True Patriot Love - Canada's Ring Of Fire ft Stan Sudol

00:00:00.560 everything was sleepy then trump came back into power and then we started looking at

00:00:04.960 um critical mineral demands uh because of the transition to electricity uh even now uh power

00:00:14.320 uh battery systems all the ev systems yeah ev lithium we and then also remember much of the

00:00:20.960 electrical system in the united states was built during the 1950s eisenhower boom

00:00:25.840 nothing lasts forever you need to re-engineer all that and that's going to take a lot of

00:00:30.640 copper and other critical minerals hi thanks for joining us this is tpl media i'm mike uh

00:00:39.520 check out tplmedia.ca local because we likely have a local version of what we're doing here

00:00:45.440 uh ready for you there don't forget to subscribe tell a friend about it and oh for the love of pete

00:00:50.480 please subscribe to uh support the network let me read something to you the ring of fire

00:00:55.440 a massive 5,000-square-kilometer crescent of critical minerals

00:00:59.260 located in the James Bay lowlands of northern Ontario.

00:01:02.940 Well, it's transitioned from decades of speculative policy discussion

00:01:06.240 into an active, high-stakes infrastructure reality,

00:01:10.880 and I find the whole thing questionable.

00:01:14.700 And that's why joining us today, Stan Siddall,

00:01:17.760 who, by the way, is one of the leading minds

00:01:20.180 talking about mines in this country,

00:01:23.040 natural resources and such and I appreciate you you you join us often to talk about this and

00:01:29.420 straighten us out so thanks I appreciate it glad to be here glad to be here so let's start with

00:01:34.320 this now uh I see kind of first of all I'm your average Canadian and probably less educated than

00:01:40.440 most and probably less patient than most but I hear about the ring of fire ongoing and and

00:01:46.080 you know for you just said to me for the last 15 years we've debated roads up there

00:01:50.800 And now, right now, I see two major companies up there, Wailoo and Juno.

00:01:57.200 The Wailoo guys, I guess, are Australian and Juno, aptly named, Canadian.

00:02:02.240 On the board of directors, by the way, Ernie Eaves, former premier and former finance minister.

00:02:10.100 Somebody who might have seen a future in this during his time in politics.

00:02:15.160 can you give me stand an understanding of who these two companies are and what they're up to

00:02:22.400 right now uh up there uh and then we'll bring it back around to the overall what's going on up

00:02:27.840 there um wailu uh was the company that took over um norat which took over the old cliffs assets

00:02:35.480 okay so it's a little bit a little bit of a little uh soap opera mining wise over the past

00:02:40.800 uh 10 12 15 years um they have a a very good very rich uh nickel copper pgm which is platinum

00:02:50.820 group metal and cobalt mine um uh there's about right now they it's open at depth and right now

00:02:58.380 they estimate about 19 20 years of production but as you start digging you go deeper and

00:03:05.640 And as in Sudbury, where I'm from originally, a lot of the mines there, the deeper you go, the richer the material is.

00:03:13.500 Well, did Sudbury, for example, open on the basis of one ideal discovery and then future deposits were found there afterward?

00:03:22.940 Absolutely. Sudbury was just a mistake.

00:03:26.400 First of all, the railroad is what opened up Sudbury.

00:03:29.660 The railroad was supposed to go south of Ramsey Lake.

00:03:32.640 They made a mistake and they went north of Ramsey Lake.

00:03:35.640 My parents' house is actually quite close to where the railroad goes, actually, funny enough.

00:03:39.720 And they saw this weird rock, and they investigated it, and it became one of the first mines, Murray Mine.

00:03:46.700 And then, again, technology kind of came in, and you ended up seeing that mixing nickel with steel is one hell of a thing to put on your ships, okay?

00:03:57.600 The ordinance doesn't, it makes you almost like a tank on the water.

00:04:02.860 Right. And so they proved to the American military that this was really good stuff. And the American technical people figured how to separate the copper from the nickel easily. And that is how by 1901, I guess, Inco International Nickel was formed. And there was always a military component to the production of nickel because it was so important for military purposes in World War I, World War II, Korea.

00:04:31.400 But as they started developing the Sudbury Basin,

00:04:35.720 they kept on finding more and more nickel mines.

00:04:39.020 And it became, for the Western world,

00:04:41.720 and especially during World War II,

00:04:43.040 roughly 80%, 90% of nickel production

00:04:45.460 came out of the Sudbury Basin.

00:04:46.640 So now we take a look at the speculation

00:04:49.580 that's going on up there.

00:04:50.960 And Wailu, as you mentioned, I think he's an Australian.

00:04:54.100 Yes, it is.

00:04:55.120 Australian base company.

00:04:57.620 What is the difference between the strategies

00:04:59.700 of these two companies at the moment?

00:05:01.680 Is Wailu only here on the basis of one claim

00:05:04.580 and they're going for that claim

00:05:06.300 while Juno is out there really gobbling up as much?

00:05:10.960 3,200 kilometers of land rights, I've noticed, 0.99

00:05:14.320 for minerals is their mission.

00:05:16.400 Is that what you're noticing?

00:05:17.480 Is there a different mission

00:05:19.340 on the part of these two companies?

00:05:20.860 Well, with Wailu, they're doing their more exploration,

00:05:26.420 like internal exploration and their due diligence

00:05:29.560 on building a mine because they have that one mine they have about 30 35 percent of the claims

00:05:35.940 in the ring of fire juno has roughly 50 percent and then there's some various other smaller claims

00:05:41.520 but a lot of until trump came back into power it was kind of falling asleep because we weren't

00:05:49.680 making any progress on the on the roads that we needed because you can't develop a ring of fire

00:05:54.600 You can't develop a nickel copper mine in the ring of fire without roads.

00:06:00.000 Well, so interesting because that's always been the,

00:06:02.500 that's the number one discussion.

00:06:03.700 We need roads.

00:06:04.360 We need roads.

00:06:04.980 We need roads.

00:06:06.040 And it's funny because we were just sitting in the office here all chatting

00:06:09.400 and Paul turned around and said, okay, we'll build the roads.

00:06:12.280 What do we get?

00:06:13.460 Which is a great question, actually.

00:06:15.340 You had a great answer for it.

00:06:16.960 But let's talk about the roads and we'll get to that.

00:06:19.640 But let's talk about the roads and the challenges

00:06:21.400 that we're being told are there right now.

00:06:24.600 up against the importance of having them um okay first you're dealing with indigenous communities

00:06:31.140 uh traditional territory boundaries um a media that tends to be very left-leaning uh and there's

00:06:40.560 a bit of a illiteracy in my opinion on the left-wing media on a little bit of the history

00:06:46.760 and geography of the region all right so you've got this mixture and then public politicians tend

00:06:52.640 react to what's in the media yes that's true okay so you you which is the importance of having

00:06:59.040 educated reporters as opposed to stenographers uh but that seems to be not the pro the case in

00:07:04.480 say cbc thunder bay or the toronto star uh when it comes to indigenous and mining issues i'm just a

00:07:10.560 little bit peeved with both of these uh institutions but i i hear it yes but um um what what's happening

00:07:19.840 uh and then of course everything was sleepy then trump came back into power and then we started

00:07:25.440 looking at um critical mineral demands uh because of the transition to electricity uh even now uh

00:07:35.120 power uh battery systems all the ev systems yeah ev lithium we and then also remember much of the

00:07:42.480 electrical system in the united states was built during the 1950s eisenhower boom

00:07:47.360 nothing lasts forever you need to re-engineer all that and that's going to take a lot of copper and

00:07:52.720 other critical minerals uh and uh whereas china had their boom in the 2000s so they built a very

00:08:01.920 modern industrial electrical system uh while we were coasting our own so and we got like

00:08:08.960 lackadaisical and oh we'll let china do that let's let's let africa do it then all of a sudden

00:08:14.560 uh things have changed there's competition between america and china china knows that metal

00:08:21.200 security supply of metals is a weak spot for the americans trump has clued into this thank god

00:08:28.480 more intently more intently and now it is one of the primary issues of this administration is

00:08:35.120 building the minds of the critical minerals that we need conversely we're into this

00:08:39.760 free trade spat uh with the americans and one of the trump cards we have in this country is

00:08:47.980 our resources and critical minerals now i keep hearing that okay i keep hearing that okay

00:08:54.860 but i guess without roads we can't build the mines because i've been hearing about this

00:09:00.840 ring of fire you see and how much uh we have in the way of critical and valuable minerals

00:09:07.380 But then I see Australia setting up mines in a matter of a couple of years

00:09:11.600 and building mining towns in what seems like no time at all.

00:09:15.140 Now we've got one of them here.

00:09:16.380 I wonder if they'll do the same thing here.

00:09:18.220 But we seem to have been talking about the Ring of Fire since I had hair, Stan.

00:09:24.220 So I don't know how much.

00:09:27.060 And I didn't have as many wrinkles, okay?

00:09:28.680 Well, I got them both.

00:09:29.940 I brought them in tandem.

00:09:30.640 But it feels to me like the reality behind this.

00:09:34.800 and then i see numbers and you have to you have to help me become a believer again okay because

00:09:40.160 so far nothing okay nothing out of the ground up there yes some discoveries uh but so far no mining

00:09:48.060 and how many years the ring of fire we've been talking the first discovery was about 207 or 208

00:09:53.080 oh my god 20 years later we still haven't put a single mine into action up there and then i see

00:09:59.080 the numbers that Juno is saying that their network and maybe if I'm

True Patriot Love - July 14, 2026

Canada's Ring Of Fire ft Stan Sudol

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