Here's my guess at what happened with the drilling.
We lost a lot of results through drilling difficulties this past year. Elmer told me something about how they had now learned what the terrain was like and would change their equipment for the next drilling to accommodate what was tough ground, or something like that.
Anyway, the point is they went in to drill and had to stop and re-group because of the terrain. That caused some delays and cost money that didn't improve the project.
After all of this they decided against bringing in new equipment and starting again because they ran out of time to include the results in the feasibility and the priority was on getting that finished. Even though it took much longer than anticipated to get the feasibility out and reviewed they weren't expecting the time lag when they made the decision on the drills.
All of this is my opinion only, but I don't believe any assumption that rests on some deal with Teck going on in the background. They simply had to draw the line somewhere.
I would assume they would prefer the results be included but decided to go ahead with starting the Teck clock on the back of this feasibility.
