Ontario Premier Doug Ford is absolutely right in emphasizing the importance for his province and for Canada of the Ring of Fire mining region approximately 500 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay. It is now generally recognized throughout the western world that we have been imprudent in allowing ourselves to become excessively dependent on China as a source of strategic minerals. This not only creates a vulnerability of supply in the not unlikely case of substantial strategic disagreements with the government of that country, but also in many areas enables China to manipulate the current price of these minerals by increasing or decreasing production in a way that can make private-sector development of alternate sources commercially inadvisable. Read More