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Manitoba's flagship critical-mineral asset is the Tanco mine at Bernic Lake: a globally significant source of cesium (via pollucite), plus tantalum and lithium-bearing spodumene. Since 2019 it has been owned by Sinomine Resource Group, a Shenzhen-listed (SZSE: 002738) Chinese company: privately controlled, not state-owned, as far as could be confirmed. This is the Saskatchewan-Orano pattern repeated with a different flag and a rarer mineral, but with the opposite ownership structure: a foreign-owned strategic-mineral asset with no confirmed state stake, visible in the public record. Manitoba's open tenure feed maps every claim but, unlike BC, SK and Québec, publishes no holder name, so ownership here is established from corporate disclosure, not the register.
6,163
Active mining claims
3,734
Mineral leases
234
Claims staked in 2026
Tanco · China
Flagship asset
A significant global source of cesium is a Canadian mine owned by a Chinese company.
The Tanco mine on Bernic Lake (Lac du Bonnet, SE Manitoba) holds pollucite, tantalum ore and lithium-bearing spodumene. By the operator's own account, Tanco is 'one of two pollucite producing mines in the world': the other being Bikita in Zimbabwe, of which Sinomine acquired a 74% stake in 2022 and where it has since built a second cesium-processing plant, per independent reporting. Per USGS (Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025), cesium mine production worldwide has largely ceased other than Tanco: existing Tanco stockpiles remain 'an important source' of cesium material, and Canada was the primary supplier of cesium ore/chemicals prior to 2016. USGS does not publish a current country-by-country reserve split (Australia, Canada, China and Namibia together hold under 200,000 tonnes of identified cesium reserves). Sinomine Resource Group (China, SZSE: 002738) bought Tanco in June 2019 for ~US$135M plus a 10-year lithium royalty. Cesium has defence and precision-instrument uses (atomic clocks, drilling fluids, aerospace); one private company now operates both of the world's active cesium sources.
Tanco Mine operator disclosure; USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025: Cesium →Mineral tenure & land claims: Manitoba
Active mineral dispositions and land claims in negotiation. Click a feature for detail.
Layers
Party
Federal ridings from the 2023 representation order. More layers in progress.
Manitoba mineral claims and leases (blue). Tanco sits at Bernic Lake in the southeast; the northern claim clusters are the Thompson nickel belt and the Snow Lake / Flin Flon greenstone. Source: Manitoba iMaQs (OpenMB licence) + CIRNAC ATRIS.
Established from corporate disclosure, since Manitoba's register does not publish holders. A foreign parent is a sourced ownership fact, applied uniformly.
Major cesium source (pollucite) + tantalum and lithium; acquired 2019 (~US$135M). Sinomine Resource Group Co., Ltd. trades on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE: 002738): publicly listed, not a state-owned enterprise.
Vale owns and operates the Thompson nickel mine/mill; concentrate shipped to Long Harbour and Sudbury. Brazilian-parented.
Like Saskatchewan, Manitoba's mineral belt sits largely under settled historic treaties (Treaties 1, 2, 3, 5), not unsettled comprehensive claims, so the land-claim early-warning is thin here. Only two comprehensive claims exist in the federal registry; the one still in active negotiation (Ghotelnene K'odtineh Dene) is in the far north, off the main mineral ground. The Manitoba watch-item, as in Saskatchewan, is Treaty Land Entitlement: not yet published as open boundary data.
Manitoba's open mineral-tenure feed (iMaQs) publishes every claim's geometry, dates and status but no holder name: the only one of our four provinces that withholds ownership from the register. So Manitoba ownership is established from corporate disclosure (as with Tanco/Sinomine and Vale/Thompson), and holder-level tracking here is an entity-resolution problem rather than a direct read.
iMaQs (Manitoba Mining & Quarrying), open under the OpenMB licenceSources
Contains information from the Manitoba government, licensed under the OpenMB Information and Data Use Licence.