From: Bill Braden,
Yellowknife
Dear editor,
I want to offer congratulations on Nancy Vail’s recent column about Vital Metals and the China debacle (‘Nechalacho mine sale a threat to our sovereignty’, Yellowknifer, Jan. 5). I think she really nailed it as an appalling failure of Canadian trade policy (as of now, at least) to allow a bad-faith player like China to have access to a valuable Canadian resource.
She is right to demand that someone in government be held accountable. But also, among shareholders of Vital — full disclosure, I am a modest investor — there also has to be accountability for Vital’s shameless about-face to bring in Chinese money to salvage what really amounts to a corporate botch-up of strategy and leadership.
Vital’s brightest light at the start was its pledge to bring a great Canadian rare earth resource into the critical minerals supply chain - outside of Chinese dominance. That’s where it has betrayed every one of us, from the Prime Minister’s office to our territorial and Indigenous leaders to the workers.
Goodness knows, we need all the help we can get here in the NWT to grow our resource economy. But as you have pointed out, we are supplying our raw materials to China for them to irresponsibly refine and sell back to us at who-knows-what price. Enough of this hewers-of-wood and drawers-of-water crap. At what point do we say No?