Method

What Kestrel forecasts

When a company applies for a mining permit, the question everyone around it needs answered is when the regulator will decide. Kestrel forecasts that date.

It does not forecast whether the permit will be granted. In these registers outright refusals are rare, so a refusal call carries almost no information, while the timing varies from weeks to years and is what changes a decision anyone is actually making.

What a forecast is

For every application, a range of dates and a middle estimate.

The range is an 80% credible interval, which means the model puts an eight-in-ten chance on the decision landing between those two dates. It is a claim that can be wrong, and the Track record tab is where you find out how often it has been: if the ranges are honest, about eight in every ten decided files should land inside.

A range is not a promise, and a wide range is not a hedge. Where the model is genuinely uncertain the range is wide, and saying so is more useful than a confident date that is wrong.

Where the numbers come from

A survival model fitted on the register's own history: every application that register has decided, how long each took, and the recorded facts about it. The model learns the shape of the wait and how named factors move it, then applies that to files still pending.

The factors are things the register publishes: how long a file has already been waiting, whether the registry has put it on hold, what the office's recent throughput has been, and which rules were in force when it was applied for. There is no private information in a forecast, and nothing comes from talking to a regulator or a company.

The two clocks

A file has been waiting since the day it was applied for. A forecast measures from the Friday the file entered our coverage. These are different numbers and the site labels both, because a file pending for four years can still be forecast to be decided next month.

Held files

Held means the registry has stopped the clock on a file. In Ontario exploration permits that is almost always consultation with an Indigenous nation.

Kestrel forecasts the timing consequence of a hold and says nothing else about it. Nothing on this site is a claim about whether a consultation is adequate, how it should resolve, or what any party should do. Held and unheld files are counted and reported separately and never averaged together, because a paused clock and a running one do not average into anything.

Which date we forecast

The date on this site is the day a decision becomes public, not the day the ministry made it.

For an Ontario exploration permit, the fact anyone outside the ministry can actually observe is the day the Environmental Registry posts the decision notice. That is the date Kestrel forecasts and the date it is graded against.

Usually the two are the same. Across the 1,557 decided exploration permits whose notice states the ministry's own issue date, the register posted a median of one day later, and within a week for nine in ten. But the tail is long and it is not rare enough to ignore: about three in every hundred were posted more than six months after the ministry issued the permit, about two in a hundred more than a year, and the slowest 1,301 days. The backlog clears in bursts rather than steadily.

We grade against the posting date because it is the first day the decision exists for anyone but the ministry, and because nothing visible at the time of a forecast distinguishes a file that is genuinely still pending from one already decided and not yet posted. A forecast of the ministry's private decision date would be a claim we could not check and you could not use.

How grading works

Every file is graded against the first range published for it, and against the day its decision was posted to the register. When a file enters coverage it gets a range, and that is the range it is scored against, however many times it is forecast afterwards.

The alternative, scoring the last forecast before the decision landed, sounds equivalent and is not. A file about to be decided is always being forecast from a few days out, so a last-forecast record measures how close to the end the forecaster was standing rather than how good the forecast was.

A forecast is never revised. It is frozen in version control on the day it is published. A new week's forecast is a new commitment beside the old one, not a replacement for it.

Nothing is removed for scoring badly. A forecast leaves the record only when it was produced with a defect that can be demonstrated without reference to how it scored, and the withdrawal is published with its reason.

Exclusions are stated. A file that cannot be graded is listed with the reason. The commonest is a decision the register published weeks after it was made, so the file was still showing as pending when it was forecast: no forward-looking range can contain a decision already made.

No accuracy percentage until 50 graded files. On a handful of files a percentage reads as a verdict, and a short record is not one in either direction. Below 50 the tally is published instead. The rule was fixed before any permit type came close to meeting it and it applies whether the count flatters us or not.

What this record is, and what it is not

It began on Aug 14, 2026. Before that date Kestrel kept a prediction record that it found could not be trusted, and reset it. Nothing from before that date is pooled with the numbers on this site.

The record is therefore short, and the site says so everywhere rather than dressing it up. One permit type is admitted today. Five were revoked on Aug 13, 2026 because they had been promoted through a review the principal judged inadequate; those revocations are on the Changelog with their reasons.

Retrospective tests against history never appear here and are never pooled with live forecasts. A model that was only ever run backwards over data it was fitted on has proved nothing.

Who

Kestrel Economics is David, an economist working on regulatory timing. The firm builds its own data capture from public registers, fits its own models, and publishes its record whether or not the record is flattering, because a forecaster whose record is not public is not making forecasts.

Not advice

Nothing on this site is legal, financial or investment advice. It is a published estimate of when a public body will decide a matter already before it.