OTTAWA — The Ring of Fire sits about 500 kilometers northeast of Thunder Bay in the muskeg of Ontario’s James Bay Lowlands, on Treaty 9 territory. Prospectors found it in 2007 and named it after a Johnny Cash song.
Beneath the peat moss lies the Canadian Shield, deeply seamed with nickel and cobalt for batteries used in electric vehicles and smart phones, copper for the grids that power data centers, titanium, platinum and palladium for aerospace, and the largest deposit of chromite — critical to stainless steel — in North America.
Nine Cree and Ojibwa communities live in and around it.
On September 14, Prime Minister Mark Carney opens the Canada Investment Summit in Toronto, where he is expected to pitch the Ring of Fire as Canada’s answer to a new world in which access to critical minerals has become an instrument of great-power leverage.
A coalition that advertises itself as anti-capitalist will be in Toronto too.
One of its three conveners has direct organizational ties to CODEPINK, the American anti-war group now under investigation in Washington and London.
The Indigenous and eco-justice coalition says it brings together labor unions and climate networks, and opposes “the sell-off of Canada’s public infrastructure and resources to global private capital.” From September 12 to 14, it will hold a counter-summit, “culminating in a mass rally and demonstration to crash Mark Carney’s Investment Summit.”
Of the conveners, World BEYOND War has the deepest international connections. Headquartered in the United States, it obtained its own charitable status in September 2021 after years under a fiscal sponsor. CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin sits on its advisory board.
Whether interests from Beijing sit behind CODEPINK’s funding is now a question for two Five Eyes governments. No such allegation has been made about any organization in the Ring of Fire coalition.
The Telegraph reported in August that Britain’s Home Office was examining claims that Beijing was funding pro-Palestinian protests to “sow division and chaos” in Britain.
The paper also reported that a British company linked to CODEPINK allegedly received about £250,000 from businesses connected to Neville Roy Singham, a China-based technology millionaire accused of financing Chinese propaganda.
Singham has consistently denied allegations of Beijing backing.
Yet footage from a November 2025 academic forum in Shanghai, co-sponsored by Singham with East China Normal University, showed him standing with attendees, fists raised, as the communist anthem “The Internationale” played. He is married to Jodie Evans, CODEPINK’s other co-founder.
In Washington, a congressional committee and the Justice Department are running parallel inquiries into whether Singham used his money to spread pro-China propaganda and advance the interests of Beijing.
The New York Times documented in 2023 that entities linked to Singham had supplied more than $1.4 million to CODEPINK — close to a quarter of its donations since 2017. The Times’ investigation, cited since in congressional letters and at a February 2026 Ways and Means hearing on foreign influence in American nonprofits, opened not on the Middle East causes the Telegraph raised this year but on a street fight in London.
“The protest in London’s bustling Chinatown brought together a variety of activist groups to oppose a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes. So it was peculiar when a street brawl broke out among mostly ethnic Chinese demonstrators,” the Times reported. The fight, in November 2021, “started when men aligned with the event’s organizers, including a group called No Cold War, attacked activists supporting the democracy movement in Hong Kong.”
“On the surface, No Cold War is a loose collective run mostly by American and British activists who say the West’s rhetoric against China has distracted from issues like climate change and racial injustice,” the paper reported.
“In fact, a New York Times investigation found, it is part of a lavishly funded influence campaign that defends China and pushes its propaganda. At the center is a charismatic American millionaire, Neville Roy Singham, who is known as a socialist benefactor of far-left causes.”
Mr. Singham, the Times added, “works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide.”
CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin’s connection to World BEYOND War is financial as well as advisory.
Her family foundation, Arc of Justice, reported a $100,000 grant to World BEYOND War in its 2022 federal tax filing, recorded as general support. The same filing lists $355,350 to CODEPINK.
The two organizations also share an institutional funder, the Tides Foundation, a large American grantmaker. World BEYOND War names Tides among its foundation supporters; Tides reported grants of $104,500 to CODEPINK in 2022 and $54,500 in 2023.
In March, CODEPINK helped organize what it called a humanitarian convoy to Cuba with The People’s Forum, one of the New York groups the Times identified as funded by Singham. Medea Benjamin, whose CODEPINK had received more than $1.4 million from Singham-linked entities, joined the trip, along with political streamer Hasan Piker. The Treasury Department opened an administrative review. Benjamin called it intimidation and denied reports that she had been subpoenaed.
In March 2025, World BEYOND War joined an anti-mining protest in Toronto — at the world’s largest mining gathering — alongside the Palestinian Youth Movement, the Sudanese Solidarity Collective, and Canadian indigenous groups.
The demonstrators denounced what they called conflict minerals and green militarism, naming cobalt, coltan, antimony, rare earths, niobium and thorium. “Every F-35 fighter jet has about 900 pounds of rare earths in it,” one argument ran. “Those weapons are being used to bomb civilians in Gaza.”
Another held that “Canadian companies can dig up critical minerals used to make the bombs that are bombing other Indigenous people, on their lands, around the world.”
On January 21, 2026, World BEYOND War published on its own site an essay by CODEPINK’s “War Is Not Green” campaigner, arguing that artificial intelligence data centers are an engine of militarized extraction, relying on critical minerals.
“The process of obtaining these minerals ... requires the militarization, destabilization, and total plunder of mineral-rich regions.”
The question of whether foreign money moves through Western environmental coalitions was put to Brenda Shaffer at a Hudson Institute panel in Washington on May 19, convened by former U.S. national security official Michael Doran with research fellow Zineb Riboua and this reporter. Shaffer teaches at the United States Naval Postgraduate School’s Energy Academic Group.
She was asked about Tides — which World BEYOND War lists among its funders — and called it “an American based organization” that is “strongly affiliated with democratic causes in the US.”
“Many, many organizations and American organizations work as pass throughs for China to block energy in Canada, but also to block energy in the United States,” Shaffer said. “For instance, there’s Energy Foundation, which is based in San Francisco, which used to be a legally explicit Chinese organization, but it broke off to an American organization and a Chinese organization.”
“You see the 990 forms and you see money comes in from China to Energy Foundation,” she said. “Money goes from Energy Foundation into various environmental movements in the United States that are working against fossil fuels. And if China was really so interested about stopping fossil fuels, you would think they, the largest consumer of coal in the world, the largest producer, they would stop it at home.”
On December 16, 2025, 26 state attorneys general asked Attorney General Pamela Bondi to investigate Energy Foundation China under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, alleging it “is supervised by the National Development and Reform Commission — an arm of the Chinese government” and is led by Beijing-based former Chinese Communist Party officials. Its chief executive, Ji Zou, previously served as a deputy director general of China’s National Center for Climate Change Strategy. The letter says that “in 2023 alone it gave over $156 million in grants to environmental and climate-focused groups.”
A search of the Tides Foundation’s amended 2022 Form 990 shows that it reported $16,292,728 in grant-making expenditures and investments in East Asia and the Pacific. The filing itemizes 157 grants of more than $5,000 to recipients in that region.
Because the public-disclosure form leaves foreign recipients’ names and employer identification numbers blank, it cannot be determined from this filing whether Energy Foundation China or any other particular entity received those funds.
The public filing also does not identify Tides’ contributors, so it cannot establish whether Tides received funds from Asia.
