The Globe and Mail reports in its Saturday edition that 180 kilometres from Winnipeg, below Bernic Lake in eastern Manitoba, sits one of the world's last remaining minable deposits of cesium, at the Tanco underground mine. The Globe's Niall McGee writes that for stability reasons, it cannot be accessed safely, but the owner of the mine, Beijing-based Sinomine Resource Group, has potentially figured out a way to get around that: a partial drainage of the lake above, and construction of an open pit mine. China already controls vast swaths of the global rare earths, critical minerals and battery metals industries, but nowhere is its dominance as absolute as in cesium. There are only two operating cesium mines in the world, Bikita in Zimbabwe, and Tanco in Canada; Sinomine controls both. Two of Canada's biggest critical-minerals miners, Teck Resources and Ivanhoe Mines, both have state-controlled Chinese companies as their biggest shareholders. At Teck, the dangers of relying on a powerful Chinese investor was made painfully clear earlier this year, when China Investment Corp. voted against Teck's planned corporate restructuring, throwing the future of the miner into great uncertainty.