OPINION: End game nears in the battle for Canada’s last diversified mining giant, and the odds do not look good for the pursuer – by Eric Reguly (Globe and Mail – June 2, 2023)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

The Phoney War was the period early in the Second World War, when there were few battles on the Western Front. The relative calm ended when Germany invaded France in the spring of 1940.

The battle for Teck Resources, Canada’s biggest diversified mining company, is definitely in the phoney war stage. After a raucous start, a whole lot of nothing has happened for weeks in the campaign that will ultimately determine the shape of Canada’s base metals industry. There are signs that a renewed assault on Teck could start soon, one that will make or break the effort by Switzerland’s Glencore to make Teck its own as it strives to become one of the world’s top producers of the metals needed to propel the green energy revolution.

It may not work in Glencore’s favour. There are few signs that Norman B. Keevil, the Teck chairman emeritus who controls the supervoting Class A shares with ally Sumitomo of Japan, is willing to hand his broken-fingernail, ore-body finding legacy to Glencore.

And there are a lot of signs that Ottawa would not approve the takeover of one of the few big domestic mining players left standing after almost two decades of foreign takeovers that hollowed out the Canadian mining industry.

For the rest of this column: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-end-game-nears-in-the-battle-for-canadas-last-diversified-mining-giant/