: the Information Statement says that if it were privatised, its obligations “would no longer generally constitute unconditional obligations of the Government of Canada”. The distinction throughout is between an obligation and an outcome. Knowing who stands behind the first does not remove the need to assess the second.

How is the 0.35% service fee paid?

In gold. The Mint charges 0.35% a year of the gold behind each receipt, accrued daily and collected on the 15th of each month by withdrawing metal from the pool. No invoice arrives and the number of receipts in an account does not change; what changes is the entitlement per receipt. On 24 September 2026 it was 0.0103490 of an ounce. The Mint’s own table, which assumes the rate stays at 0.35%, puts it at 0.0101692 after five years, 0.0099926 after ten and 0.0093166 after thirty. The rate is not fixed: the Mint may vary it on at least 90 days’ notice, and says an increase needs the approval of its independent directors.

What did buyers in the offering pay for?

Not all of the C$33.0 million became gold. The Information Statement sets the issue price as the value of the gold behind one receipt at the spot price on the pricing date, plus the costs of the offering spread across the receipts sold. Of each C$65.82, C$63.01 was applied to buying gold. The underwriters received 2.90% of the gross proceeds; National Bank of Canada, which bought the gold as purchasing agent, received a fee of 0.83% of the purchase price; and other expenses took 0.57%. Those costs — C$2.81 a receipt, about 4.3% of the price — were paid by buyers in the offering. They are not a charge on someone buying existing receipts on the exchange.

Can the exchange price differ from the gold value?

Yes, and the Mint publishes by how much. Net asset value per receipt is the gold entitlement multiplied by a daily gold price. On 21 September 2026, the last trading day before the offering was priced, that value was C$63.02 and the receipts closed on the Toronto Stock Exchange at C$68.30 — 8.4% above it, by our arithmetic. The new receipts were then sold at C$65.82: above the value of the gold, because the price included the offering’s costs, and below the market price. The Information Statement says follow-on offerings are usually priced below the trading price, and that this may lower the trading price afterwards.

8.4% Premium of the last closing price (C$68.30) over net asset value (C$63.02) on 21 September 2026 — our arithmetic on two figures in the Mint’s Information Statement. The US-dollar line closed at US$48.24 against a net asset value of US$44.95, a premium of 7.3%. From the programme’s start to 31 August 2026, the Mint reports, the receipts traded between 6.1% below and 19.7% above net asset value in Canadian dollars, and 0.141% above on average.

The gap moves, in both directions. Over the twelve months before the offering the monthly average ran from 4.6% above net asset value in September 2025 to 2.8% below it in June 2026.

Source: Royal Canadian Mint, Information Statement of 22 September 2026, “Trading Price and Volume” — the average differential between the trading price and net asset value in each month. A buyer who pays a premium that later disappears loses that amount even if the gold price does not move, and a discount is not a promise that the market will close it. Deciding to hold gold and deciding what price to pay for a particular wrapper are separate decisions — the distinction between metal, flows and valuation at the centre of our review of August’s record fund flows, and one that applies equally to the closed-end trusts described in the physical-versus-paper section of our Learning Academy.

The two tickers need the same care. MNT and MNT.U are the same receipt quoted in two currencies, and neither is currency-hedged. The Mint values each receipt in US dollars, as the gold entitlement times a US-dollar gold price, and converts that at the Bank of Canada’s rate for the Canadian-dollar figure, so for a Canadian holder the value of either line moves with both the gold price and the exchange rate. A US-dollar symbol does not make the receipts available to US investors either: the Information Statement says they have not been registered under the US Securities Act of 1933 and may not be offered or sold in the United States, or to US persons, without registration or an exemption.

What is the difference between selling and redeeming?

Selling on the exchange and redeeming with the Mint are different transactions at different prices. A sale on the exchange takes the market price, through a broker, on any trading day. A redemption is a request to the Mint, processed once a month on the 15th. It must reach the transfer agent by 5 p.m. Toronto time on the fifth business day before that date, it cannot be withdrawn once given, and the price is set on the redemption date — so the holder carries any move in the gold price or the trading price in between.

A cash redemption does not pay the value of the gold. It pays 95% of the lower of two numbers: the volume-weighted average price of the receipts on the exchange over the five trading days ending on the redemption date, and their net asset value on that date. There is no minimum size and no separate fee, but the Mint keeps the other 5%, and its own risk disclosure says that redeeming for cash “may yield a lesser amount than selling the ETRs on the TSX”. That 5% belongs to this route only. It is not a charge on an ordinary exchange sale.

A redemption for metal has a floor of 10,000 receipts. At the 24 September entitlement that is about 103.49 ounces, and at the offering price it cost C$658,200 — calculations on those dated figures, not a current quotation, and not a minimum for buying receipts on the exchange. The gold comes as one-ounce Gold Maple Leaf coins in lots of ten, kilobars, or London Good Delivery bars of 350 to 430 ounces, and any remainder under ten ounces is paid in cash. The fee schedule adds C$100 per request and a fabrication charge that depends on the product: 5% of the gold price for Maple Leaf coins, US$15 an ounce for kilobars, and US$1 an ounce for the first 10,000 ounces of large bars. The holder must also hire and pay an armoured carrier, and the Mint’s responsibility for the metal ends when the carrier takes it. What a retail buyer pays a dealer over spot for the same coin is the subject of our guide to bullion premiums and spreads.

Within a physical redemption the holder can instead direct the Mint to sell the gold — a “facilitated sale”, carried out in US dollars at the London afternoon gold price two business days after the redemption date. It is not the cash-redemption formula, and it is not free: the physical-redemption fees still apply, plus 0.13% of the proceeds and applicable taxes, with a minimum of US$5,000. On a minimum-sized redemption it is the minimum that counts. At the US$4,318.10 gold price used to price the offering, 103.49 ounces is worth about US$446,900, of which US$5,000 is about 1.1% — our arithmetic, not the Mint’s.

One more condition sits behind every redemption. The certificate lets the Mint suspend redemptions, postpone payment or delivery, or substitute a different product for any period in which it determines that conditions make the fabrication, valuation or sale of gold impractical, and its determination is conclusive. A suspension cancels pending requests, and one lasting 90 days is among the events that allow the Mint to end the programme, in which case holders are paid in US dollars at net asset value less termination costs. “Redeemable” describes several routes, each with its own price and its own conditions.

Can the receipts be held in a TFSA or an RRSP?

The Mint’s own counsel says yes. In the opinion of Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP, printed in the Information Statement, the receipts are qualified investments for registered retirement, education, disability, profit-sharing and first-home savings plans and for tax-free savings accounts — RRSPs, RRIFs, RESPs, RDSPs, DPSPs, FHSAs and TFSAs — provided they are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. The same page warns that gold received by such a plan on a physical redemption may not itself be a qualified investment, because bullion generally qualifies only when the plan acquires it directly from its refiner or from a regulated financial institution. Eligibility to hold a receipt and eligibility to hold what it redeems into are separate questions, which is a reason to check with the plan’s administrator before redeeming inside one. The wider rules for metals in registered accounts are in the holding-structures section of our Learning Academy.

In a taxable account the fee has a consequence that is easy to miss. The Information Statement’s tax summary treats each reduction of gold to pay the service fee as a disposition of that gold at its market value — a small gain or loss each time — and says the fee itself “may not be deductible”. It also records the Canada Revenue Agency’s published position that gold bullion and gold certificates are identical property, a position it says may apply to the receipts, in which case physical gold a holder owns elsewhere could enter the same cost average. How that average works is set out on our Canadian capital-gains page. The summary is the issuer’s general description for Canadian residents, not tax advice.

What should a precious-metals investor take from this?

The choice is not simply between “real gold” and “paper gold”. That shorthand hides more than it explains. The receipts are owned metal that the custodian may use, an obligation of the Crown that does not protect the price paid, and a redeemable instrument whose cash route keeps 5% and whose metal route starts at 10,000 receipts. Each of those is stated in the documents, and none of them is visible in the ticker.

The useful questions are the ones those documents answer: whether the structure serves the purpose the holding is meant to serve, what the holder has permitted the custodian to do, what stands behind access to the metal, and what it costs to change or end the arrangement. For someone whose aim is personal possession, the practical path to possession matters more than the existence of a redemption feature. For someone whose aim is exchange-traded exposure, the price paid relative to net asset value, the custody terms and the full cost of getting in and out belong in one comparison, alongside the funds and trusts we set out in physical gold versus gold ETFs.

Choosing an ownership vehicle follows from a portfolio’s objective. A new offering is not, by itself, a reason to hold more gold than that objective calls for; how that amount is set is the subject of the allocation section of our Learning Academy.

The Bigger Picture

The Mint’s programme is a useful specimen because its documents are unusually explicit. Ownership, segregation, permitted use, the scope of a guarantee and the price of an exit are each a separate term, written down, and each can be read before a single receipt is bought. Most ownership structures bundle the same terms under one reassuring adjective — “physical”, “allocated”, “backed”. Pulling them apart is the same exercise for a vault account, a fund or a token.

Ownership, segregation and permission to use the metal are three separate questions. The documents answer them. The label does not.

Sources and Methodology

This article rests on the Royal Canadian Mint’s own documents: the Information Statement for the offering dated 22 September 2026, the executed Gold ETR Certificate No. 006 dated 24 September 2026, the “Redemption of ETRs” terms, the releases of 21, 22 and 24 September 2026 announcing, pricing and closing the offering, and the programme website, read on 30 September 2026. The offering’s terms and costs, the ownership and custody provisions, the Crown obligation and its limits, the service fee and the projected entitlement, the redemption formula, fees and conditions, prior offerings, the closing prices and net asset values for 21 September, the monthly and historical differentials to net asset value, the tax summary and counsel’s opinion are as printed in those documents; the number of receipts outstanding, the programme’s net asset value and the gold price for 29 September are from the programme’s net-asset-value page. The Information Statement gives the average differential since inception as 0.141% in three places, with an end date and a currency, and as 0.172% once, with neither; we use the former. Where the programme’s web pages and its offering documents differ, we follow the documents. The following are our own arithmetic on the Mint’s figures and are identified as such in the text: about 193,700 ounces and six tonnes (18,716,872 receipts at 0.0103482 ounces); 103.49 ounces and C$658,200 for 10,000 receipts; the premiums of 8.4% and 7.3% on 21 September; offering costs of C$2.81 a receipt, or about 4.3%, and the 95.73% and 0.79% shares of gross proceeds; the fall of about 3% in the gold price between 22 and 29 September; and the US$446,900 value and 1.1% fee for a minimum-sized facilitated sale at US$4,318.10 an ounce. The description of a London unallocated account follows the LBMA’s guide to the London market. We did not inspect any gold, test the Mint’s compliance with its custody undertaking, or form a legal view on recovery in a dispute. Information is as of 30 September 2026.

Conflicts of interest, stated plainly. The Royal Canadian Mint is at once the issuer and seller of the receipts, the custodian and user of the gold, the recipient of the service and redemption fees and the calculator of net asset value, and it is the source of every term quoted here. The opinion on registered plans is from the Mint’s own counsel. Six of the banks whose dealers underwrote the offering have custody, trading, refining or leasing arrangements with the Mint, and one of them, National Bank of Canada, was paid to buy the gold. The LBMA is the trade association of the London bullion market, whose members operate the accounts its guide describes. George Gammon publishes investment commentary and is cited for a documented view, not for any figure. GoldSilverPortfolio may earn a commission through two links elsewhere on this site: an affiliate link to SilverGoldBull, a bullion dealer, and a referral link to Wealthsimple, a brokerage. Both bear on this subject, because a dealer sells the physical alternative to a receipt and exchange-listed receipts are bought through a brokerage account. GoldSilverPortfolio has no affiliate or commission arrangement with the Royal Canadian Mint. No receipt, fund, dealer or broker mentioned here is recommended.

Primary sources

• Royal Canadian Mint — Information Statement, Canadian Gold Reserves Program, 22 September 2026: the issue of 501,175 ETRs at C$65.82; the underwriters’ fee, gold purchase fee, other expenses and net proceeds of C$31,578,985.50; 5,186.661 fine troy ounces acquired; ownership, unallocated custody and use of the gold; the Crown obligation, excluded events and risk factors; the service fee and the entitlement table; redemption terms, fees and suspension; trading prices, net asset values and differentials; prior offerings and the 70,000,000-receipt cap; the tax summary and counsel’s opinion on registered plans
• Royal Canadian Mint — Gold ETR Certificate No. 006, 24 September 2026: 501,175 receipts evidencing 5,186.661 fine troy ounces; co-ownership as tenants in common and no shareholder status; sections 4 to 9 on custody, the service fee, redemption and suspension; Appendix A, the fee schedule
• Royal Canadian Mint — “Redemption of ETRs”, an undated programme document: the monthly redemption date, the 95% cash-redemption formula, the 10,000-receipt minimum and the facilitated sale
• Royal Canadian Mint — “Royal Canadian Mint announces closing of follow-on offering of Gold Exchange-Traded Receipts”, 24 September 2026; “Royal Canadian Mint announces pricing of follow-on offering of Gold Exchange-Traded Receipts”, 22 September 2026; “Royal Canadian Mint Announces Follow-On Offering of Gold Exchange-Traded Receipts”, 21 September 2026
• Royal Canadian Mint — Canadian Gold Reserves programme website, read 30 September 2026: the programme description and frequently asked questions; the fee and redemption pages; and the net-asset-value page for 29 September 2026, showing 18,716,872 ETRs outstanding, an entitlement of 0.0103482 ounces, a gold price of US$4,180.79 and a programme net asset value of US$809,773,536, or C$1,148,905,753
• LBMA — “A Guide to the Loco London Precious Metals Market”, chapter 8, “Precious Metal Accounts”, and chapter 9, “Lending and Borrowing Metal”: allocated and unallocated accounts, and the lending of allocated metal