Submitted by The Bureau's Sam Cooper (emphasis our own),
The Ring of Fire sits about 500 kilometers northeast of Thunder Bay in the muskeg of Ontario’s James Bay Lowlands, on Treaty 9 territory. Prospectors found it in 2007 and named it after a Johnny Cash song.
Beneath the peat moss lies the Canadian Shield, deeply seamed with nickel and cobalt for batteries used in electric vehicles and smart phones, copper for the grids that power data centers, titanium, platinum and palladium for aerospace, and the largest deposit of chromite — critical to stainless steel — in North America.
Nine Cree and Ojibwa communities live in and around it.
On September 14, Prime Minister Mark Carney opens the Canada Investment Summit in Toronto, where he is expected to pitch the Ring of Fire as Canada’s answer to a new world in which access to critical minerals has become an instrument of great-power leverage.
A coalition that advertises itself as anti-capitalist will be in Toronto too.
One of its three conveners has direct organizational ties to CODEPINK, the American anti-war group now under investigation in Washington and London.
The Indigenous and eco-justice coalition says it brings together labor unions and climate networks, and opposes “the sell-off of Canada’s public infrastructure and resources to global private capital.” From September 12 to 14, it will hold a counter-summit, “culminating in a mass rally and demonstration to crash Mar
