True Patriot Love - July 14, 2026


Canada's Ring Of Fire ft Stan Sudol

Topics
ring of fire mining debate roads and mining challenges
Hosted by
Shara Micucci Mike Wixson
Guests
Stan Sudol
Mentioned
Juno Stan Siddall Ramsey Lake Wailoo Murray Mine Paul
Canada's Red Tape Killing Entrepreneurial Spirit？ #Canada TPL On The Road： Kingston's Heritage ft Peter Gower

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

166.14

Word count

1,669

Sentence count

54

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Stan Siddall is a mining expert who has been around for a long time. He's been involved in the mining industry for a lot longer than that, and he's got a lot of experience in the mineral mining industry. In this episode, Stan talks about the history of mining in Canada, and why mining in the James Bay lowlands of northern Ontario might be a good idea.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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