PDAC 2023: Focus on Ring of Fire overshadows ‘several other’ more advanced projects, says Wilkinson – by Naimul Karim (Financial Post – March 8, 2023)

https://financialpost.com/

‘Enormously bullish on the mining sector,’ natural resources minister tells conference

The fascination with the Ring of Fire region in northern Ontario is quite evident in the country’s business pages.

Few mining zones receive more press, even though no mine yet exists in the region 500 kilometres north of Thunder Bay. Ontario Premier Doug Ford is anxious to change that, asserting a number of times in the last few years that it was time to “hop on a bulldozer” and start building roads to what have been described as one of the “most promising” critical minerals deposits in Canada.

But that’s a sensitive subject, thanks to the region’s peatlands and resistance from certain Indigenous groups who worry about what development would do to their communities.

For Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson, a member of Parliament from British Columbia, the attention the Ring of Fire gets can cast a shadow on other Canadian mining projects that are closer to producing critical minerals such as lithium and copper that are needed to power the electric vehicle boom.

For the rest rest of this article: https://financialpost.com/commodities/mining/pdac-2023-ring-of-fire-copper-lithium-wilkinson