From Mines to Minds: The Intelligence Curve Beats the Extraction Curve
Why Canada must climb the intelligence supply chain or be left mining the past.
The 21st century is a thrill ride… and a mess. We are building tiny stars in labs; we are moving people and freight in cars that sip electrons and never burn a drop of fuel. Yet for all that brilliance, we are still sweeping the floor with a broom made of mud.
In the 90s and 2000s, China played the role of maid to the world’s recycling. The high-value bits were processed; the low-value mountains were piled. Today, the script is updated. Swap plastic for rare earths. They hand us magnets and motors; they keep the sludge. It looks like progress; it smells like tailings.
The maid wants a raise; maybe she wants to quit. And the rest of the world is posting the job. Canada… please do not apply.
Smart nations will avoid rare earth elements like the plague. Not because they are useless… but because the price never includes the spill. To extract REEs at scale, you break rock, you leach with chemistry, you separate cousins on the periodic table that refuse to part ways. There is always a lake behind the curtain. You can line it and monitor it; you still own it. It’s salt water for an economy… it wets your lips and deepens the thirst.
Even if Canada crowned itself the new king of rare earths, it still wouldn’t matter. We’re not China, and that’s not a statement about competence or patriotism; it’s about scale and consequence. When China squeezes supply, the world listens because China has a gun the size of a continent. It can point to leverage in the West and make markets twitch.
If Canada ever tried the same thing — if we decided to stop shipping to the United States or Europe — we wouldn’t get sanctions or angry tweets. We’d get tanks. The polite version might be “security guarantees,” but everyone knows what that means. Our leverage ends where our alliances begin. We don’t have the population, the military, or the industrial depth to weaponise scarcity.
That’s the difference between holding the gun and holding a single bullet. China can rattle the global table because it has built the entire ecosystem: the mining, the refining, the magnet plants, the export routes, the army to defend them, and the political appetite to use them as leverage. Canada could never turn minerals into a menace without breaking the very alliance structure that keeps the lights on.
So even if we became the world's biggest rare-earth exporter, it wouldn’t make us powerful. It would make us useful… and that’s not the same thing.
And the bitter truth is, even that usefulness would fade. Rare earth leverage decays.
The Short-Term Ace
Rare-earth leverage decays because no monopoly over materials can outlast human innovation. The world has never let a single element, fuel, or process keep power for long. The moment scarcity appears, science begins to work against it.
We’ve done this before. Every generation starts by leaning on the rare and ends by mastering the common. Early lightbulbs needed tungsten; now we excite cheap semiconductors. The first colour televisions relied on europium and yttrium; modern displays get the same glow from quantum dots and organic films. Catalytic converters once consumed platinum by the ounce; now they sip palladium or nickel. Lithium batteries began as cobalt-hungry chemistry experiments and are already being redesigned with iron and manganese. The pattern is always the same; at the start, we chase performance at any price; once the physics is understood, we rewrite the recipe with what the Earth has in abundance.
The other reason the leverage fades is substitution. No material stays indispensable forever. When oil got expensive, we made engines efficient. When copper got scarce, we turned to fibre optics. When platinum spiked, we redesigned catalysts. Every element that becomes strategic also becomes a target for replacement.
Rare earths are walking that same path. As demand grows, the labs start humming. Engineers develop new alloys, magnet geometries, and recycling methods. Companies learn to use less, recover more, and eventually do without. The price of scarcity is innovation, and innovation always wins.
So yes, for now, rare earths are the ace in the deck… but it’s a card that burns when you play it. The future belongs to whoever stops needing them first.
The Short Term Is Getting Shorter
In the 20th century, material monopolies could last for decades. Oil, tungsten, indium, and cobalt each reigned long enough to shape an era before innovation dethroned it. That window is closing fast. The short term is getting shorter with every new GPU.
Every new generation of computation accelerates the cycle from discovery to obsolescence. It used to take thirty years for a material to go from “essential” to “optional.” Now it happens in five. The more intelligence we pour into design tools, the faster we climb out of dependence.
It follows the same three-act story every time.
First comes the invention phase. We reach for whatever works. Rare or unstable elements have properties that make them indispensable in early prototypes; they glow brighter, conduct faster, and magnetise stronger. That’s why early televisions needed europium and yttrium phosphors; why early catalysts devoured platinum and rhodium; why the first lasers were built from rubies. When a new idea is born, the chemistry is always exotic.
Then comes the scale phase. Demand grows, costs bite, and scarcity turns from a curiosity into a constraint. That’s when research pivots. LED phosphors evolve from europium to quantum dots. Motors once built around neodymium magnets are now re-engineered with ferrite magnets. Batteries shed cobalt for iron phosphate. Touchscreens that rely on indium tin oxide are migrating to graphene and conductive polymers. Scale forces substitution.
Finally comes maturity. Once the physics are understood, engineers begin the long march of optimisation. They use thinner films, trace dopants, or coatings instead of bulk materials. They learn to recycle efficiently and design systems that function without the rare ingredients altogether. What started as critical becomes background… a trace memory of the prototype era. And machine learning is about to turn even this pattern on its head.
The End of Exotic
Artificial intelligence is about to close the age of exotic materials… the long, messy century when every new technology was born addicted to something rare.
In the 20th century, innovation and dependence moved hand in hand. We invented lasers, colour displays, catalysts, magnets, and semiconductors; each one demanding some new element from the bottom rows of the periodic table. The first copy of every great invention was expensive, dirty, and scarce. Those were the birthing pains of the modern world.
Now, AI changes the tempo. It doesn’t just make discovery faster; it makes it directional. Instead of waiting for accidental breakthroughs, we can ask for specific properties… strength, conductivity, luminescence… and let models search the combinatorial universe for answers. AI can simulate, synthesise, and optimise materials long before a single gram exists.
That means the era of “rare by nature” is ending. We no longer need to find perfect atoms; we can engineer perfect behaviour. A magnet doesn’t have to contain neodymium if it can act like it does. A battery doesn’t need cobalt if the lattice holds charge just as well. We’re moving from geology to geometry… from extraction to expression.
When that transition matures, the word “rare” will stop describing elements and start describing imagination. The nations that invest in intelligence… in chips, algorithms, and labs… will own the recipes that make scarcity obsolete.
That’s the real future of materials. Not digging, but designing. Not tolerance for waste, but command over matter itself. The 20th century mined the planet; the 21st will program it.
Real Men Have Fabs
And that’s where the story turns… from dirt to design, from mines to minds. The nations that win this century aren’t the ones sitting on the most elements; they’re the ones teaching matter to obey new rules.
Chips are the new mines. AI is the new refinery. We used to dig deeper to get better materials; now we simulate and synthesise them. Computation lets us explore the chemical universe faster than any laboratory ever could. It finds magnetic behaviours in iron, conductivity in carbon, and luminescence in organic chains. It rewrites physics without touching the ground.
That’s why China’s rare earth advantage is finite, but the chip advantage isn’t. The first concerns extraction; the second, acceleration. Extraction gets slower the deeper you go. Intelligence gets faster the smarter it becomes.
So what about Canada?
If You Can’t Spot the Mark… It’s You
If Canada thinks it can build power by being the cleanest miner in a dirty game, it’s already lost. The West doesn’t reward purity; it rewards leverage. And there’s no leverage in being the polite supplier to everyone else’s intelligence stack.
The trick in geopolitics is simple: if you can’t spot the mark at the table, it’s you. Canada keeps showing up to trillion-dollar games with good manners and good geology, mistaking relevance for invitation.
The real seats are higher up the stack… where nations design chips, not ship rocks. The players there don’t sell inputs; they sell inevitabilities. If we don’t get into that layer… the precision, photonics, and AI infrastructure that power modern cognition… We’ll spend the next century digging holes for people who already know how to replace what’s in them.
The Table
You know if you’re truly in the European Common Market by asking one simple question: Does my country build part of the Airbus? It’s the same with power in the West. You can tell if your country is actually at the table of modern nations by asking: Are we part of the ASML supply chain?
To understand why that question matters, you need to understand lithography. Every microchip — every brain of modern civilisation — starts as a blank wafer of silicon. Lithography is how we teach that wafer to think. A chip is born through light: layers of circuitry etched by beams so precise they can write patterns smaller than a virus. Each new generation of chips comes from pushing that light further… shorter wavelengths, sharper focus, tighter control.
For fifty years, this race defined progress itself. The transistor count, the speed, the energy efficiency… all of it depends on how well you can sculpt light into logic. And at the pinnacle of that process stands one company. If chips are Christianity, ASML is the Vatican. Every major chipmaker kneels before its machines. There is no alternative. No second source. No backup plan.
Think NVIDIA or TSMC make chips? Don’t fool yourself. They’ve never made a single chip that didn’t pass through an ASML machine. The fabs get the headlines, but ASML writes the scripture. It decides what is physically possible… how small, how fast, how efficient thought itself can be made.
That’s the table. If your industries touch optics, metrology, immersion lithography, EUV mirrors, scan systems, light sources, photoresist, or control software… You have a seat.
What is ASML’s role, and who contributes?
ASML builds extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines that etch the smallest features onto silicon wafers, the heart of modern chips. Its ecosystem is a distributed cathedral of precision:
Zeiss (Germany) delivers mirrors so smooth that a mountain would look flat beside them.
Trumpf (Germany) and Cymer (U.S.) create the laser sources that vaporise tin droplets into bursts of light brighter than the Sun.
Tokyo Electron and SCREEN (Japan) handle photoresist, coating, and wafer prep.
Intel, TSMC, and Samsung push the performance frontier and fund the next iterations.
Dozens of European and American firms supply the vacuum systems, sensors, actuators, and control software that make each machine a billion-dollar instrument of national power.
Each nation in that web holds a fragment of control. Together, they form the industrial covenant of the democratic world… a shared monopoly on the means of intelligence itself.
Where does Canada stand?
We don’t. We have talent, resources, and labs… but none tied into that precision chain. No optics at Zeiss scale, no metrology firms in ASML’s orbit, no presence in the sub-nanometer control stack. We sit outside the table, selling the shovel to the builders of minds.
If we want a future beyond extraction, we need to earn a seat at that table… the one where the West manufactures cognition itself.
What About Canada?
So I ask again… what about Canada?
In the old economy, we traded away technical sovereignty for a role. Washington handed us a seat in the supply chains of the automotive and aerospace industries; a dependable subcontractor, not a sovereign builder. We didn’t design the car; we assembled it. We didn’t own the jet; we built it under license. For a while, that bargain worked. We got a “Canadian car” and a “Canadian fighter plane,” even if the blueprints lived elsewhere.
Now Washington wants to take even that from us. The industrial carve-outs that once defined our middle class are dissolving. We are being restructured, not by choice, but by neglect. The question is whether we pivot on purpose… or just get spun.
And if we do pivot, to what? I hope the case is clear: all that glitters is not rare earth. Canada will have to keep extracting the old-economy commodities we have sunk so much into for now because they pay the bills, but let’s not mistake that for a strategy. Extraction should fund the ascent, not define it. The next era of prosperity won’t come from digging deeper; it will come from joining the layer above, where nations design the tools that define the rules.
We have something the rest of the West still wants… a stable democracy with 30 million wealthy consumers. That’s leverage. Let’s use it the way we did with the Auto Pact. Back then, we told our allies: if you want access to our resources and our markets, we want a small but respectable piece of the industrial pie. It worked once. It can again.
And if our “friends” can’t see that, we may need to start asking harder questions. Because loyalty should run both ways. I don’t see Zeiss polishing lenses in Calgary. I don’t see Applied Materials partnering with the National Research Council to build a photonics or AI-chip tooling centre in Montreal. Those are the kinds of friends we need, not just sympathetic co-conspirators against American overreach.
The logic still points West. It makes the most sense to stay in the alliance and earn our place at the ASML table rather than walk away from it. But if the door never opens… if we are forever told to stay in the pit while others build the fabs… then the world has other tables. China, India, and Russia will be happy to offer one.
Let’s hope we never have to knock.