Thank you for a great post, emphasizing the oft forgotten fact that NOT's only big asset is its key management team. They will detemine what the opportunity and its realization can be. I would like to make a few comments about NOT in the Canadian context (after wishing any moms a great day !

1) I think you are a little hard on the Chinese. Their drive and long strong demand is a breath of fresh air from the monthly /quarterly manipulations by the big hedge funds and international investment banks. They are fundamentally not manipulators when it comes to resources, they are just looking for secure supply. For example the trading patterns on BHP changed dramatically when Chinese interest was rumoured.

2) Canada is a tiny capital pool with a massive amount of resources. Yet, ironically, few Canadians own resource shares such as NOT directly, and this results in part from the fact that while Canadian investors pay full capital gains tax on any Canadian gains, Americans pay NO tax to Canada on those gains, and in many cases will pay no tax in the US. And, believe it or not, we still have a thing called "AMT" or minimum tax, just in case you do find a way to shelter any of those gains. So, big private money tends to keep a tight risk profile, since any capital losses are not deductible in whole or in part against other income. Heads they lose, tails they lose. That fiscal greed is one of our biggest impediments to capital supply. Flow throughs do not level that playing field. A separate zero- rated tax class of junior resource shares is anathema to the Finance bureaucrats. This has a lot more to do with public sector pensions than with our medical system.

3)Watch out for the feds and Ontario. If things tighten, as before, they will point to resource pools such as NOT and income taxes to get what they need. That is history, and the provincial bureaucracies are continually looking at how to squeeze more out of resources.

Thanks for your thoughts and enjoy the day.