The Financial Post reports in its Tuesday, Nov. 29, edition that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government is keen to strengthen Canada's relationship with Indonesia, but not so much that it is willing to join the nickel cartel that the emerging Asian power is trying to get off the ground. The Post's Naimul Karim writes that
Trade Minister Mary Ng said, after she and three fellow cabinet ministers released the government's first ever Indo-Pacific Strategy in Vancouver on Sunday, "It's an idea that Indonesia has proposed to us, but we are not looking at that particular model in the way that they have proposed."
Indonesia is a country on the rise thanks to an increasingly wealthy population of 276 million people and its vast nickel deposits.
"We want to be the main players in the EV battery industry," Joko Widodo, Indonesia's president, told The Economist magazine earlier this month.
One of the Widodo government's strategies to do so, apparently, is to become the Saudi Arabia of battery metals. With automakers seeking low-carbon supply chains to manufacture their electric vehicles, analysts feel that Canada has an advantage that it could lose by joining any such alliance.
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