Which will come first in Canada, the mine or the facility to process rare earths? Although there‘s no active rare earths mine in Canada at the moment, a commercial minerals-to-metals processing plant for demonstration purposes is being built by the Saskatchewan Research Council (SRC), an agency of the provincial government. SRC‘s President and CEO, Mike Crabtree, sees this “chicken-and-egg situation“ clearly in favor of building first the front-end to then give “nascent mine operations off-take agreements“ and “a route to market rather than having to sell that product to China“. MP Materials Corp. is producing such a product, a mineral concentrate, from its Mountain Pass Mine in California, but has to ship it to processors in China as there is no adequate facility in North America yet to produce the higher value rare earth metals. MP Materials is currently building its own processing plant in the United States, but SRC‘s facility will likely be first to come online, slated to be operational in late 2024. As SRC is not a mining company, it is already looking for adequate sources to feed its Rare Earth Processing Facility.