https://www.thesudburystar.com/
We must provide the West with sustainably sourced critical minerals to stop global warming
In 2014, after spending about $550 million to buy, further explore and develop their Ring of Fire properties, Cliffs Natural Resources left the province in disgust due to the inability of both levels of government to build a road into the camp.
They sold their project at a steep discount to Noront Exploration (now Ring of Fire Metals) for around $27 million. Have the federal and provincial ministries of environment not learned a painful lesson from that ordeal? We got a second chance when Wyloo Metals – which has enormous financial clout — bought Noront and yet I fear we are blowing it again.
We are not building the pyramids of Giza or the Panama Canal. It’s a simple, industrial road, roughly 350 km in length, and a couple of bridges. It took Canada less than five years, from 1880 to 1885, to build the longest railroad in the world at the time, from Ontario to Vancouver, through some of the harshest geography on the planet – the rocky mountains of British Columbia.
It was an astonishing engineering feat for a small country of roughly 4.5 million people. Our ancestors must be spinning in their collective graves at the site of a rich and modern G-7 country with almost 40 million people not being capable of building a short gravel road.
During the Second World War, Canada and the United States built the 2,600-km Alaska highway, from Dawson Creek, B.C., to Delta Junction, Alaska, in around eight months. We are in a climate change emergency. Both Trudeau and Biden have demanded that by 2035, all automobiles must be electric. That is only 12 years away.
For the rest of this article: https://www.thesudburystar.com/news/local-news/accent-ontario-has-moral-obligation-to-develop-ring-of-fire