The CEO of a Vancouver-based company has figured out how to collaborate with Trump

America and China have tapped the brakes on a spiralling tariff war. But there are other points of fierce competition between these two nations that haven’t abated — including the race for rare earth metals. In late March, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to fast-track the mining of critical minerals in a new frontier, the deep sea, a move intended to give America a competitive edge over China. And in an odd twist, it’s a Vancouver-based corporation, The Metals Company, that’s been lobbying power brokers in Washington to bypass multilateral United Nations conventions and set a unilateral pathway for commercial mining of deep sea minerals. The company has announced its U.S. subsidiary will apply for a U.S. mining permit to harvest mineral nodules lying 5,000 metres deep in the Clarion-Clipperton zone of the Pacific Ocean. Officials at the International Seabed Authority — the UN-backed regulator responsible for setting the rules for deep sea mining in international waters — aren’t happy. Trump’s decision to revive a 1980-era U.S. mining law that predates the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), a convention the U.S. has not signed or ratified, flies in the face of how the UN prefers to see things done. With the stage set for a showdown between Trump’s executive order and UN conventions, I’m curious to find out what Gerard Barron, the CEO of The Metals Company, has to say. Gerard’s in Sydney, Australia, when we connect. The public company’s first quarter results for 2025 have just been released; The Metals Company shares jumped nearly 83 per cent in April, and the stock is up 180 per cent in 2025. To say Gerard is bullish would be an understatement. With a trillion dollars worth of metals sitting on the seabed floor in their licence areas, Gerard declares, the company should be worth far more than a couple of billion, Canadian. The son of Aussie dairy farmers, Gerard is now a jet-setting entrepreneur splitting his time between London and Dubai, and more recently spending a lot of time lobbying in Washington, D.C., and some time at corporate offices in Toronto. Sporting a black T-shirt and frequently running a hand through his thick hair as he speaks, candidly and confidently, it’s not difficult to imagine why this deep sea mining pioneer has been dubbed “the Elon Musk of Australia.” Gerard bristles at the comparison: “There is no equivalent to Elon Musk.” But he does confirm the company’s vice-chair, Steve Jurvetson, is well connected to Musk. It’s an enterprising move for a Vancouver-based mining company to figure out how to work with Trump and fast-track the commercial harvesting of minerals from the ocean floor, I observe, particularly given Canada declared a moratorium on deep sea mining in 2023. “The previous (Canadian) government did put in place a moratorium,” Gerard acknowledges, “and let me maybe give a bit of background on how moratoriums come about; generally, they’re driven by NGOs.” For decades, this scrappy deep sea miner has squared off against environmentalists, who argue the ocean ecosystem is too fragile for commercial mining. Gerard’s counter-argument: electric vehicles and renewable energy aren’t possible without these critical minerals, and we can extract them in the deep sea with less environmental impact than land-based mining. He hasn’t convinced all naysayers. In 2023, Greenpeace activists boarded The Metals Company’s vessel while it was conducting research. Across the globe, green movements influence governments’ positions on deep sea mining, Gerard complains: “Germany and France went from being vocally very supportive to all of a sudden flipping their position to, ‘Oh, we need to slow this down… we need to understand more.’ The tactic was very much to kill it.” Using swarm techniques, green advocates bombard politicians, Gerard explains, “and all of a sudden, we saw the Canadian government, driven by some pressure from ministers, weak-willed ministers, say, ‘We think we should join this moratorium position,’ yet the bureaucrats who have the file were freaking out. They know you can’t do that. We’re meant to be abiding by the rules of UNCLOS here.” The International Seabed Authority has been working on finalizing a deep sea mining code for years, yet commercialization is not sanctioned. “We’ve been part of the international intergovernmental organization since 2011,” Gerard laments. “There were a set of rules we were working to. There were a set of obligations that we understood everyone was going to uphold. And we went ahead and spent more money on environmental research,” he says, “…then the process started to be overtaken by the NGO movement.” Deep sea mining is not for the faint of heart; I’ve had credible scientists tell me they know more about what it would take to mine the moon than the seabed floor. Gerard shrugs; he’s not slowing down, he’s excited to see the commercialization process speed up, and believes Trump’s unilateral action could well be the push needed to prompt more sensible voices within UNCLOS to stop dragging their feet and finalize the mining rules. “When I say more sensible voices,” he clarifies, “I mean voices like Canada and Australia and China, for sure.” “President Xi has publicly said, we (China) want to dominate deep earth, deep space, deep ocean,” Gerard reports. And he thinks China will still work with the International Seabed Authority — “they’ll be seen as a good international citizen,” he chuckles. “It’s always funny when China are now calling America into question over this move,” he snickers, “…China, the great adherer to international law.” I can’t help but wince; the prospect of China buffing its international reputation in all this wrangling is ironic. The Metals Company has hitched its fate to Trump’s re-industrialization campaign. Gerard expects there will be a “bit of flapping of the wings” by UNCLOS member countries and NGOs. But, he grins, “one of the beauties of having America behind you … we’ll have our vessel flagged to America. So we’ll have the support of Americans.” The competition for critical minerals — to fuel the green transition — is fierce and will pry open new frontiers to mining including not only the deep sea, but quite possibly, northern Ontario’s Ring of Fire, if Ontario Premier Doug Ford gets his way. As Gerard anticipates, these forays will undoubtedly incite more flapping of the wings. But what seemed impossible a year ago is now feasible.

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