Spartan Metals Corp. (TSXV: W | OTCQB: SPRMF) is advancing its flagship Eagle Project in eastern Nevada, a past-producing tungsten district being repositioned as a multi-metal critical minerals asset centered on tungsten, rubidium, silver and copper. The company’s strategy is to build a portfolio of strategic defense minerals in top-tier Western U.S. jurisdictions, with a focus on tungsten, rubidium, antimony, bismuth and arsenic.In an interview with InvestorNews.com host Tracy Hughes, President, CEO, and Director Brett Marsh described Eagle as a largely untested modern exploration target built on a historic production base. The project hosts the past-producing Tungstonia and Rees/Antelope tungsten mines, which together recorded historic production of 8,379 units at grades between 0.6% and 0.9% WO₃ between 1915 and 1956. The 20-square-kilometer land package lies about 120 kilometers northeast of Ely, Nevada, in the Kern Mountains and covers 4,936 acres across 244 unpatented Federal lode mining claims.Spartan’s current program at Eagle is built around three deposit types identified on the property—porphyry, skarn and carbonate replacement—hosting tungsten (W), silver (Ag) and rubidium (Rb), with associated copper, antimony, gold, lead, zinc, bismuth and arsenic. Company materials describe Eagle as an opportunity to delineate one of the largest and highest-grade tungsten and rubidium districts in the United States, including potential recovery of tungsten, rubidium and silver from legacy mill tailings at Tungstonia. Marsh noted that Spartan has completed 34 holes into the tailings for assay and two additional holes for metallurgical work to test whether they can provide an early source of cash flow.Rubidium, one of the less familiar critical minerals in Spartan’s portfolio, was a particular focus. Marsh highlighted its use in quantum computing, next-generation telecommunications, and atomic clocks that underpin advanced weapon systems and precision timing. As he put it, rubidium “has its fingers in a lot of different aspects of the industry, from high-tech into military applications.”A November 3, 2025, news release outlined the polymetallic potential at Eagle. Surface work and a review of historic rock-chip sampling have identified high-grade silver and base-metal replacement mineralization extending roughly 2.5 kilometers along the contact between the Tungstonia granite intrusion and carbonate host rocks south and southwest of the Tungstonia vein system. The mineralization is associated with previously unrecognized quartz veins with similar strike and spacing to those around the past-producing Tungstonia Mine, and rock-chip results include elevated silver, lead, copper and zinc typical of carbonate replacement deposits.Spartan sees similar potential on the Rees claim block, which also hosts two past-producing mines: Rees, another tungsten producer, and Antelope, a polymetallic silver-copper-antimony-arsenic deposit. At Antelope, historic production reports cited copper head grades of up to about 4% with significant silver, while recent fieldwork at Eagle has identified additional carbonate replacement-style targets with copper in the 1.5–2% range and silver up to about 900 grams per tonne.Spartan has broadened its investor base by securing a U.S. listing, with its common shares now trading on the OTCQB Venture Market under the symbol SPRMF as of November 17, 2025, complementing its TSX Venture Exchange listing under the symbol W.

A new Ontario law is turning digital cleaning records from a niche software feature into a compliance requirement, and Visionstate Corp. (TSXV: VIS) is positioning its technology at the centre of that shift.Visionstate is a growth-oriented company that invests in the research and development of technology in the realm of the Internet of Things, big data and analytics, and sustainability. Through its wholly-owned subsidiary Visionstate IoT Inc., it helps businesses improve operational efficiencies, reduce costs and elevate customer satisfaction with devices that track and monitor guest activities and requests. Its WANDA™ smart device has been deployed in hospitals, airports, shopping centres and other public facilities across and beyond North America, forming the foundation of a Software-as-a-Service model built around monitoring how facilities are cleaned and maintained.In an interview with InvestorNews.com host Tracy Hughes, CEO and Director John Putters linked that existing product set directly to Ontario’s Bill 190, which mandates digital cleaning records in certain public washrooms. “Bill 190 is essentially legislating digital cleaning records for health and safety,” he said. “So Bill 190 is really to protect people, to make sure that there’s access to the cleaning records and what’s been done and when and by whom and all the rest of it, which is essentially what Wanda did in the first place.” Putters noted that “our product and that legislation meet in the middle at a very nice point,” and said the company has “been capitalizing on it.”Public-health concerns provide the backdrop. “Obviously, we live in a world now where disease and infections can become pandemics,” Putters said, adding that “in Canada we’ve even lost our status as measles-free.” While he was careful not to overstate the impact of any single technology—“I’m not going to say Wanda is going to address that”—he connected clean, well-kept facilities with efforts to reduce the spread of disease and framed digital records as a way to provide verifiable evidence of what has been done.The company is using Bill 190’s January 1st effective date to drive new customer adoption. Putters acknowledged that the law represents a burden for operators: “Nobody likes legislation, right? Nobody likes to be legislated. You know, I’m doing things and the government comes along and says there’s new legislation that you’ve got to comply with, and if you don’t comply with it, it’s going to be a $10,000 fine.” Visionstate’s response has been to remove an immediate cost barrier. “We decided we’ll onboard all these companies up until December 31st and not bill them until January 1st, which is when the legislation comes into effect,” he explained. “This has been extremely effective as a strategy. So it does forego some revenue in the short term, but as a Software-as-a-Service model, these contracts can go on for years and years and years, and we have an 80% margin on our software once it’s out there.”That approach, Putters said, is already visible in the company’s metrics. “Our acquisition rate has gone up year over year probably 200 to 300% as a result of that strategy, and all of those companies will be billed starting January 1st,” he told Hughes. He described the emphasis on scale and data as deliberate: “Our whole strategy is to get as much of the market as possible as quickly as possible to increase the value, and frankly to increase the ability to collect data—because it’s all about the data at the end of the day, which is why the five largest companies in the world are all essentially data companies, whether that’s Meta or X or whatever.”

Critical minerals are no longer a niche subset of the periodic table; they are the wiring diagram of geopolitical power, and Canada is sitting on a toolkit it still hasn’t decided how to use.As Co-Chair of the Critical Minerals Institute (CMI), Jack Lifton has spent decades mapping that wiring diagram, from obscure byproduct metals to the politics that decide where refineries get built. CMI, which I help lead, has created as a “brain trust” for this emerging economy: a global hub that connects companies, capital markets and policymakers, backed by masterclasses, a weekly Critical Minerals Report, and an annual summit that now draws ministers, institutional investors and C-suite executives to Toronto.When I asked Lifton what he plans to discuss at PDAC 2026 in Toronto, he did not start with lithium or copper, but with the quiet metals hidden in their shadow. “They’ve asked me to give an introductory talk and then chair a panel on the sourcing of critical minerals for the electronics industry in Canada,” he said. But his real focus is on the companion metals that fall out of existing operations: “The metals for electronics, the critical metals, come as companion metals in copper mining, aluminum mining, zinc mining, silver mining. So what they are is, for example, gallium, germanium, tellurium, selenium, cadmium, metals like that, and of course silicon.”This is not a theoretical list. Lifton’s point is that the raw material base for an advanced electronics industry already exists inside Canada’s established mining complex. “All of these metals or metalloids can be produced in Canada as byproducts of major mining,” he told me. He ticks through the map: Rio Tinto Group (LSE: RIO) (NYSE: RIO) in Quebec processing bauxite into aluminum and, as a result, being able to produce gallium and scandium; Teck Resources Limited (TSX: TECK.A / TECK.B) (NYSE: TECK) mining zinc in Western Canada, with germanium as a companion; high-quality silicon deposits in Manitoba now attracting junior developers; tellurium and selenium emerging as byproducts of copper. “You have the entire suite of critical electronic minerals, which are byproducts,” he said. “All could be produced in Canada, and as far as the measures, they will be produced in Canada.”If that sounds like a blueprint for an industrial policy, that is exactly how Lifton frames it. In his view, the missing step is not geology but intent. “Canada should take a hard look at enticing the electronics industry—manufacturing of chips and basic electronic devices like chips—because everything is there,” he argued. The PDAC panel he will chair is expected to include representatives from Rio Tinto, Anglo American and Teck alongside him. “This is interesting to me because normally I don’t talk to the majors,” he admitted. “These critical minerals for electronics are things that the majors can produce but really don’t know a lot about.”That gap—between what can be produced and what is strategically understood—is precisely where CMI has tried to position itself. Recent membership additions such as Quantum Critical Metals Corp. (TSX.V: LEAP | OTCQB: ATOXF | FSE: 86A1) show how the ecosystem is evolving around metals that, until recently, would barely have merited a line item in an annual report. Quantum, a junior explorer with projects focused on gallium, rubidium, cesium, antimony and germanium in Québec and British Columbia, joined CMI this fall, citing the Institute’s role in “support[ing] the clean energy transition, address[ing] supply chain vulnerabilities and strengthen[ing] national security.”