Interesting that Bill Blair spends time on the fact that...

Interesting that Bill Blair spends time on the fact that Canadian investors have bad memories of lithium compared to Australian investors who have only seen hard rock lithium successes.

Here is the background story:

Canada was a serious player in the international lithium market in the 1950s but then Lithium production fell away and the last mine closed.

In modern times, Quebec has had some unfortunate debacles when two very large companies mistimed their Lithium production. This lead to well-publicised market failures which spooked Canadian and US investors for a while.

One of the highly publicised failures was NAL. The North American Lithium mine in Québec (NAL), formerly the Québec Lithium mine, reached commercial production in early 2018 and shipped spodumene concentrate to refineries in China for processing into lithium carbonate. Prices of lithium products and spodumene concentrate fell sharply later that year when global spodumene capacity nearly doubled, primarily in Australia. NAL suspended production in 2019, sought bankruptcy protection, and was acquired by Sayona Québec in 2021, a joint venture between Sayona and Piedmont.

The other major failure was Nemaska Lithium. It produced its first spodumene concentrate at the Whabouchi Mine (then valued at CAD$411.4 billion) in Quebec in early 2017 after spending ~$CAD450 million on several years of exploration and construction. But, having also mistimed the rise of lithium, the company suspended production in 2019, and the mine was put on care and maintenance. After bankruptcy, Nemaska was acquired by the Pallinghurst Group in partnership with the Government of Quebec. The company plans to restart the mine and build a lithium hydroxide refinery in Bécancour, Quebec.