Again, I’ll repeat: There isn’t a single thing in the proposed legislation that’s different than the current legislation.

I will tell you that the largest number of individuals who are employed by the mining industry are Indigenous people—11%. They fully participate in the mining industry.

Where we in fact have situations like Cote Lake that took 15 years, they were fully supported by the Indigenous communities. They were waiting for those permits. What did we see after that? We see a company and a mine that is spending $2 billion, they’re employing 1,600 people, and the Indigenous people who are supporting that are extremely, extremely happy with the development that they participate within fully.

We also know that the Indigenous communities that support development are thriving.

Take a look at TTN. Take a look at Chief Bruce Archibald and his older sister RoseAnne. Before they were fully committed to development, the unemployment rate in TTN was 85%, and now, Chief Archibald tells us that, in fact, it’s less than the national number. They fully support development.

This is how it works. The prospector on the ground looks for minerals. They might find something. Then they have to get involved with a junior exploration company. Junior exploration companies are the entrepreneurs. They’re the true risk-takers. For them to take risks, they must have certainty about their investment—and that’s what this does. Can you imagine a situation where you’re asking someone to put money into the ground and they have no reasonable opportunity to get a return on that money for 15 years—not possible, not going to happen. The junior exploration companies will see that there is an opportunity to attract—and that’s what happens. The larger companies that, in fact, have the financial ability to raise the capital invest with the junior companies. So that’s how this works. But they need certainty in relation to the regulations and what it takes to permit the mines.

Once again, I’ll say we’re fully committed to the duty to consult. That hasn’t changed. There isn’t a word in the proposed legislation that changes that fact. This government is committed to the duty to consult, and we will carry out that duty.

My question for the minister.

I know we’ve spoken a lot in this House of the importance of building more mines faster, and I think that is absolutely true. We sometimes talk about some of the larger companies and some of the large mines, which is really, really important, but I’m wondering if you’d talk a little bit about a population that I’ve had actually brought up in my riding a couple of times that I know is important to you as well: the juniors. Could you speak a little bit about why this legislation is going to help more entrepreneurs, more small business owners, and not just the large mining giants, but the junior mining exploration sector, and what this is going to do for those people who take risks, who want to invest in the mining sector and make a go of it—not just the big guys, but the little guys too.

I’m very happy to be talking about Bill 71, the Building More Mines Act. We had debated this at second reading. Basically, what we said is that it’s a pretty good bill, but it’s flawed. The idea was that we would support it at second reading, hoping to fix those flaws. Honestly, I think no bill is ever going to be perfect.

The two major flaws in this bill really have to do with the environment. The member opposite just said that it doesn’t change the environmental regulations at all, but that’s not accurate. It changes it. The old standard used to be “better than”—you leave the mine site better than before—and the new standard is “comparable to.” And I’ll get into that afterwards, but basically, when you do something like that, it’s very clear to see what’s better. When you say “comparable,” that’s just an invitation to have lawyers come forward and start arguing about what’s comparable and what’s not comparable. In our opinion, that does weaken the environmental standard, which is kind of par for the course for what’s happening here.

We have heard this morning during debate about the mining community and mining organizations. I’m proud to come from a mining community. I’ve always lived in Sudbury. My parents met in Nova Scotia. They came to Sudbury because my dad had a job working at Inco. He was working at Stobie mine and the Frood mine. I also worked in the mining industry, at the smelter, for nearly two decades. My stepfather also worked in the mining industry. Really, anybody in Sudbury—if you don’t have a connection to the mining industry, you’ve probably just recently moved there and haven’t met enough people yet, because it is a mining town and has been for more than 100 years. It’s much more diversified, but it is a mining town, to the point that growing up as a kid, my friends and I all thought that flashlights only came in yellow and black, because those are mining flashlights. Those were the Inco colours, and so everybody had a yellow and black flashlight. When you’d go out at Halloween, you had a yellow and black flashlight. That’s how ingrained it was in our community.

When we talk about mining, sometimes we get into rhetoric: “This party likes this. This party doesn’t like this.” I want to be very clear: As New Democrats, we understand how important mining is. And leading off the debate here, I want to be very clear that I understand how important mining is, because it’s what put bread on the table and food on the table for my family when I was a child, and it’s what puts food on the table for my family now that I’m a parent. I understand how important it is, and I understand the values of the mining community and mining organizations, and I have to tell you that there are parts of this bill that don’t match those values.

Mining organizations care about the environment, and it is an uphill battle for a mining organization to demonstrate that, because part of that process is disturbing the environment. Part of the process is pulling things out of the ground and refining them. There are waste products that damage the environment, and in the old days, there was nothing to be done with those waste products.

I’ve talked in the past about growing up in Sudbury and how it looked like a moonscape, how the ground was scorched from acid rain; certain things wouldn’t grow; how I didn’t know that trees could grow any taller than 20 feet tall, and that in many places, in what we would call the mountains, because you’d see so much black rock, there would be these large tree stumps that had just dried out and died from acid rain. I remember as a child—not kindergarten, but later on, in grade 4 or grade 5—playing in the mountains with my friends and picking up these tree stumps that were so dried out and throwing them around, pretending we were the Incredible Hulk. So I know first-hand the environmental damage that has gone on there.

But I also know first-hand how hard the mining industry—the OMA—in Ontario has worked to rebuild that relationship and to demonstrate their commitment to the environment.

So even though it’s a slight weakening, it is a weakening, and it doesn’t reflect the values of the mining community.

Mining organizations also value the communities where they work. That is important to them. I live in a mining town. I know that Sudbury—Vale and Glencore are the two largest mining companies there, and there are a couple of smaller ones. I know how important my community is to them, and I know the relationship they have with the workers there—because they’re all workers there. As you get farther away, they’re global companies, but the core group all live in the community. We all play together, swim together, hunt together. And so those communities are important.

I have to say, the best mining companies and the largest mining companies in Ontario have worked really, really hard on building true nation-to-nation partnerships with Indigenous communities. One of the things that we’re being told—and I’ll get into it—is that they’re asking the government for a framework for this. I can only imagine that if the large companies are struggling to find the ways, the junior companies really are having a difficult time making it up as they go along. Wanting to do the right thing but not having the framework to work with is difficult for these junior mining companies, because it’s difficult for the large mining companies who have been doing it for decades in finding their way.

Our position was that we were going to support this in second reading, because we think there are parts of this bill that are really good, things that are going to help, and I’ll get into that part of it.

The part about helping a mining company develop at different stages and not have the financial surety through the whole project makes a lot of sense. When you’re trying to develop and raise capital—I worked at Vale; I can’t remember if they’re second or first, but they’re a very large company. They could raise capital if they want to. But if you’re a junior mining company, you’re going to have a difficult time raising enough money for the end-life of the project.

If you were to think of it—people have a hard time understanding mining being built, but let’s say it’s a neighbourhood, and you’re going to bring in the road. You just have to have enough money to restore that road, and then you’re going to start developing to bring in the infrastructure, the pipes and electricity and stuff. You just need enough money to cover that if things go bad; if you end up going bankrupt, if the economy changes and suddenly cobalt is not as valuable as it was and you have to close down—you have enough money to close that section. I think it makes sense that before you start the next stage you have enough to cover that stage and the one before. I think that part of it is good.

But these parts about the environment, taking care of the community and having a positive relationship with Indigenous communities—those are hurdles that, unfortunately, I don’t think we can overcome on our side to support this legislation. These are big barriers. These are core values—core values for New Democrats and core values for the mining industry. So it would be difficult for us to support this.

After the second reading, I had asked for it to be travelled. The government House leader said, “Absolutely, we’re going to travel it.” I was excited for this because I thought this would be a real opportunity. Sometimes we put on our team jerseys and our team hats and we don’t listen to each other. When you go out there, you hear stuff from the community, and sometimes you hear stuff that you think is inaccurate; it’s not what you thought. But those people who work in the industry tell you stuff, and you’ve got to think about changing your point of view or adjusting it and moving that way. So we did travel. We travelled to Timmins, and we travelled to Sudbury. In northern Ontario, the distance between Timmins and Sudbury is pretty small. It’s very common in northern Ontario that we describe distance in hours. Last night I drove four hours to get here, and that’s not a big deal for people in Sudbury. I don’t know if you have the same relationship with distance in southern Ontario. Sudbury and Timmins is about a four-hour drive; it’s fine.

A lot of the talk here about mining has been about the Ring of Fire. Even if you don’t know anything about mining, over the last five or six years, I think if someone asked you about mining anywhere you are in Ontario, you would think of the Ring of Fire because it has been in the news so much. It’s a massive deposit there. It’s very exciting for the mining industry. Let’s be honest: There is a lot of proposed work going into the Ring of Fire. We did not go anywhere near that side of Ontario. Northern Ontario, if you look on a map, is about the size of the nation of France. We went to eastern Ontario, where Timmins and Sudbury is, but we didn’t go to western Ontario, where Sault Ste. Marie is, or, farther up the coast, to Thunder Bay or Rainy River, where the Ring of Fire would be. In fact, if you wanted to travel from one of those communities where the Ring of Fire is, if you wanted to travel from that side of the province to Timmins or Sudbury, it’s more than 1,000 kilometres of travel. I don’t know if we give adequate resources for those people to be heard on a bill that’s going to have so much to do with the Ring of Fire. It would be like if we were discussing a farming bill and you came to Sudbury. We do have farms around and in Nickel Belt, but Sudbury is typically not the hotbed of farming. And if we’re talking about the hotbed of mining right now, it is the Ring of Fire, and we just didn’t go there.

I talked about being from Sudbury and being in a mining town. I wanted something in my office to reflect the growth of Sudbury and what had happened, so I have a painting from Ray Laporte, who, I later found out, when my mom came to see my office, was friends with my mom. Ray is best known for what’s known as rock bass sculptures. He has passed on now, but a lot of people know him because he would make these sculptures of fish but with rock in between, because Sudbury is so entwined with rock, and called them rock bass. A lot of people have those in their house.

I have a painting in my office of Delki Dozzi, which is a community park in Gatchell. Gatchell is an Italian neighbourhood. Delki Dozzi park—there’s a landscape of it, and across from it you can see the slag dump. The slag dump resonates with me for a couple of reasons. One, Sudbury was known for a long time for being able to watch the slag. Slag is melted rock. It’s the waste rock after you smelt it. It used to be a tourist attraction—to come and park on the side of the road, and they would dump slag and you could watch it. In fact, if you have old postcards of Sudbury, they are probably of slag dumps. That is the one connection I have.

The second connection I have is, it’s where I proposed to my wife. In my head, I thought this would be romantic. The first date I had with my wife—she lived outside of Sudbury, in Nickel Belt—she was talking about how she’d never seen a slag dump, so we went to go see it. There wasn’t anything there, and she thought I’d just brought her to go parking. So—I can’t remember, five years later—when I proposed, I decided I was going to go to where we had our first date. It’s a dirty parking lot, so my advice to anybody thinking of proposing is plan ahead and check out the area. But I have a soft spot in my heart for that.

The third reason that it’s important to me is, that was my job. After I got married, when I got hired at Inco originally, now Vale, my job was furnace operator. I filled the bowls that would fill the slag.

So there’s that connection that I have from, as a child going out to watch and having Dairy Queen, to the connection of that I have a wife from that area and how every time we drive past it, my kids and she make fun of me—and filling those bowls and having that sort of blue-collar job that I’ve always been proud of.

The reason I talk about Ray’s painting is, you cannot—I went to go take a photo of that area to show the before and after because there’s been my lifelong experience of re-greening Sudbury, and I wanted to show how you can’t see the slag anymore. There’s grass and there are some trees growing on top of it, and it looks like a big grass hill now. I can’t get a photo of it because there are trees in the way. The trees have wrecked my photo, so I can’t show how it used to look and how it looks now because there’s no way to line it up because the trees are all blocking the shot, and that is my experience in a lifetime.

So if someone in my community were to say to me, “I cannot believe, Jamie, the NDP didn’t support the mining bill,” I would say to them, “I grew up in Sudbury when it was a moonscape, and throughout my lifetime we have worked tirelessly to re-green this community, we have worked so that we can restore the pollution that was caused to Junction Creek—Junction Creek used to be a yellow and green, highly polluted creek; we restored it to the point that brook trout are now swimming in it.”

Throughout my lifetime, we have turned a moonscape into Earth. This law weakens environmental protections for mining communities, and I won’t have another community in northern Ontario go through what we went through in Sudbury.

We all agree that mining is important. The Conservatives as well—all of us understand this. Mining includes the product but also includes the people and the environment, and the product I want to talk about first is metals and minerals.

There has been a lot of talk since the bill was tabled about the importance of e-vehicles—and absolutely, it is. E-vehicles are the next wave of the future. I remember when I was first elected, auto companies were speaking with me about the importance of the government understanding that e-vehicles are happening—that we are set for the next Detroit is what I was told. It’s a worldwide business. So the next Detroit could be in Ontario because we have not just the trades skill—because you need that to build these cars—but we have the post-secondary education, because a lot of these cars are as much technology as they are physical matter.

I’m glad that we’re excited today because, in 2018, when I was excited about electric vehicles and people were getting involved with electric vehicles—my son, in fact, bought a hybrid just before the election and was able to get the rebate that was there that was cancelled afterwards. But the same government that’s now touting electric vehicles was cancelling rebates allowing people to get into electric vehicles early. The same Conservative government that is bragging about electric vehicles now was ripping up charging stations. As my car starts to slowly disintegrate with over 200,000 kilometres on it and I’m looking at my next vehicle, I would love to get an e-vehicle. There are very few charging stations between Sudbury and here, so I don’t know if I can get to Toronto in order to drive my vehicle, but I would like that opportunity. If we weren’t ripping up charging stations, if we were installing more charging stations during the time from 2018 to 2022, there may be more places for me to charge. But I am glad that they’re excited.

I also want to remind everybody that mining was really important before anyone knew what an EV was. There’s a reason that a half-tonne truck is really heavy. It’s not the rubber and the moulding—that thing is made out of steel, man. It’s heavy because of all the steel that’s into it. You peel off everything that’s not steel—a lot of people would even consider maybe the tires, but the tires are steel-belted, so mining is integral to everything we’ve done. We stumbled into the new frontier, I guess, of e-vehicles, but mining has always been important to society for as long as I can remember. Maybe because I’m from a mining community, it stands out more to me.

I was thinking this morning—first thing this morning, my alarm went off. I’ve set it on my cellphone because I travel back and forth from Sudbury to Toronto. My cellphone—none of those components would be available without mining. It’s instrumental to that.

I go for a shower and I’m reminded that all the pipes that bring the water up to the shower is all because of mining.

I get dressed and because I have no waist I have to wear a belt, and the attachment for my belt is there because of mining.

I get something to drink out of the kitchen sink. It has a stainless steel tub which is available because of mining.

The door handle is there because of mining. The key I lock the door with is there because of mining.

The elevator, the entire shaft and all the components, except for the plastic buttons, is there because of mining.

That entire building, the rebar holding it in place, is there because of mining.

As I walk here and I see the subway or trolley cars going by—that is all there because of mining, including the rails that they’re on.

Every car and bike—everything that you see, there’s a component of mining.

Even in this room, which has a lot of beautiful wood, there is mining all around us that is valuable.

And so while there is some excitement, I just want to remind people that mining has always been core and important to us.

I talked about people as well. There’s a famous expression, an important expression: “The most important thing to come out of the mine is the worker.” I like that because it’s a reminder of the deaths that happen in the mining industry. My passion was health and safety. We just had the Day of Mourning on April 28. The Steelworkers, which is the union that represents the workers at Vale, have a Day of Mourning ceremony. Management from Vale comes. They say, “We remember the workers who died.” The families come as well. There’s a slide show. I should have counted the names, but there are a countless number of names, over the last 100-plus years, of people who have died underground or on the surface in the mining industry. The number goes down, but it’s very important to recognize that workers die in the mining industry.

They also live in those communities. During deputations, when the committee travelled, Eric Delparte came from USW Local 6500. Eric is a miner. He’s a union steward. He’s a community activist. Eric, when I first met him, worked on the honey wagon. I know the minister knows what that is, but other people here probably don’t know. I’ll talk about what this is afterwards. He talked about mining, and he’s very proud, like most people who are miners, of the work that they do. It’s a work hard, play hard workplace. And when they’re not mining, when they’re not underground and blasting, mucking, scooping—when they’re not doing all of that work, people in the mining community hunt and fish and they play ball, and they get together. And so Eric said that Sudbury is a place where we work, fish, hunt and play. I think that’s an important thing to think about. What we hear about a lot today is the prosperity and the jobs, which is all important to community. When times are good, community is generally better. But you have to understand that community is also where you live. It’s where you work. It’s where you hunt. It’s where you fish. It’s where you play. It’s where you raise your families and take care of your families. And you can’t replace a good-paying job and eliminate everything else in your community that’s important to you. You need that balance between the two of them.

I mentioned earlier that Eric, when I first met him, worked on the honey wagon. A honey wagon is a polite way of saying—there’s washroom facilities underground, and the person who cleans them and maintains them works in the honey wagon. Eric, in his typical style of joking around, would wear a tool belt with the hoses and different attachments on it. And I say that because I know there are members here who didn’t know what that meant—when I said “honey wagon” earlier. I say that to remind us all as MPPs that we don’t know everything; we think that we do. We think we know a lot of stuff. We get a lot of briefing notes. We’re fortunate to have access to a lot of resources. But really, it’s the people in the province, the workers in the province, the people in the community who will inform us and educate us and allow us to make really good decisions.

I’m going to talk about some of the flaws. I mentioned some of them earlier, but I’m going to go a little more into them.

There are sections of the bill where the director of mines has been replaced with the minister.

I have said this several times in the past, and I think that the minister understands: I have a lot of respect for the minister. We’ve had some conversations. Following the election, when I was working with the Minister of Labour to get the apology for the McIntyre miners, I went to go talk to the Minister of Mines about it. He cut me off right away and he said, “Oh, I know that. My dad had to breathe the McIntyre aluminum dust.” We talked a little bit about his history and his past. I know his father worked in mining; I believe his grandfather did as well, which is typical in northern Ontario, where it’s multi-generational. I wasn’t able to confirm it, so I don’t want to misspeak.

All through this act, they’re going to change the director to the minister. This isn’t anything personal about the Minister of Mines right now, who I think knows a lot but may not know a lot about all industries. I don’t know his whole background, so open pit might be different for him, or surface plants might be something where it’s a blind spot for him.

The director works for all of us. The director is non-partisan by nature. The director has the historical knowledge of what has happened in the past, has all the resources.

All of us in this room have to recognize that we’re only renting these seats, that there are people who were here before us and there are people who are going to be holding these seats after us. Some of us will lose an election, some of us will retire, but none of us get to keep these forever. So you need that institutional knowledge, you need that non-partisan knowledge to ensure that things go well for all the people of Ontario.

Frankly, during deputations, I kept asking people if they had asked for this, and nobody could tell me that they asked for this to happen. No one in the mining industry could tell me, the Indigenous communities didn’t tell me, the environmentalists—none of them wanted this. It’s curious that the Conservative government very clearly wants this, because they couldn’t provide anybody else who wanted it as well. When we had an amendment to remove it, they fought very hard and voted against it, so it wasn’t removed. But it seems like a weird thing to have in a bill that nobody is asking for.

I mentioned, as well, one of the other flaws earlier about the closure planning. They changed the wording about qualified professionals to certify the plan. At first, they couldn’t define what “qualified” meant—it was just “qualified.” I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t know the technical term, so I’ll just say it’s a bit of a weasel word. When you say “qualified,” it’s vague. What I think is qualified might be different from what my colleague thinks is qualified, and then you end up in the weeds. When you’re not clear about stuff, you open the door to lawyers and lawsuits and delays.

One of the things we wanted to ensure was that this qualified individual—once it was defined—would be independent of the mining company, because that’s clearly a conflict of interest. Sometimes at Vale, somebody would do something that was clearly a mistake, and the polite way of phrasing it was, “That was a career-limiting move.” If you are a qualified individual having to sign off on the stage of a project for a mining company that pays your wages, not signing off could be a career-limiting move for you. So we believe, as New Democrats, that this qualified individual really should be independent and separate from the mining companies that are looking for the permits; it’s possible they could be, but the Conservative government wouldn’t allow us to have this as part of the legislation in the amendments to ensure it happened. I don’t believe in “trust us”—not because of the Conservative government specifically. I think it’s bad policy to just say, “Trust us, that will never happen,” because when you leave doors open, people walk through them.

There’s another part about allowing more flexibility in the techniques used to rehabilitate mines once they’re closed. They changed the wording from “better” to “similar.” I heard the parliamentary assistant say that there was no change, but I think that changing from “better” to “similar” is a change, and it’s actually a weakening of the process. When we come into this House, for example, we all have the placemats that spell out where everyone is sitting and the different names and stuff, and it’s very clean and tidy. If we were to leave, at the end of the day, with water glasses and pieces of paper around, that’s not better. It’s very easy to tell what’s better and what’s not.

In fact, growing up, I was involved with the Scouts. I was a Cub, and then I was a Scout—and then when I got older it was that “pay it forward,” where I was a Beaver leader and a Cub leader and a Scout leader. When we go camping in Scouting, it’s very common to say that we’re going to leave our campsite better than we found it.

If eight-year-old kids can leave a campsite better than they found it, I believe that multi-billion dollar mining companies can do that as well and don’t need that watered down.

During deputations, we heard mining companies talk about infrastructure that was there and how it would help to leave it behind. There were hydro lines that were there, and there were structures that were there that it would be nice to leave behind. And I do agree with that, if the community wanted it. One of the communities said that the reason they didn’t want the hydro lines is that they don’t want to liable for that infrastructure; they have to pay for it and be liable for any kind of damage. So I understand if a community says no, but I don’t know if they’ll be able to when it says “similar,” because now the mining company can say, “Well, we have a great place. They can use this as an emergency shelter. We don’t have to tear it down. They can use this as a place to store things.” And so it just opens the door. And I’m not saying this is specifically why I would vote against this, but I am saying we could have found a middle ground that would allow the mining company and the community to work together so that they could come forward and they could agree: “We’d like to keep these structures; we’d like this structure to be back in place. The road has been handy to us. We’d like to keep the road and not have it returned.” But that didn’t happen. That was voted down as well.

The part I did think made sense to me—and I mentioned it earlier—was the stages of financial assurance. The way mining works is, before you open your mine, you have to pay to close the mine—and so it’s a little misleading to think of it in a hundred years, because you get to adjust over time. But if you’re going to open up a mine and you’re trying to find capital and investors, especially as a junior company, for the end project, it’s very, very difficult. So if you can do it in stages—and I mentioned this earlier, so I won’t go through it again, but if you can start at the first stage and have the surety to restore that if you had to close the mine. And then, before you start the second stage—you’ve already had the money in place for the first one—you have the money in place to restore the mine site for the second stage. That’s a part of this bill that really I think we can get behind. It would help move mining forward.

I mentioned earlier about mining company values and the value to people and the environment, and you’ll see this in mission statements. Most mining companies—most corporations—have a mission statement somewhere, and in there somewhere they’ll have something about the importance of the community and the importance of the environment. I believe that, in the past, these were words on a wall. They sounded well to someone in HR or PR, who probably wrote them. And if it happened, it happened, but it wasn’t really front and centre. Those were the old days; those were the old “black-rock Sudbury” days. But mining companies really are committed to these values of the environment and values of people.

The old days of saying, “I’m going to drive the bulldozer to the Ring of Fire” are over, and they were over long before the Premier said them—literally decades before he said them. It really did a disservice to mining companies. I’m not saying this to be hurtful. I’m saying this because it’s honest, and you need to hear it. You put mining on its back foot, and you damaged relationships that they had spent a very long time building.

The mining companies, the big players, the ones that were investing—and, honestly, any smaller one that wants to be invested in—they are committed to building a true nation-to-nation partnership with Indigenous communities. They’re struggling sometimes but they are doing their best to find their way, and what we heard clearly through the deputations, when the committee travelled, is that they would like advice and a framework on how to do this. Many of them are finding their way, and they’re working at it, but they’ve gone—in the old days, they used to do this: “Hi, we’re doing this.” That was consultation. They don’t do it anymore. They really have ongoing relationships and meetings—the best ones. And the best ones should be lighting the path forward for the other ones. And, really, as government, when they’re asking us for frameworks and for help for them to do this even better, we should be providing that to them.

As I said earlier, driving a bulldozer—it’s not helpful. When you’re trying to build a nation-to-nation relationship with First Nations in Ontario and you don’t separate the Indigenous file from the northern development file, it sends a message to Indigenous people in Ontario, First Nations in Ontario, that their value is connected to the wealth of the land where they live, that their value isn’t about them specifically; it’s what’s beneath their feet or what grows around them that we can harvest and make money from.

When the Conservatives tabled the bill, it was during PDAC, and I think one of the reasons it was tabled that week is because the prospector development conference was out and it’s a good talking point while you’re there. There are good things in the bill, for sure, but, the Conservative government tabled this without consulting Indigenous communities. True, meaningful consultation, like I said, is not showing and is not coming after the bill is tabled and saying, “This is what we’re doing.” With all due respect to the minister, it’s not saying, “If you want to provide feedback, you can do it to the end of this month”—I may have heard it inaccurately, but it’s later this month—especially when the bill is probably going to be voted on by the end of this week. That is not consultation. That’s a formality, that’s a checked box, but that formality, that checked box—mining companies are moving away from that, and they want to really have true consultation, that true relationship.

I just want to talk for a minute about the request that we had from mining companies to have this framework, because I think it’s important. We heard a couple of times from the PA earlier in debate about how nothing in the federal legislation that requires consultation has been changed. He’s accurate. What he’s not sharing with you is that there wasn’t any consultation on this bill. There is legislation in place saying it has to happen, but it didn’t happen. I’m pointing this out because that means there’s a flaw, there’s a loophole in this. And when industry comes to us and says, “Do you know what would help us as we try develop this process? It would be nice if there was a framework that was spelled out, because we’re not sure when we should start, we’re not sure how to start, we’re not sure who to approach”—I’m not pointing fingers, because my relationship, my knowledge with Indigenous communities where I live, started when I was 40. I’ve talked in the past about this—thinking I was an ally, and then, somewhere in my forties, realizing I was polite. I didn’t know about Atikameksheng Anishnawbek—I didn’t know they were part of the Robinson-Huron Treaties territory. There are lots of us who are like this because our school system didn’t teach us this, and so we’re learning together and moving together. We’re walking the good path, as they would say, together. As we’re walking down the good path, when people are coming forward from the mining industry saying, “This would help us be more successful; we’d be better at this if you could help us do this,” it would be great if we were to say, “That’s a good idea.”

The way we could have said, “This is a good idea,” is that when we brought forward the amendments—my colleague MPP Mamakwa read the amendment and spoke about it very passionately. I think not voting it down would have been a first sign, or saying, “We’re not able to do it now, but we’re going to commit to have that done within a year,” would have been a good sign. I don’t believe that saying, “It’s good enough,” is a good sign—“It’s good enough. It isn’t working, it isn’t happening, but it’s good enough, and it’s already there.”

There were 22 amendments—there were a little more; some of them were withdrawn. There were 22 amendments: 20 of them were from the New Democrats, one was from the independents, and one was from the Conservative Party. We also had three motions. They were all voted down. The Conservative amendment was a technical amendment just to fix wording in their bill. All the amendments were voted down. We don’t write amendments to make bills worse; we write them to make them better. Very little conversation—we spoke very candidly on our side about why these were important amendments. We spoke for a very long time, specifically about the ones that would strengthen the First Nations relationships and true ability to have free, prior and informed consent, and the Conservative government, unfortunately, just voted against them.

When I’m in this room and I hear the Conservative members speak about prosperity and the importance of the north and bringing jobs to the north, I’m concerned that maybe they don’t understand what northern Ontario is like. I’ll be honest: I’m from the north, and there are things about southern Ontario that I don’t understand, and I’m always open to learning.

We have had First Nations chiefs come here several times to talk about the importance of being consulted, and we have had First Nations chiefs who have been removed from the gallery, because in the gallery you’re not able to speak—but about how important this is to them, and to demand meetings with the minister, to demand meetings with the Premier, and to not have those happen. I think when my colleague from the other side says, “I’m very disappointed the NDP applauded”—I’m not disappointed to have applauded. I grew up in a city that was decimated by the environmental damage from mining communities, and so when a chief comes and says, “I want you to speak with me before you destroy the environment in my community,” I do applaud that.

I understand how important mining is, and I believe in how important mining is, but I also believe that the commitment to the community and commitment to the environment that mining companies talk about are equally as important. And when somebody who is a leader in their community says, “I care about my community and I want to ensure that it is taken care of—and not just about jobs, but that you have a real, true, free, prior and informed consent conversation with me,” that has to happen. And if you have to yell because people aren’t listening to the polite conversations—maybe you do have to yell to be heard.

Interjection.

I thank the member for that question. The member asked how this helps people take control of their destiny.

I’m from southern Ontario. I’m from the county of Essex. We have a nice mixed economy in Essex county. We have farming, we have industry, we have tourism, so that when one area of the economy is flagging, other areas of the economy have made up for that. We’ve always had opportunity in the riding of Essex, and we want to share that. We want to share that with all of Ontario. We want people in northern Ontario to have that too. People in northern Ontario, to a great extent, are dependent on mining. We want to share our kind of economic thriving with northern Ontario, and we can do that through this legislation.

The minister has said in his comments that he appreciates all those who participated in defining this bill. What the minister has not referenced is all the voices that were intentionally left out. In fact, we have heard in this House that if you’re not fully on board with Bill 71, then you better get out of the way. This message applies to the very Indigenous nations that were not consulted, perpetuating colonialism in the year 2023.

Why have you sabotaged your own bill by disrespecting First Nations people in Ontario?

Question?

My father used to say, being from northern Ontario, that the mining and industry in northern Ontario used to fuel southern Ontario. That changed over time—regulations and changes.

Now that I live in southern Ontario and I have built my home here in southern Ontario, I’m wondering if the minister or his parliamentary assistant could say what this act does to help people in the GTA and our prosperity here.

I heard that. The member said it wasn’t appropriate.

A lot of this bill really is about the Premier saying, “Trust us.” At the end of question period, the Premier came over and talked to me. He said, “I hope I’ll have your support on this bill”—and unfortunately, he doesn’t. There are parts of it that I think are going to help, but there are parts of it that are damaging and parts of it that are weakening, and I do not trust that things will go well. When the Premier and the Conservative government don’t provide free, prior and informed consent to Indigenous communities before tabling this bill, I do not trust that he will do it before moving forward with mining applications.

Neskantaga First Nation has come several times. The first time I met them was in MPP Mamakwa’s office, and they had a bottle of water—I had heard about the polluted water in the past, but I hadn’t seen it. It is visibly polluted. I always thought there were chemicals in it that would be harmful to drink; you can see in it that it is—it looks a little like swamp water. It is cloudy and unclear, and there are bits of debris in it. You don’t need a microscope to understand. When I spoke with these members of this community about the water that they brought from Neskantaga, they told me that even in Toronto, where they’re told that the water is safe to drink, they will not drink the water, because this has been going on for generations—28 years without clean water: “My oldest just turned 26, so for more than his lifetime, I could not bathe him. I couldn’t give him water out of the tap to drink. I couldn’t clean his clothes. These are all basic things. When he spit up on me, I couldn’t have a shower.”

You cannot go forward and say, “Trust us. It’s going to work out,” when you have communities like this who have been unable to trust multiple governments—not just the Conservatives, multiple governments—for 28 years. The last time the government said “trust us” was 28 years ago. If you waited 28 years for clean drinking water, would you trust the government? If they tabled a bill without speaking to you, would you trust the government? Would you think, “Oh, next time”? This is a “the cheque is in the mail” conversation. None of us believe people when they say the cheque is in the mail.

Honestly, with the Conservative record on the environment, I do not trust them. It has not been a good record.

In Alberta, the Conservative government of Alberta told the citizens to trust them—this is about oil lines and gas lines—that industry will do the right thing and the polluters will pay to clean up their mess. And I think that the company that made the mess—there’s high risk, there’s high reward. When you see mining companies post profits with a billion per quarter, they’re doing all right. They have to have the structure in place to restore things and to clean up the environment where they do business, and so weakening it doesn’t make any sense.

In Alberta, there are currently 170,000 abandoned oil wells. That’s 37% of all their oil wells that are abandoned. Do you know who’s going to pay to clean those up? It’s not the oil companies that made the money; it’s the taxpayers. Even if it cost a dollar, it’s going to cost taxpayers $170,000 to clean up these abandoned wells. But it’s not going to cost a dollar; it’s going to cost a fortune to clean up these wells.

What the Conservative government did in Alberta is that they started offering royalty money—so taxpayers’ dollars—to these companies to pay them with taxpayer money to clean up the mess that they made while getting profitable. Think about that for a second. I think about starting a small business, maybe a coffee shop, and I’m worried about the risk if my coffee shop isn’t successful. So I go to the government and I say, “I’d like to open a coffee shop, but I don’t want any risk. Can you buy all of the infrastructure for me? And if my coffee shop goes under, if I’m not able to make ends meet, I’d like to just leave, and then someone else can clean it up for me.” That’s kind of what they’re saying on this, and it doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make sense because people understand that business is about risk. It’s great to want to minimize risk for people and make it better for people to want to invest, but “minimize” and” eliminate” are different. And basically telling people who have mining companies building and developing in their communities, “Trust us, they’ll clean it up”—well, the history hasn’t been great for cleaning up. I talked about Sudbury several times—it hasn’t been great.

I talked about these oil wells in Alberta. I think on this plan that the Conservatives in Alberta are doing, where they’re paying companies who refuse to clean the land taxpayer money to clean up their own mess—it kind of goes in the face of the quote that the company that made the mess and profited from it has to clean it up, and I think that’s why the Globe called it corporate welfare. Previously, they gave a $1-billion payout by the federal government to deal with some of the damage—so at both levels they’re getting a payout, from the federal and provincial governments. It’s easy to brush that aside and say, “That’s oil wells. That would never happen for mining because mining is totally different.”

What could go wrong in mining? Ironically, the first place we travelled to when we travelled the bill was Timmins, and outside of Timmins is the Kam Kotia mine disaster. This is Ontario’s most notorious mine waste project. They had a mine in Kam Kotia, and they abandoned it—and this was years ago, before the legislation was strengthened. It was an American company, and then a couple of junior ones tried to take it over and make a run at it. Basically, they ran for a while and they mined, and they left a mess behind, and now taxpayers are ponying up $28 million to fix this mess. Speaker, $28 million dollars is a lot of money. Whenever I hear the Conservative government talk about, “If we had the money, we could invest in schools and health care”—well, if you didn’t give $28 million away to the Kam Kotia mine disaster, we would have that money. Some of the examples they talk about in the description—the mine only operated from September 1943 until December 1944, and its legacy still lingers on. If you were to go there, you would see that “dead trees sticking out of the swamp and rotting vegetation create a scene from a Hollywood horror movie. Oxidation of sulphide in the mine tailings (treated remains of ore) and waste rock causes an acidic runoff affecting creeks and rivers close to the mine.” So those all flow. There are about 200,000 tonnes of waste rock and six million tonnes of mine tailings on the site. So when the Conservative government and the Premier are saying, “Trust us,” or “I hope I can count on your support, Jamie,” I think of the $28 million that taxpayers had to pay to clean up this one mine site four hours north of Sudbury, and I don’t really trust on this issue.

I’ve already talked about the director, so I’m going to skip over that.

Interjection.

Oh, I thought I did.

The member from Oshawa is saying I didn’t talk about “better than” and “comparable to.”

Interjection.

I think this is a funny one, but just because I have the time to talk about it—there has been a lot of discussion about the 15 years to open a mine site. I made a comment when I was doing the lead debate at second reading on this, and I explained that 15 years is kind of normal. Conservatives have been all over the place, that it shouldn’t be 15 years for an open-pit mine, it shouldn’t be 15 years for a—I don’t care. If you’re planting crops and you’re upset that it takes a growing season to grow your crops, you’re not being realistic. That’s just what it takes. If we can shorten the time and get it to less than 15 years, by all means, let’s do that. But if you’re going to stand here and tell me that you can open a mine and you want to cut it down by bypassing the protections that are in place—there are all kinds of FEL studies, there are investments, there are environmental studies, there’s all kinds of stuff that has to happen, and winter also throws a wrench into things. So it really shouldn’t be something that we’re arguing about; it’s just the reality of the workplace.

Anyone going around Toronto, when you see a skyscraper being built—it takes time to build a skyscraper. I’d love it to be done tomorrow. They’re building near my place, and it’s super loud. It would be great if it only took a month. It just takes a little bit longer. People are working. It takes time.

It’s also a little misleading, I think, to say that no one’s employed until the 15 years is over. The bulk of your employees don’t show up, but there are people who work all the way through that. The prospector is working before that. The people who are doing the core samples are working before that. The engineers are working before that. The environmental specialists are working before that. There is a lot of work going on.

I talked about the minister’s powers. I’ve mentioned several times my respect for the minister and his knowledge of the mining industry. But ministries don’t last. Cabinets will shuffle. Governments rise and fall. The parliamentary assistant, for example—I believe his background is in law; I don’t know if it’s in mining law. As much information as the minister has with his lifelong knowledge—I’m sure he learned a lot under his father before he was working in the industry, and then while working in the industry—when we make this change, this change lasts forever, until it’s amended.

The knowledge that the Minister of Mines has right now could change if there’s a cabinet shuffle or if he decides not to run again in the future or if anything happens, and it could just land in anyone’s hands. They’ll do the best they can, but honestly, they will not have the institutional knowledge that the director will have. They won’t have that framework to be able to share. And any decision that the minister makes, just because of the nature of where we work, will be considered as partisan—even if it’s not, it will always be looked at as a partisan lens because all of this in this House are seen as party members. All the ministers are Conservative. The opposition members are New Democrats. The independent members are Liberal and Green. Two are just independent, but most of us are seen with whatever colour is part of our party, and it’s very difficult, if the minister makes a decision, for it not to be seen as a Conservative decision and not an independent decision. So I don’t understand why they want this.

I said earlier that I don’t think industry wanted this or asked for this; there’s no way to demonstrate it. When I asked them in committee, when I ask people at PDAC, when I talked to my colleagues and friends from the mining industry at PDAC—none of them seemed to be really interested or cared or knew why it was there or not. So it’s an odd thing to do, and I think it hurts us all as elected officials, because whenever things look like we’re doing things for what’s best for our party above what’s best for the people of Ontario, it is a bad look for all of us, no matter which side of the House you sit on. It’s a weakening.

As I said earlier, it’s a flawed bill. At second reading, I was clear about it; it’s really not terrible, but it’s flawed. The issues when it comes to Indigenous communities and the issues when it comes to the environment are things that are just a bridge too far in terms of support. It’s hard to measure the parts that are going to help. We would have been open to addressing those or fixing them through the amendments that we brought forward, but they voted against those amendments.

I want to speak briefly about tailings. I don’t think I heard you earlier. I apologize; I had to get something out of my office, so it may have been spoken about. Part of the bill does talk about tailings, and I want to talk about this because it is important. If you’re doing an aerial map—if you go to Google Maps, you can see some of the tailings ponds around Sudbury. Tailings are basically the waste rock. If you’re in mining, they bring muck to the surface. If you’re not from mining, you think of mud; the muck is actually big chunks of rock. Then, at the crushing plant, they literally crush this rock. There are a bunch of methods. The ones we use are ball mills and rod mills. Basically, the rock bounces against these big metal balls or rods, crushed into smaller and smaller fragments until it’s almost like a powder. There’s a lot of water that’s used in that and slowly and surely, through a variety of processes—I’ll just use flotation—the valuable stuff sinks and the waste floats off. You end up with a lot of waste sludge. It’s kind of gross to look at, to be honest. It’s muddy. It’s not disgusting; it’s just muddy. It’s not super clean. They pump this into tailings ponds.

For a long time, especially in Sudbury—we’ve been mining for a very long time—you build a dam and you build the dam bigger every year as the tailings ponds come. Some of the water will evaporate, but you always have this sludge that’s in there. Mining creates a lot of this sludge, tailings. For every tonne of metal—I have a stat here—you get between 20 and 200 tonnes of solid waste.

In the old days, they weren’t as good at refining. We’re still not great at it. There’s always some good product that gets into that sludge. But in the old days, there was gold in them there ponds. So I’m excited about the part of this that will move toward allowing some recovery from the tailings ponds.

Not only are tailings ponds a huge liability, but they take up a lot of space in nearby communities. When I was at the smelter, one of our major hazards when we did hazard assessments was that if the tailings pond broke, we could very likely explode the smelter because of the hot metal. Hot metal does not like being cooled down suddenly, and it will explode. Also, there was a community nearby that we more than likely would have buried in tailings. I don’t want anyone to be panicked, because Vale and Copper Cliff are world leaders when it comes to tailings ponds. They’ve invested close to $1 billion. They have a world-class facility when it comes to tailings. So I don’t want people to be overly concerned, because hazard assessment is what we do in the mining industry all the time.

But there have been tailings dam failures in the past. In 2019, there was one in Brazil that buried an entire town, just completely covered it. Think of an avalanche, but it’s water and mud. Speaker, 267 people were killed, and a lot of those people were never recovered. They’re just assumed to have been in that waste because they weren’t able to find them. That was in 2019.

Since then, there have been 18 major tailings dam failures—six last year alone. It’s a major liability around the world. Canada doesn’t have as many of them, but we did have one in BC, at Mount Polley mine. There were about 17 million cubic metres of water and eight million cubic metres of tailings and materials. There were no penalties for that spill, either. I’m not sure of the details, but I would assume that the taxpayers are helping to clean that up.

The tailings recovery—the point I’m trying to get to—I think is a win-win solution. It minimizes that risk, and we also get to process more of the minerals that have come up.

As we get deeper into the tailings pond, it’s going to be even more valuable. It’s going to be the easiest mining ever, honestly. Any mining company would love to have that rich a resource so close to the surface without having to go very, very far below the surface.

There are going to be ways for this to remove pollutants and to reduce the size of these ponds. It’s exciting because Dr. Mykytczuk from MIRARCO in Sudbury is doing this leading-edge research on this. This is groundbreaking work that they’re doing that will be in Ontario and—I’m sure the minister would agree with me—that we’ll be able to celebrate around the world. People will be banging on the doors to figure out how they’re doing this. It will be something we could celebrate and show off. I want to thank the minister because I know, during second reading, he made an announcement to invest in MIRARCO and the work that she was doing. So thank you very much, Minister, for doing that.

I want to go back to Eric. Eric Delparte is a friend of mine. We’ve been friends a long time. I was very happy that he came. I didn’t ask Eric, specifically, to come to speak, but I’m glad that he did.

I often say that Sudbury is a small town disguised as a city. You don’t know everybody, but you’ve seen everybody before. It’s difficult as a politician, because you recognize everybody, and then when I meet somebody, they often know who I am because I’m more visible as a politician. So you’ll meet somebody and not be sure if you’ve actually met them before. But it has a small-town feel. People care about each other, look out for each other. If you don’t know somebody and you’re passing them on the sidewalk, you have to say hello. That’s the small-town charm that it has there, and I love it, just like my friends from every riding love where they’re from.

When Eric said that it’s not just where we work, but it’s where we hunt and fish and play—I think that’s a core of this that we need to understand. It’s very important to have good-paying jobs, it’s very important to support industry that creates jobs, but we have to recognize that life is more than work. The Steelworkers, when they pushed hard for the eight-hour workday, and then they do shift work that works out to an eight-hour workday—one of the mottos they talked about really was eight hours of work, eight hours with family, and eight hours of sleep, so your life is more than work, your value is more than work. I think it’s important to emphasize that when miners come out of the underground—when I said earlier that the most important thing to come from out of the mine is the worker—they go see their families or they go together on trips.

When I was junior and I didn’t have that much seniority, most of my vacation time was fishing trips with the crew I worked with. We would get together because we would have a Tuesday off and nobody else is off on a Tuesday. Or we would have vacation time in the middle of the winter, so we would have vacation together. There’s a tight bond—and I’m including my supervisor. This wasn’t like an hourly-versus-staff thing; we all hung out. We worked together. We played together. Our value was more than our job. Our job is what allows us to pay for the things that we do the rest of the day.

So when I talk about the flaws in here, I really am talking about the importance of the community, the importance of the environment—and not just the community of the individual employees, but everyone who is there. When you’re so close that you say hi and nod and ask how people are doing that you haven’t met in a small community, that’s reflective of the values of that community and the values of mining companies, as I said earlier. This is why we can’t support the bill—it’s those small parts with the environment and that lack of helping have free, prior and informed consultation with First Nations.

Questions?

Thank you to the member for Sudbury for his participation this afternoon—a very important participation, having had a depth of experience in the mining sector that I’m sure not many of us have. I really appreciated hearing about his lived experience and some of the concerns and also the interesting personal perspectives from his community.

I’m wondering if he could speak a little bit more about the tailing ponds. That was something that was very interesting to me—some of the reclamation. I know in Niagara we’ve had different—they’re not, I guess, formal tailing ponds, but different deposits and different by-products of manufacturing from 100, 110, 120 years ago that are now beginning to be reclaimed as actually assets that were sort of sitting there for a long time and now are being reutilized. I’m wondering if he could speak a little bit about that process and what he sees coming down the pipe with regard to the future—

Speaking of good aspects of the bill, the Mining Act would increase certainty for business planning and generate investment in northern Ontario. It involves engagement with industry, Indigenous communities and Indigenous organizations on the proposed changes, and there are no proposed changes to our world-class environmental protections. Given these positive features, why is the opposition voting against this act, when members from the party, the official opposition, are clearly in favour of the industry and understand how important it is to the overall economic well-being of the province of Ontario and to Indigenous and northern communities?

My thanks this afternoon for being able to rise on behalf of the people of Niagara West and to participate in debate on Bill 71, the Building More Mines Act. I’m very thankful to be able to stand in this chamber today and build on the remarks that have already been added to the debate about this piece of legislation that I believe is critical and very important to the future prosperity of Ontario, the current prosperity of Ontario, and continuing a legacy in this province that we have now had for generations upon generations—far before I came here, and far before my family came here some 70 years ago.

First of all, I want to thank the Minister of Mines, the strong member for Timmins, for coming to this chamber with a piece of legislation that will be a legacy not just for him but for our entire Parliament, I believe, in what it will do for so many communities, not just in northern Ontario but, as was already spoken about extensively through the debate from my colleagues—especially the member for Essex county, who spoke about the important investments that the mining sector makes throughout the supply value-added chain, especially in the auto parts sector. I know that’s a crucial part of the economy in my neck of the woods, as well.

So I’m thankful to be able to speak today about that. I’m thankful to be able to participate.

I wish to welcome all those who are watching this afternoon and wish them the ability to follow us in what can be sometimes a complex file but one that I believe is very important.

I speak for many constituents in communities across Ontario in thanking the Minister of Mines for his leadership and his tireless work to further build up and improve the mining sector.

Thank you, Minister Pirie, for all of your efforts and your labour and for helping to bring economic prosperity to Ontario.

The minister’s advocacy for this bill and his presentation earlier today make it clear that there is an urgent need for the measures in this proposed legislation, and it’s why it’s my privilege to rise for the third reading and to expand on a few of the details from Bill 71, the Building More Mines Act.

Before I begin, I want to reiterate the minister’s point that our government has been actively engaged in the process of consulting with the public, with industry stakeholders and with Indigenous communities, as well as organizations from across Ontario on our proposed amendments to the Mining Act. We have also been consulting on further regulatory changes. As the minister mentioned, which I believe is very important for me to repeat, the measures in Bill 71 are based on the recommendations and the feedback from industry and other stakeholder experts. This is not an ivory tower exercise where we went and had some academics gathered together in a room, perhaps at the Mowat Block or another downtown office and come up with what ideas should be imposed upon the north, what ideas should be brought forward for this sector. This has been the consequence of a lot of listening, a lot of meaningful engagement to get the very best ideas from the sector to support a more modern, more streamlined legislative framework and regulatory regime for mineral exploration and development. We know that all of these industry partners and leaders brought forward their extensive knowledge and expertise together to provide recommendations that we’re using as a road map to help drive the industry forward, to reduce barriers to build more mines more efficiently.

These changes are needed to help seize the economic potential of the province’s minerals, to support the geopolitical need for secure access to these resources as outlined by the minister, and to advance the transition to a more sustainable economy.

Our proposed amendments mean to save companies time and money by reducing administrative burdens and clarifying requirements for rehabilitation and creating regulatory efficiencies.

Perhaps most importantly, these changes will help Ontario attract mining investments to support the unlocking of critical minerals, including those in the Ring of Fire region, while maintaining Ontario’s strong standards for environmental protection and meeting the duty to consult with Indigenous communities.

Before I highlight some of the key proposed changes in this legislation, I do want to speak briefly to the committee hearings on Bill 71. Our government values the importance of the feedback we receive. It’s why separate hearings were held to gather feedback on the bill in two of the province’s northern mining hubs: Timmins and Sudbury.

I also want to thank the government House leader for his work on ensuring that we have these active consultations, as well as the other members of the Standing Committee on the Interior.

Our government has acted. We have listened and then moved forward on the recommendations and questions of the various stakeholders and presenters throughout the committee process. In particular, we introduced an amendment through the committee stage that will support a balanced consideration of public health and safety, as well as the environment, for the permit to recover minerals from mining waste.

I’ll be elaborating more on this in a moment, but I want to ensure that all of us who are watching today know that your government has heard the importance of listening and ensuring that we are responding to the needs of the people in making this proposed legislation even stronger.

We will always support common sense measures that balance the need to build more mines efficiently with the corresponding need to uphold protections for the public, for safety and for the environment.

This balance is exactly what Bill 71 achieves, and it’s what our partners and our global allies expect. Ontario is known globally for its world-class environmental protections, and improving the Mining Act is crucial to support the transition to a greener economy.

As the minister touched on, this proposed legislation is a very important part of our Critical Minerals Strategy. This strategy supports better supply chain connections between industries, resources and workers in northern Ontario and manufacturing in southern Ontario, including Ontario-based electric vehicle and battery manufacturing—good news for so many communities in the south.

Jobs in the north lead to more jobs in the south, including important manufacturing jobs right in my home of Niagara. For example, the GM St. Catharines Propulsion Plant recently announced a transition to EV—electric vehicle—propulsion systems, securing hundreds of well-paying, secure jobs here in Niagara.

As an aside, it’s worth noting that we are attracting over $16 billion in transformational investments by global automakers; in fact, if I heard the numbers correctly, that number will soon be $22 billion. We are becoming a world leader in the supplying of EV batteries and battery materials to position Ontario as a leader in the EV supply chain.

Speaker, our Critical Minerals Strategy is helping to secure the province’s position as a reliable global supplier and processor of responsibly sourced critical minerals. The five-year road map that’s contained in the Critical Minerals Strategy focuses on six pillars, which I’d like to speak about and mention as they do set the stage and provide some context for our government’s investments and work thus far to advance that sector, including the initiatives in this legislation. The six pillars of the Critical Minerals Strategy are (1) to enhance geoscience information to support critical minerals exploration; (2) to grow domestic processing and create resilient local supply chains; (3) to improve Ontario’s regulatory framework; (4) to invest in critical minerals innovation, research and development; (5) to build economic development opportunities with Indigenous partners; (6) to grow the labour supply and develop a skilled labour force.

We heard the Minister of Mines speak about the importance of a major objective in Bill 71. That objective is to improve the Mining Act so that we can attract more investments and help secure the critical minerals that support this made-in-Ontario supply chain I know we all want. It’s why we’re bringing forward a suite of changes which will address current challenges and support a modern, robust and effective mining sector.

Ontarians have seen and witnessed project delays, increased costs and lost opportunities due to a lack of flexibility in closure planning and a lack of clarity within the Mining Act. We know that some processes and requirements can create uncertainty, which leads to a burdensome delay.

I want to reiterate the purpose of the Mining Act because it underscores and informs all of the changes that we’re proposing in this legislation. The purpose of the Mining Act is to encourage mineral exploration and development in a manner consistent with the recognition and affirmation of existing Aboriginal and treaty rights, including the crown’s duty to consult, and to minimize the impact of these activities on public health and safety and the environment.

With this overarching purpose in mind, I would like to go into a little bit more detail about some of the particulars of the amendments that we are proposing. If passed, the amendments made through this legislation would save time and money for companies and, ultimately, for workers, providing more jobs and more money for our communities.

Currently, one of the requirements to obtain a permit for mining is that the applicant must demonstrate that the condition of the lands on which the recovery would take place would be “improved” with respect to public health, safety, and the environment after the recovery and remediation activities. The proposed amendments in this bill would replace the requirement to “improve the land” subject to the recovery permit with a requirement that the condition of the land be “comparable to or better than it was before the recovery activity.” This would provide greater flexibility for recovery permit applicants. The term “improvement” is ambiguous and creates uncertainty about the degree of improvement needed. What does that even mean? How much improvement is requisite under the act? This clarification will act as an incentive to ensure that companies who are participating in this worthwhile activity can make use of previously existing materials and have greater clarity.

I would also like to note that our government did bring forward a motion to amend section 18 of the bill to further strengthen the language around the requirements for the condition of land following recovery activities. During public hearings of the Standing Committee on the Interior, a number of stakeholders and presenters shared concerns regarding the consistency of the language in this subsection of the bill as it relates to the intended purpose and the conditions of the mineral recovery permit.

Speaker, as always, our government listened. We’ve heard these concerns, and we’ve acted. Throughout the legislative process, we’ve been open to feedback from stakeholders and partners, and we remain committed to strengthening the language in this bill to ensure the legislation reflects the goals we all share: improving the Mining Act, supporting the sector and, fundamentally, supporting local communities. Our proposed amendments to the current language in the legislation address the concerns that were raised and support a balanced consideration of public health and safety, as well as the environment, for the recovery of minerals permitted. Our proposed language ensures that remediation of the land with respect to public health and safety, as well as the environment, would be carried out to a comparable standard or better than it was before the recovery of minerals took place. This amendment would still maintain our commitment to flexibility and our objective in this section of the act to ensure that there is greater flexibility for recovery permit applicants, but also ensure that all of—not any of—public health and safety and the environment would be remediated to a comparable standard or better.

We know that these proposed improvements to the Mining Act are crucial to supporting the sector and the transition to a cleaner, greener economy. This motion to amend demonstrates that we are always going to uphold Ontario’s world-class standards for environmental protection and public health and safety in the mineral development sector.

Before I continue, I’d like to point out that companies in Ontario are already making use of this tactic to retrieve critical minerals from mine waste, which contributes to advancing the circular economy within the mining industry.

For example, we heard recently that Vale Canada is moving to accelerate commercial recovery of critical minerals from mine waste in partnership with the Mining Innovation, Rehabilitation, and Applied Research Corp. at Cambrian College. According to the company’s news release, “The industrial research chair program ... will develop, pilot and work towards commercializing bioleaching and bioremediation processes including efforts to recover nickel and cobalt from ... tailings and other wastes.” I appreciated hearing more from the member for Sudbury about the important advancements that are being made in this technology. Our government is supporting this groundbreaking project. We’re contributing through the Critical Minerals Innovation Fund, which Minister Pirie outlined in his remarks, as well as contributing through the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corp. To quote the Minister of Northern Development and Indigenous Affairs, the member for Kenora–Rainy River and the chair of the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corp.: “The ... Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corp. is supporting innovative solutions in the resource extraction sector that will change the way we see mining. By partnering with Vale,” MIRARCO and Cambrian College, “we are committing to made-in-Ontario solutions that will reduce mine waste and enhance value for materials already involved in the mining process.”

Our government’s support of this type of innovation to recover critical minerals from mine waste demonstrates our steadfast commitment to helping to move the industry forward in an environmentally sustainable way. This program is just one example.

Our proposed amendments would also simplify and improve closure plans by strengthening qualified professionals’ certification of plans and allowing companies to conditionally file a closure plan while deferring certain elements to a later-approved date. A conditional filing order would be issued by the minister on request from a proponent and may include terms and conditions for those elements as determined by the minister.

We are also proposing to eliminate the need for proponents to file a notice of material change for minor site alterations, which will help to alleviate unnecessary burdens.

There are more changes, changes to allow more flexibility in the techniques used to rehabilitate mines once they’re closed while continuing to uphold Ontario’s world-class environmental protection standards; our proposed changes to remove administrative burdens, to simplify processes with respect to closure plans and address ongoing concerns we’ve heard from this industry for years, including at public hearings before the committee. We know that we have to make these changes, because current processes are creating uncertainty, resulting in long delays, cost overruns and lost opportunities for mining proponents. We know that better is possible, and with this legislation, we are accomplishing that.

I do want to speak very briefly in the minutes I have left about those closure plans, because I think that’s something perhaps not everyone is aware of in what is entailed within the closure plan process. The Mining Act requires that mining companies have a filed closure plan before starting advanced exploration or mine production. A closure plan describes the measures that the proponent will take during the life cycle of the mine to rehabilitate the mine site.

There is currently no flexibility within the Mining Act to allow for a closure plan to be filed without all of the required materials, regardless of what features will be built or brought online during the life of the mine’s operations. Closure plans are supposed to be conceptual, forward-thinking plans for how to close out and rehabilitate a mine. It’s not always practical to provide information for features that, frankly, may never be built and for rehabilitation measures which can’t be predicted, let alone which innovative future technologies could be used. This is why we’re proposing measures to provide mining proponents with more flexibility.

Currently, the term “rehabilitate” in the Mining Act means to take measures so that the use or condition of the site is restored to its former use or condition, or is made suitable for a use that the ministry sees fit. We’re amending the definition of “rehabilitate” as well as the related definitions of “protective measures” to allow an alternate use or condition or feature to remain on the site post-closure. This, again, will provide greater flexibility and certainty to industry by allowing alternate post-closure land uses and rehabilitation measures while simultaneously upholding our environmental standards.

We’ve said it before, and I believe it bears repeating in this chamber: When issuing authorizations under the Mining Act, where those authorizations have the potential to trigger a duty to consult, Ontario will always assess and reassess the potential impacts to Aboriginal and treaty rights and remains committed to meeting its constitutional obligations, including the duty to consult with Indigenous peoples.

These proposed changes would also create more options for companies to pay financial assurance. Instead of paying financial assurance up front, it could be paid in phases tied to the project’s construction schedule. Currently, companies have to provide the government with financial assurance, the estimated cost of the rehabilitation measures described in the closure plan. This allows the province access to the money to carry out rehab work outlined in the plan. But the up-front cost can be sometimes unnecessary as proposed changes or proposed features may never be built, and associated rehab costs never materialize. Amending the Mining Act would update this process to allow proponents to submit financial assurances in a more reasonable timeline.

Speaker, I do see that I’m running close to the conclusion of my comments this afternoon. I just want to wish again, to all members of this Legislature, to remind them of the importance of this legislation and thank the Minister of Mines for taking the leadership that was need-ed to ensure that we have a strong mining sector, as we have had for generations in the past, for generations to come. Thank you so very much for listening to me this afternoon.

I’m pleased to be able to ask the member, who just gave an hour speech about mining—I appreciated that we all probably learned a couple of things about Sudbury, but about mining in a community: the good, the bad and the ugly; the historical and the potential here.

As he mentioned, this bill was tabled without free, prior and informed consent of First Nations. We have heard a lot about the fact that the Premier used the term “bulldozing” and is essentially bulldozing relationships. When we see a government that is playing First Nation off First Nation, I have concerns. Obviously, we on this side have concerns. Even today, we heard the government refer to “our First Nations” or “our Indigenous communities,” and they’re not ours. They don’t belong to us. Why is it so hard for this government to realize that they’re not stakeholders but that they are partners and should be properly consulted?

Questions?

Further debate?

Madam Speaker, Ontario has seen literally billions of dollars of automotive manufacturing investment as a result of the efforts made by this government, and one of those multi-billion dollar investments is from Volkswagen, in the city of St. Thomas. I’d like to hear from the member for Sudbury, why would he want to jeopardize that multi-billion dollar investment by wanting to stop the development of more mines in Ontario?

To the member from Sudbury: Thank you for your presentation. I always learn so much listening to you, especially on the subject of mining.

As part of the deregulation amendments that government Bill 71 contains—I recognize that there are some measures in there that certainly weaken the environmental protections, but there are also measures in there that release companies from financial obligations. One of them is, of course, the rehabilitation of the mines once the extraction is done. There seems to be not a lot of information in here—and perhaps it’s coming in the regulations—on who will pay. You’ve touched upon it that the taxpayer will most likely end up picking up the bill if the mining companies are released, but is there anyone else who could pay besides the taxpayer? Is there someone else you think the government has in mind who will pick up the bill besides the mining company?

This is a good aspect of the bill. I mentioned earlier complimenting the minister about the funding for Dr. Mykytczuk’s work from MIRARCO. Basically, to shorten it—when you mine, there’s a by-product, there’s a sludge, and there are valuable materials and also pollutants that are there. She has explained the process to me, and I usually end it by saying, “Exactly.” That’s why she has a PhD and I don’t. The process, basically, will use, I think, biological leaching to extract these and also capture some of the pollutants. It’s a way that we can shrink the liability of the tailings pond but also allow mining organizations to be profitable for stuff that they already brought to surface, and be able to mine that and process that in the future. So it’s a win-win for the environment, the community and the mining company.

I’m going to be fair to people: Our journey and knowledge when it comes to Indigenous communities, First Nations communities in Canada, I think for most of us of a certain age, has been stilted. You only know what you know. But we’re at the point now where we need to know more, and we know that we need to know more, and so we can’t pretend anymore—any of us—that we didn’t know any better.

I don’t understand why the bill didn’t have the consultation. I don’t know why we’re not moving towards free, prior and informed consultation. I don’t know why, when mining companies are asking for a framework, the Conservative government isn’t making that commitment to build the framework so mining companies can be more successful with this process. We really are in a stage where we should be doing this, and it makes perfect sense to me.

So I think it’s a great question and something we should be moving forward on.

The other thing is, you can say that there’s a good relationship with Indigenous communities, but there isn’t—there is for some mining companies who have worked individually to build a nation-to-nation agreement, nation-to-nation relationships, but the Conservative government hasn’t done a good job first-hand on this. If they had, we wouldn’t have chiefs saying, “You have to drag dead bodies off the roads to develop through my land.” This isn’t something that chiefs do off the hop; that is something they do when they’re being ignored. We’re urging them to build this relationship that the rest of the mining communities are asking for, have established, but the Conservative government has to be here and be an asset for mining companies when it comes to nation-to-nation relationships with First Nations.

There are some good aspects to the bill. Just to clarify, they’re changing the surety so you don’t have to pay for the whole project up front; you can do it in stages. So before you start the first stage, you have to have the money up front, and before you start the second stage, you have to have the money up front for the second stage—and the third stage. I think that’s a good part of this bill.

The part I’m concerned about is, when you change the aspects of leaving the land at the end of the day “better than” and you weaken that, it allows lawyers to get involved and arguments to happen.

I think, as well, that if you don’t have a good structure in place when things fall through, the public pays through taxes, and taxpayers have to pay for it. This is what we saw in the past with it, and I lived this in my own community. We’ve seen this with other abandoned mine sites, where the community, the taxpayers through all of Ontario have to pay for it.

So we want to make sure we’re not weakening those laws. Those laws were written for specific reasons and to insure them.

So there is some good, but there is some bad.

I’m very glad that Volkswagen chose to invest in Ontario. I met with auto companies during my first term, in 2018-19. I don’t want to say which auto company it was—not Volkswagen, but one of the other large auto companies—that said, “You need to speak to the government. What I need as an international company when I go and say to invest in Ontario is—I need to tell them we have more than a sign at the border that says, ‘Open for business.’ I need to know what that means and what to spell out.” And the government wasn’t able to do that for four years. So I’m glad they’re able to attract. I’m glad that Volkswagen chose Ontario. We have a lot to offer.

One of the things we have to offer that’s being jeopardized today is—we have a universal medicaid system that has been weakened. That’s what makes us more attractive than the States for these companies to invest in—but as we get towards the American medicaid system, we’re not going to be as competitive, and we’re going to lose those jobs.

Questions?