I hope the member opposite has received a copy of the Your Health document that has been circulated to all MPPs because it actually highlights in that document exactly the expansion that we have in the works to expand the number of family health practitioners and primary care practitioners practising in the province of Ontario.

In fact, since our government formed government, we have had over 1,800 new family docs practise in the province of Ontario. Of course, we also have two—not one—new medical schools that are being built. In fact, in Brampton alone, we are going to have new family docs who are registered and starting to practise their studies in September 2024 because we were able to work with a partnership with the city of Brampton to find an existing building, renovate it and get those students in training as quickly as possible.

I’m proud of the work that we’re doing—

Interjections.

This petition is titled, “To Raise Social Assistance Rates.

“To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas Ontario’s social assistance rates are well below Canada’s official Market Basket Measure poverty line and far from adequate to cover the rising costs of food and rent: $733 for individuals on OW and $1,227 for ODSP;

“Whereas an open letter to the Premier and two cabinet ministers, signed by over 230 organizations, recommends that social assistance rates be doubled for both Ontario Works (OW) and the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP);

“Whereas the recent small budget increase of 5% for ODSP still leaves these citizens below the poverty line, both they and those receiving the frozen OW rates are struggling to live in this time of alarming inflation;

“Whereas the government of Canada recognized in its CERB program that a ‘basic income’ of $2,000 per month was the standard support required by individuals who lost their employment during the pandemic;

“We, the undersigned citizens of Ontario, petition the Legislative Assembly to double social assistance rates for OW and ODSP.”

I wholeheartedly support this petition. I’ve affixed my signature, and I’m handing it to Riya for the Clerks.

Thank you to the minister for her response. I know that all members of this Legislature agree that every woman has the right to live in safety and with dignity, free from intimidation, coercion and the threat of violence.

What is needed now is timely intervention and access to a variety of supports to help women who are at risk where and when they need it. The government must ensure we are supporting survivors who are escaping violent situations and providing them with the supports they need to enable them to start new lives, with futures free from abuse and free from fear.

Speaker, can the minister please explain how investments made by our government will lead to tangible outcomes for women across our province who are experiencing violence?

Thank you again. These crisis lines are free, confidential and available 24/7 to help ensure those affected by violence or sexual exploitation can access supports they need anywhere, any time.

In addition to 24-hour crisis counselling, the lines offer triage support, such as referrals to women’s shelters and specialized programming to help survivors rebuild their lives and heal from trauma. This investment supports multiple organizations, including:

—the Assaulted Women’s Helpline, which provides services in over 200 languages;

—Fem’aide, which offers crisis counselling and referral services for francophone and French-speaking women; and

—Talk4Healing, which provides culturally responsive services for Indigenous women and their families in urban, rural, remote and First Nations communities.

Working together, we can end violence against women and we’re going to continue towards this important goal.

“To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas this government has committed to building, expanding and repairing Ontario’s highways and bridges, creating jobs and spurring economic growth;

“Whereas construction is well under way on the expansion of Highway 3;

“Whereas investment in key infrastructure greatly enhances the safety and economic output of our province;

“Therefore we, the undersigned, petition the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to:

“—continue to build Ontario, and focus on enhancing critical infrastructure;

“—work with local municipalities to effectively execute major infrastructure projects across the province.”

I fully support this petition, I affix my name hereto and I will give it to legislative page Rohan.

I want to thank Sally Palmer for collecting these petitions. This petition is entitled a petition “To Raise Social Assistance Rates.

“To the Legislative Assembly of Ontario:

“Whereas Ontario’s social assistance rates are well below Canada’s official Market Basket Measure poverty line and far from adequate to cover the rising costs of food and rent: $733 for individuals on OW and $1,227 for ODSP;

“Whereas an open letter to the Premier and two cabinet ministers, signed by over 230 organizations, recommends that social assistance rates be doubled for both Ontario Works (OW) and the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP);

“Whereas the recent small budget increase of 5% for ODSP still leaves these citizens well below the poverty line, both they and those receiving the frozen OW rates are struggling to live” during a period “of alarming inflation;

“Whereas the government of Canada recognized in its CERB program that a ‘basic income’ of $2,000 per month was the standard support required by individuals who lost their employment during the pandemic;

“We, the undersigned citizens of Ontario, petition the Legislative Assembly to double social assistance rates for OW and ODSP.”

I support this petition, I’ll affix my signature and provide it to page Mary so she can give it to the table.

Resuming the debate adjourned on March 7, 2023, on the motion for second reading of the following bill:

Bill 71, An Act to amend the Mining Act / Projet de loi 71, Loi modifiant la Loi sur les mines.

I think all of us are aligned that mining is important. My background and my career is in mining, so I know I’m on board; I know my colleagues are, for sure, and I know the government side is, as well.

Mining includes three things: product, people, and the environment. You can break it down further than that, but at its core mining is a product—the metal and the minerals, for example.

Right now, the government is very excited about e-vehicles—critical minerals and electric vehicles. This is going to be a boom. This is going to be very, very important. It would have been more fortunate, I think, if they were excited in 2018, when they were ripping up charging stations. If they were excited in 2018, they wouldn’t have been cancelling the incentive to buy EVs and hybrid vehicles. If they were excited for this in 2018, the Premier probably wouldn’t have said, “That ship has sailed,” when GM workers were going to lose their jobs. But they’re excited now, and better late than never. I’m glad that they were able to come around to this.

Just for the record, because I hear a lot about e-vehicles and mining and the excitement around it—it’s going to be a boom, absolutely, but I just want to point out that mining and vehicles have always been important. If you were to strip everything not mining-related from a vehicle, you would have a couple of hoses, some plastic and a few seat covers, and the tires—and not even the whole tires, because tires are steel-belted. I say that just to refresh people that it’s around us everywhere, in everything that we do. Sometimes people talk about EV vehicles and mining as if all our cars were Fred Flintstone vehicles that were stone tires and wood on the sides. But mining has always been important.

Another product that mines have—and it’s a bit of an ugly product—is tailing ponds. In the bill, it talks about advancing critical mineral projects by making it easier for companies to get a permit to recover minerals from mine tailings and waste. Those are the materials left behind after the target minerals are extracted. This is really important to the future of mining, especially in Ontario, if we want to position ourselves as global leaders.

Tailings are like a sludge that’s left behind after you mill the muck that comes to the surface. You make a lot of this in a mine. Depending how rich your ore is, for every tonne of metal—the actual mineral you get out of it—you’re going to leave about 20 to 200 tonnes of waste. So what happens is, they’ll blast muck—people think it’s gravel, but muck is big chunks of rock. They’ll grind that down into a powder and a slurry paste. They use water, and they float it. Not to get too far into the weeds, but whatever isn’t valuable, they pump out to tailings ponds. They pump this all day.

The history of tailing ponds is, they just keep building them bigger and bigger. There’s some that, they get out of it—but it really is a liability for a lot of organizations. They take up a ton of space. In communities like mine, they threaten the nearby communities. I come from Sudbury, which is a mining town. We have a tailings pond and a children’s pool right beside each other—a small lake, but it’s a family lake that people go to.

There have been tailing dam failures in the past. A lot of people in mining really woke up to the fact—there have been a lot of major failures, but in 2019, Brazil had one that buried an entire town, and 267 people were killed when this happened, not to mention all the infrastructure that was destroyed. Since 2019, there have been 18 major tailing dam failures—six last year alone.

Canada’s largest tailing spill was at Mount Polley mine, in 2014. They lost about 17 million cubic metres of water, eight million cubic metres of tailing and materials—so it’s water and materials, and as they pump it into the tailings pond, the materials will sink to the bottom. With this spill, there were no penalties. There was a massive cleanup. There was environmental damage, obviously. It got into the water system—not to mention everything that it trampled in its wake. But there are no penalties currently in place for this.

I don’t want to speak badly of the mining industry, because I know after these incidents, a lot of mining industries—including the one I worked at—invested very heavily in ensuring that their tailings ponds were fortified, had spillways and accommodations for it. But I don’t know how well you can guarantee that every mining industry had done this. And I don’t know how you can guarantee old tailing ponds are secured like this.

Tailings recovery is a green solution. It’s win-win; it’s money in the pockets for the mining companies, which is good for the communities and the workers who have the extra work. It cleans up the environment, which is good as well, and it’s a real investment. When you see how much ore and rock and muck is brought to the surface, compared to how much comes out of it, going to a place where you’ve paid for that already, you’ve paid to blast and drill and hoist—and going and being able to get it out of, basically, a pool is very, very fortunate.

A lot of these tailing ponds are decades old. The member from Essex, this morning, was talking about how mining is back, and when he was saying it, I was thinking to myself that I got hired at a mining company that was 100 years old. That’s not traditional. But mining has been around for a very long time. So if you have 100 years of mining, you traditionally will have 100 years of tailings ponds and infrastructure in place. In the old days, just separation wasn’t as good as it is now—there’s still a little bit that gets away all the time. But as it settles, you’re basically—if you think of the old Yukon rush days, when they panned for gold, there’s minerals; there’s gold in them there hills.

Removing the minerals from the tailings ponds will make the ponds smaller. It will reduce pollutants. It’s also really profitable for mines because, like I said earlier, they’ve already paid to bring the stuff to the surface.

Last night I was at the PDAC conference, and so were a lot of my colleagues from both sides of the aisle. I ran into Dr. Nadia Mykytczuk from MIRARCO, and I want to brag about her because she’s from Sudbury. She was originally at Laurentian University, through the CCAA process—she wasn’t there, but got picked up at MIRARCO, which has a great history for mining innovation. I’m not a doctor. I know, basically, what she’s trying to do, because I toured tailing ponds and I worked in health and safety at our mine. I’m just going to quote from a Sudbury.com article where she explains the process. I’ll start midway through:

“That’s what we call biomining: using bacteria instead of a smelter as a catalyst to break down these materials and extract some of the metals that are left over.” The smelter is where you melt everything.

“If you take the biomining approach you can accelerate the process that causes acid mine drainage, but at the same time, by accelerating the process, you’re releasing a lot of the iron, a lot of the sulphur, and any metals that remain. You can actually separate those out and you can deal with the iron and sulphur precipitated into a solid form and prevent it from causing acid mine drainage in the long term, and then also extract the metals that can help pay for that cleanup.”

Basically, what she’s saying is that with this process—and it’s used around the world, but I think she has a great idea locally for how we can do it more effectively—you can not only extract the valuable metals that you want, but you can also capture some of the waste product and make tailings a little safer. It’s not 100% safer, but it’s a really golden opportunity. So this part of the bill absolutely is a great idea and supportable.

We’re going to be debating the budget very soon, so I want to make sure that I get on the record MIRARCO’s budget submission, because I think this is important as well. Their submission was called “Transforming mine waste into economic opportunity”—if the government is looking to look it up:

“The Centre for Mine Waste Biotechnology ... will be the first of its kind in Canada: a pilot-scale facility equipped with tools and expertise to move biotechnology-based bioremediation and bioleaching technologies more quickly to real-world mine settings. With support from the Ontario government, the centre can begin to achieve its vision to be a catalyst for transforming bench mine waste biotechnologies into commercial applications....

“Mine waste contains billions of dollars of untapped mineral content that is beyond the reach of traditional extraction methods. Processes such as bio-oxidation and bioleaching offer an environmentally sustainable way to extract this material from low-grade ores and mine wastes.”

The fact that stood out to me was that in Sudbury alone, you’re looking at $8 billion to $10 billion. MIRARCO is looking to raise $21 million, and that’s combined investment from municipal, provincial and federal governments, private partners and industry partners, to establish a centre to deal with tailings and waste. Our portion, provincially, would be a portion of the $21 million, but the recovery in Sudbury would be $8 billion to $10 billion.

So I just want to push it again—I was there when Nadia presented this to the finance committee, and I want to push again for it because I think this is a smart idea. I believe the minister is on board, as well; I don’t want to speak for him, but I think he’s in favour of this.

The next part I want to talk about is people. I’ll speak about people and get back to the environment, because they’re tied together.

There’s a very famous statement that mining is more than the product. So what you’ll hear a lot and what you’ll see on posters on lunchroom walls or in the dry, where miners get changed in the morning, is, “The most important thing to come out of the mine is the worker.” I think we’re all aligned on that. This bill doesn’t really affect workers directly, but it could and probably would affect the community.

There are a few points from the press release on the bill—I’m just going to summarize and speak in bulk. These are the ones I have problems with. One of them is that Bill 71 replaces “director of mine rehabilitation” anywhere this occurs in the Mining Act with “minister,” so the function of the director more or less all becomes the sole discretion of the minister.

The second one is to “improve closure planning” by having more qualified professionals available to certify plans and allowing companies to conditionally file a closure plan while deferring certain elements to a later date. I think allowing more qualified professionals to be involved is a great idea; I’m not so much in favour of deferring—“The cheque is in the mail. Trust us. It will work”—and I’ll get into that as we go on.

The other part I’m a little worried about is allowing more flexibility in the techniques used to rehabilitate mines once they’re closed. Maybe it’s one of those things where the devil is in the detail on this, but sometimes allowing more flexibility gets caught up in cutting red tape—“Don’t worry. It’s going to be okay.”

I come from a background of health and safety. We refer to the Occupational Health and Safety Act as the green book, and there’s an expression that this book is written in blood. Those regulations are important because things went wrong, and when you don’t follow through on why they went wrong, things go really, really wrong.

The final part that I’m a little bit concerned about is about creating 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. Maybe that makes more sense as we drill into it. But I am always cautious of large industries in mining who post profits in the billions and are very successful in important communities—but if you go bankrupt and the cheque is in the mail, the cheque is never coming. So this is my concern that I have.

Again, I think the core essence of the bill is great. I think there are some flaws that we need to work on.

Mining company values: If you go to any mining company in Canada, they will probably talk about the value system. It will be on posters. It will be on their letterhead. It will be in the entranceway, at the door, as you walk in. It’s a value system they work very hard to live up to. It will talk about a commitment to valuing the people—and the people will be the workers, their community, their partners—and valuing the environment. This is typically in their mission statement that you see everywhere, and they really have worked hard to move past the old days and be aligned with these values.

For example, there’s a mining company that, years ago, had developed sort of south of Japan. They needed some company land on an Indigenous burial ground in this country. They didn’t need it because there were ore deposits or because they needed a processing plant. They needed it because they had workers going over there to work and they needed a golf course. This is sort of our ugly history. It’s not anything a mining company would do today, but that was the mentality back then: “We bought this land. We own this land. We can do whatever we want. We don’t have to work with our partners. We don’t have to work with the communities nearby. We have the title, and we’re allowed to do this.” I think it’s something that mining companies would be embarrassed about today. I’m not saying it to embarrass them. I’m just saying that this was a practice that happened in the past. They really have worked very hard to move past those days. I would say the old days—my manager, our president or someone saying, “We’re going to get that mine open if I have to drive the bulldozer up there myself” —that doesn’t exist anymore. None of the mining companies I know and work with and speak with and help put food on the table for my family—they just don’t. They’re over it. Mining companies worth investing in, the ones that we should be proud of, as a province, investing in, are really working on building true nation-to-nation partnerships with Indigenous communities.

There was a time when we were struggling to have a good conversation back and forth, when it felt like a check box exercise that we had a consultation. They would have a town hall nearby, and they would send out some mail saying, “Come to the town hall”—or maybe have that town hall in the Indigenous community. But it was a formality—“You have a duty to consult. Did you consult?” “Oh, yes. We went out and told them what we’re doing.” I can’t remember if they had any complaints, but we did that check and we moved on. But that was decades ago. There has been a real, concerted effort in these mining companies to build nation-to nation agreement. Other industries, if they’re struggling—and I’m sure there are some who are—to deal with this, could take a page from the mining industry, because they do it so well. It isn’t transactional—“We need to develop on your land. We’re happy to see you again.” It’s an ongoing thing, where they’re part of the community, investing in the community and working with the community, so that, when there are economic opportunities, they have the relationship, they have the trust, they have an understanding of very distinct cultures in Indigenous communities and the participation and the acknowledgement of them.

I want to underscore that Indigenous relationships are important. I said earlier that doing things like saying “I’ll drive the bulldozer there myself” is not really helpful. Doing things like having the same minister for northern development and Indigenous affairs is not helpful. I don’t know if it’s intentional or not, but it can send the wrong message. It can send a message to people in our community—the first people in our country—that your value is tied to your economic value. If there’s resource extraction that we need where they live, that’s their value. We wouldn’t have a francophone affairs in northern development—we wouldn’t tie in the other one, together. It sends a bad message, even if it’s unintentional—I like to be optimistic. It does send a bad message to people, especially in light of what we’ve been going through with the Indigenous children’s bodies that were found. There’s more and more awareness and there’s more and more people my age recognizing that our education wasn’t fulsome, our understanding wasn’t fulsome, and wanting to learn more, wanting to do better—I believe, as well, across the aisle. I’m not throwing stones and saying our team is better than theirs. I think all of us want to get better at this. But it does send a bad message to people when you say, “We’ve merged your file.” I know they’re two different ministries and they’re not merged, but it feels like it’s not as important as a separate ministry.

I think doing things like ignoring the right for First Nations to have free, prior and informed consent is not helpful. If you are trying to—I know there’s a line in here where it talks about the important of Indigenous communities, First Nation communities, but if you want to really emphasize that you have a strong partnership and a strong relationship, it’s not a tag at the end, it’s not a throwaway line; it’s a priority statement that you make. If we had a relationship—we know that Ontario’s biggest trading partner is the States, and, if we had a bill talking about trade with the States, it would be first and foremost. We would talk about how important that relationship is. We need to do this, as well.

I want to talk about the importance of free, prior and informed consent. The member for Kiiwetinoong has talked about this many times. And many of us have talked about the need to address the boil-water advisory. I’ll go on a bit of a tangent and come back.

It is frustrating to find out that there are places that have gone generations without clean drinking water. It’s frustrating, because I know we wouldn’t accept that anywhere else—I know that in Sudbury, where we have infrastructure issues and we’re farther remote than, say, the GTHA but still on a good transportation area, the crossroads of 400 to the north and 17 east and west. We have thaw-and-freeze cycles where, as they’re doing the repairs, you’ve got to run your water and it’s brown for a couple of—you can’t use the water during the day; you’ve got to run your water half an hour to an hour to flush out the minerals. That’s frustrating. I cannot imagine growing up in a place where you cannot drink water out of the tap, where you cannot bathe, where you cannot wash your children. There is a frustration in a place like this, where we feel like we can get things done and the political football gets tossed to the feds. I share that blame—and also to the feds who kick it back. I’m proud of our former leader for taking the stance, when I was elected in 2018, saying that the province should pay for it—should fix it and figure out afterwards who will pay for it. I think that’s the approach that we should be taking—whoever is in government. Let’s just fix this. It has been much too long.

Neskantaga First Nation is not a stranger to broken promises. They have gone 28 years without clean water—28 years. Think of any time that you slept in and didn’t have time for a shower, or any time they were doing repairs and you couldn’t turn the water on, or that time you went camping. For 28 years, there have been people who haven’t been able to get a drink of water unless it came in a bottle. You can’t bathe yourself.

Nicole and Jenny from my office are both on maternity leave right now, but I think of them and their babies—Jenny with her twins—how often, as babies, they’re using up diapers and being cleaned, how often you’re bathing and cleaning and how much water that would be, and to not have the ability to just turn on the water.

In the middle of this—for 28 years—the Premier, the minister, the Conservative government is tabling a bill that says, “Trust us. Trust us on cleaning up. Trust us on being accountable.” And it was tabled without providing free, prior and informed consent to this community; Neskantaga didn’t get that ahead of the bill. The Premier didn’t provide free, prior, informed consent to Neskantaga First Nation before announcing that a road was going to go through their community or beside their community, and that feels like something that—if I had trust issues already because of the drinking water and then I had trust issues about a road that was going to come through that I didn’t feel like I had valid participation in, and they were telling me, “Trust me on cleanup and accountability,” in an area which is described as the lungs of that area, I don’t know how much trust I would have.

I don’t want to go too political on this, but I want to recognize the environment we’re in. We’re finding bodies of children. The government had said, “Trust us.” It’s a shared shame. I’m not pointing fingers; none of us were here when that happened, but this is our history. We need some ownership, and we need to understand the generational trauma that came out of this and the accountability we have, as settlers, to address that and rebuild and earn that trust.

The Conservative government doesn’t have a great record when it comes to the environment. I was at Fridays for Future—I’ve talked about Sophia several times. Fridays for Future is a regular event, and Sophia was the first child outside of Europe to have one. She lives in Sudbury, Ontario. She had an event last Friday, and she was asking about what we need to do to move forward. I had a really nice speech about our party policy and stuff, but I abandoned that. I said that what we really need is a province that believes in climate change. I’m happy to be corrected if I’m wrong, but in the last four years, I think the only thing that happened was, we tabled the litter cleanup day. I was a Cub Scout a very, very long time ago and we had a litter cleanup day, so I don’t feel like that’s a new idea or going to help with anything.

Anyway, I think that if you don’t have a great record when it comes to the environment and you’re saying, “Trust us on environmental issues,” people might have trust issues. I want to give an example about this. Right now, in Alberta, they’re dealing with pollution from industry. Conservatives in Alberta, for years and years, said, “Trust us; industry will do the right thing. Trust us that polluters will pay to clean up their mess.” It was a “cheque is in the mail” sort of thing—“Not to worry, it’s going to work out.” The theory is, basically, the company—this is capitalism—that made the mess and profited from it is going to clean it up.

Right now, Alberta has 170,000 abandoned oil and gas wells, so 37% of all of their oil and gas wells are abandoned.

There’s an article in Policy Magazine I’m just going to read from: “It is doubly ironic that”—this is the Premier’s name—“made his announcement as Alberta Premier Danielle Smith”—Conservative, as well—“was laying out her controversial plan to clean up abandoned oil/gas wells in Alberta. At a time when the oil industry is racking up record profits, the UCP”—the United Conservative Party—“has promised to shift $100 million in royalty credits to entice the industry to clean up its own mess. The Globe and Mail has rightly called this scheme ‘corporate welfare.’ Such largesse comes on the heels of a $1-billion payout by the federal government to deal with the damage of abandoned oil wells in Alberta.”

As people like to remind us all the time, there’s only one taxpayer—so $100 billion came out of the federal to pay for these abandoned oil wells that were profitable for those organizations, and now $100 million in credits of taxpayers’ money is going to go to these industries that were supposed to pay for the cleanup. And if they do the cleanup now, we’re going to pay them to clean up their mess out of taxpayers’ dollars.

The article goes on to say, “No doubt, the Ontario Conservatives will tell you that they aren’t letting mining companies off the hook. They will claim that this is just about giving them a leg up in order to get vital projects off the ground. Once these companies start making money, they will put the money aside to protect future generations. Pinky swear.”

That’s the comment in the article; that’s not me, but I kind of agree with that.

There’s a cost of doing business, and part of the cost is protecting the environment, ensuring that environment. Just like at home we pay taxes to have our garbage taken away, we pay for certain services—this is one of the services that’s important.

The article, or the part I took out of it, concludes by saying, “This is what happens when you don’t have a strong regulatory program in place, including closure plans that compel resource extraction operators to put money aside to pay for their damages.”

You can make the argument, Speaker, that those are gas wells and oil wells—and what could go wrong in mining? That’s Alberta—although we do have a similar situation here in Ontario. So what could go wrong with mining? It’s a really good question, and I have a really good answer.

I’m going to tell you about the Kam Kotia mine disaster—and I think this should be familiar. I wasn’t aware of this. My colleague Charlie Angus was talking yesterday about it, and he said—actually, the mines minister should be aware of this because this happened in Timmins, and it’s the riding he represents.

This article is from MiningWatch in 2006: “The Kam Kotia Mine Disaster, Ontario’s Most Notorious Mine Waste Problem.”

“It has been labelled the ‘worst environmental disaster’ in Ontario. It has been criticized by mining opponents as ‘corporate greed’ running wild. Some taxpayers are unhappy that $14 million of their money has been spent—and $14 million more is needed—to restore 500 hectares of land left devastated after the mine closed, the miners moved on to other sites and the shareholders spent their dividends.”

Some of the points for the description of what happened here: This mine was a wartime mine, and there were some federal tax incentives to open up, and when those tax incentives dried up, basically—the mine owners were American, and they invested back into the States, where it was more profitable and easier to access. This mine only operated from September 1943 until December 1944, so just a little more than one year. They described the area as, “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”—I talked about tailings before, which are the treated remains of ore—“and waste rock causes an acidic runoff affecting creeks and rivers close to the mine.” There are about 200,000 tonnes of waste rock and 600 million tonnes of mine tailings on the site.

So when the Conservative government says, “Trust us,” I think of these Alberta gas wells and oil wells, and I think of the $28 million that taxpayers had to pay to clean up the Kam Kotia mine disaster outside of Timmins. So I’m a little hesitant to say, “What a good idea. We should trust,” because the history has been that things have gone wrong, and maybe that’s why these regulations are in place. I expect that this is why those regulations are in place.

Earlier, as well, Speaker, I mentioned that I was wary of giving the minister powers—and just as a refresher, Bill 71 replaces “director of mine rehabilitation” anywhere this occurs in the Mining Act with “minister.” It eliminates the functions of the director and places these at the sole discretion of the minister.

Before I go on to this, I want to say, I have a lot of respect for the minister. Since the election, I haven’t had a lot of opportunities to speak with him because our ridings aren’t—if you look at the northern ridings, we’re fairly close, but we’re not super close. So we have a limited opportunity while we’re here—depending on our schedules—to speak, but I have had the opportunity to talk to him a couple of times. For example, when we were talking about the aluminum powder apology, the McIntyre apology—just to refresh everybody: Miners, who worked in uranium and gold mines primarily, for years, were forced to breathe aluminum powder. The theory was that the aluminum would stick to your lungs and protect you from harm. It didn’t do that. There’s a pretty good theory that it protected you from your X-rays showing that any harm had happened, because all of your lungs would glow. What had happened was wrong. I had been working for a long time, just prior to the last election, with the minister on having an apology for these miners, who were having neurological disorders as a result of this and whose lives were ending prematurely and whose quality of life was really deteriorating—and I was very proud, in November, that we were able to do that; all parties came together to do this. The Minister of Mines was new in his role, and I wanted to make sure he was up to date. I went to talk to him and give him a quick rundown of what we were trying to do and what it was, and he stopped me midway through and said, “I know all about this. My dad had to breathe this.” And we had a couple of conversations in Sudbury when Vale reopened South Mine. The Premier was there, and the mining minister obviously was there.

I know that he understands mining. He comes from mining. He has worked in the industry, his dad has, and I wouldn’t be surprised if his grandfather had, as well, because in the north, that’s very, very common—where it’s generational mining.

I thought I was only a second-generation miner, but the more I thought about it while putting together my notes—I’m third, and probably more than that. My grandfather’s family comes from hard rock miners in Scotland. They came to Canada for a better way of life. My grandfather joined the air force and had a great career with my grandmother there. Then, my mom and dad met at an air force base in Nova Scotia and, I guess because you can’t get away from mining, moved to Sudbury so he could start a life as a miner. My dad was a hard rock miner in Sudbury, at Frood-Stobie mine.

Often, in the chamber, when I talk about my dad, I’m actually talking about my stepdad. My parents were divorced when I was pretty young. My mom met my stepdad when I was—probably a couple of years before I met him. When I was 16 years old, my mom and my stepdad began dating and then moved in together and lived in sin until she was in her 70s.

Not to go too far on a tangent, but I learned on Facebook that my mom and dad had gotten married, and I called her and said—it was her sister, my aunt, who was celebrating about it. I phoned my mom to say, “I wish I knew. I would have come with you”—because they had eloped. My mom said, “Jamie, I’m 70 years old. How many romantic things do you think I get to do?” Both of them had come from marriages that ended in divorce. After many years of promising each other that they would not get married, my stepdad popped the question to my mom, a lot because—I’m building back to the connection of intergenerational mining. My stepfather also worked in mining. He has been retired for 25 or 30 years now. He was a millwright at the Falconbridge smelter. One of his concerns was that because they were common-law, maybe his benefits wouldn’t cover her later on. So he was preparing for the future of his family and wanted to ensure that she would be protected and comfortable if anything were to happen to him, so I’m very thankful to Bill for that.

I’ve lost my spot. Oh, I was talking about the minister—the generational part of mining in northern Ontario. If I had more opportunity, I’m sure I would learn about it.

I worked in mining, as well, for 17 years before I was elected, and I represented my workers for a long time. So I have a great passion for mining, not just because I live in Sudbury, but because mining is what paid for my house—well, it paid for part of my house. I’m still paying off the mortgage, but it allowed me to qualify for the loan. Mining is what allowed me to put food on the table for my kids.

I don’t want to run out of time, but there’s a funny story about me getting involved with mining that I want to get to, if there is time.

I absolutely have a lot of respect for the minister when it comes to mining. There is a language that people who work in mining speak—just like I’m sure my colleague does when he speaks to dairy farmers. I was speaking to trades workers, and I was talking about the need for tradespeople to come in and the average age. At one part of the speech, I said, “If the average age is 50 and you started in the trades when you were 18 or 19 years old, you’re ready to pull the pin.” That’s a normal expression, but someone afterwards said, “That’s a guy who worked in the trades.” There’s language we use—it’s English, and it makes sense in other industries as well, and you can follow it and stuff. But there are things he said that I recognize.

In the press release, there was a quote from the minister that didn’t ring 100% true with me. It’s not essential to this bill or anything, but I just find it interesting, because it said, “It shouldn’t take 15 years to open a mine.” My gut says that someone from the communications department wrote that, because it’s a lot like saying it shouldn’t take eight years to become a doctor. Building a mine takes time. If there’s a way we can make it be more effective, if things are sitting around and not moving, absolutely—but building a mine is a lot different than building a Starbucks. It’s probably a good sound bite. It’s probably good at the door, especially if you don’t live in a mining town or work in a mining town.

Think about the Ring of Fire or any mining project: First, someone stakes a claim. That’s easy. You just go out and you’re basically staking, and there’s some paperwork. But then geologists will go out and look for samples. There are going to be some minerals to go for. All through this process, they’re constantly raising money and capital for it. Then, if they think that it’s viable, they’ve got to get core samples—it’s just a drill, and it brings out a big sleeve of rock, basically. This equipment is very heavy, so you’ve got to build the infrastructure to get that equipment in there. That takes time, because you very rarely will find a mine site across the street from the Walmart; it’s typically deep in the bush and far away. The Ring of Fire, for example—I don’t think most people in Ontario had any idea where that was until it made the news; it’s far. So you’ve got to drill your core sample to pull it out, and then you need time to analyze it—because Bre-X had salted their samples, and investors were wary because Bre-X was going to make everyone a millionaire, and then it was worthless.

Interjection: The helicopter ride.

Further debate?

Yes, that’s right—the helicopter ride.

They analyze those core samples, then they go out for funding to find people who are willing to invest, and it’s a long-term investment. Then they have to start building the infrastructure, actually start constructing a mine, because you’re going to need water and power and roads, and heavy equipment is going to come in. That takes time, and especially in the north, where you have to deal with a thaw-freeze cycle. It’s not like you can just run all the time. It’s similar here, obviously, but the farther north you go, the colder it is for a longer amount of time. If you build when things are freezing and thawing, engineering—they probably have a way of describing it, but it’s not going to go well. Then you sink a main shaft. If you ever drive past a mining town, you will see a big—I want to say “shaft station,” but that’s one part of it. You will see the shaft coming out of the ground, and that’s basically in an elevator that they bring men down in and they will bring ore back up in. But all that is essentially a spike. If you think of our building and the elevators across from the chamber, for example, that’s your main shaft. You still have to build the hallways—they aren’t called hallways, obviously. You have to build all of the rest of that infrastructure that heads off to the ore, wherever the ore is. It’s typically in deposits in different locations, and you’ve got to go out there. You are hard rock miners; you are going through hard rock, and so you’re blasting, depending on—I’m out of touch when it comes to mining; I was a surface guy. You’re blasting eight to 10 feet at a time. It’s going to take a while to blast that and get to the surface—and so, 10 years or 15 years? Yes, it kind of makes sense. There are long-range plans.

Also, it’s worth the investment when it is successful, so I think allowing the investment to happen is important. Anything that is unnecessarily slowing it down—I think we’re on board with helping it be more effective, but I don’t think we’re on board with eliminating controls that would protect communities or eliminating the duty to consult with Indigenous communities or consult with nearby communities. I don’t think we’re on board with that, and I don’t think that mining companies are.

So, even though I have a great deal of respect for the mining minister, I am wary of giving the minister powers for a couple of reasons. I think that it’s better to have an arm’s-length distance. As well, what if there’s a shuffle? What if the mining minister is no longer someone with a background in mining? What if it’s someone with a background in selling cars, or someone whose background is in dairy farming—

During the debate earlier today, I heard that Toronto is the centre of mining, and in northern Ontario, that makes you wince a little bit. It might be the centre of mining commerce, but no one is investing in the TSX until they get to a mine. If you go to Coleman mine and you can pull a chunk of ore off the wall that is valuable—just that one chunk—absolutely, you’re going to invest in the TSX. But you’re not going to invest just because the TSX happens to be in Toronto.

We had done a lot of work to improve mining safety in Sudbury. We had a bunch of fatalities, and we got a lot of amendments made to the mining regulations act and the regulation O. Reg. 854. They wanted us to have our meetings in Toronto—these working groups that were happening in northern Ontario—and Mike Bond, a former mentor of mine, when speaking to the former Minister of Labour, said, “We’re not going to Toronto. How many mines do you have?” And that sums it up—not that Toronto is not important, but there is a perception, I’ll tell you, of Toronto that it’s the centre of the universe and that there is a lot of value in the north, and that if you’re doing resource extraction that is producing literally billions of dollars, maybe you could come to where we work and see how it’s done there.

So my concern, again, about giving the ministry these powers is, what if there’s a shuffle or a change in government? This is not a “today’s Conservative government” plan. This is a “forever” plan. Governments rise and governments fall, and that’s just how it happens. Sometimes it happens for good reasons, and sometimes there’s a bit of a wave that surprises people. But that’s the reality of the workplace we’re in. We’re renting these chairs; they’re not guaranteed to us. So when you say, “Now the minister is going to make these really great decisions”—well, who knows who the minister is going to be in the future?

I think I know mining fairly well. There are experts out there; I’m not an expert, but I have been in and around the industry for a long time. I have worked with the industry on the labour side, on the management side, and I’m well-connected with people in management. I don’t think they were asking for this specific—I think they wanted to ensure mining could move forward, but I don’t think they were looking for eliminating environmental concerns or not having a decent relationship and having an impression that Indigenous communities aren’t as important. I don’t think this is what they’re looking for, and I don’t think they were asking for the minister to now be able to make those decisions arbitrarily on his own. Maybe they did, but if I was the sort of person to gamble, I think I’d bet against it.

I talked earlier about the bill being flawed.

Before I get to that, because I have time—I talked about generational mining and how my dad was a hard rock miner. My stepfather was a millwright at the smelter. When I was 16, he brought my best friend and I on a tour of the Falconbridge smelter. You had to be 16; I don’t know if it was for legal reasons, liability or whatever. When we were 16, we went for a tour. It’s a little overwhelming if you’ve never been in a smelter, because it’s a massive place. They’re moving a lot of material around, and it’s hard to understand what moves around. We went on this tour in a place where you smell a lot of sulphur. I wandered around on the tour and—not to bury the lead, but I worked at another smelter—I had no real understanding of the work he did, but I understood the gas, the dust and the sacrifice of physical labour that he was making to pay for food and to put a roof over my head. At the end of the day he asked me what I thought, and my first response was, “You could not pay me enough to work here.” It’s physically demanding, and the environment is tough. There are sparks, and there are explosions, and there is melted rock, molten material and lava. That was my first thought: “You will never pay me enough to do this.” But when I was 25 and I had two kids—my two sons were born—and I was working contract to contract, because Mike Harris had created this sort of gig economy that we all understand now, and Inco was hiring, I applied and I became a smelter worker. Strangely, when I applied, my priority was paying bills, ensuring a good life for my family—and I would sacrifice my health and well-being in order to do that. That’s what miners do for their families. They take that risk—but not to be thrown away. We joked, often, about how they could pay me enough—and I’m happy that I did it because I really fell in love with this industry.

I was reluctantly a candidate. I was a candidate mainly because I was mad at my MPP.

But I liked my job. I had a good job that I enjoyed. I was a union rep in health and safety. I worked with a company that valued health and safety, even though we had fatalities where we worked—but a good working relationship with management. I was able to work on things that were of value. I was able to help develop the mental health program that we had there. So I’m proud of the history I had, and I’m proud that it led me to health and safety, which I absolutely love doing.

There are a lot of people working in a field where they’re doing it to pay the bills. When I got involved with health and safety, I understood what they meant by “if you enjoy what you do for a living, you never work a day in your life.” I feel similarly about my role here, as an MPP. I really, really value what I do here—and I think my colleagues would all share this.

Before I was elected, when I would see an MPP at the end of their career, if they had chosen not to run or to retire, or if they lost the election—and somewhere in that speech they would say, “It has been my honour and privilege to represent the people of my riding,” or “my ward,” or whatever elected position they were in. I thought someone wrote that once and everyone else copied it because it sounds so good. But once you’re elected, you really understand what an honour and privilege it is to represent the people of your riding.

I work late, and when I’m leaving, a lot of my colleagues are still in their offices working, and if they’re not in the offices, they’re in the communities or they’re at events. It’s a hard-working group. As politicians, we get labelled as lazy, overpaid and all this other stuff. But honestly, once you’re doing this job, you understand how much work goes into it. This isn’t something that you do unless you really care about what you’re doing.

I’m very happy to have been involved with mining. I’m very happy that it led me to health and safety, which became my passion. And I’m very happy that my involvement in my union led me to my involvement in politics and to running and becoming an MPP.

One other story just popped in my head. I was working for Bell before being hired at Inco. My wife and I were hoping to buy a house, and we were living in Copper Cliff, where it’s a little more affordable, and saving money. I had worked for Bell, but I was a low man on the totem pole. What happens, less now because of cellphones—in the old days they called it POTS, a plain old telephone system, where it’s wires going out to your house phone. Every time it’s wet outside, you get static on the line, and you’re more busy. In the winter, all the moisture freezes, and you’re less busy, so I would be laid off for between three and four months every year. They would start with the person with the lowest seniority.

I was really interested in computers and wanted to get into computers. It’s hard to believe, but this is when high-speed was still coming out, when we were still doing dial-up. I was doing a network design course. I hesitate, with people who are real engineers in the room, to say I’m a network engineer, because it was a year-long course; it wasn’t the extensive process that real engineers go through. But I am a network engineer. Part of that program is learning how to set up a worldwide network; you would never do this on your own, but that’s what you do for studying. It is probably very exciting for some people, but for me, it’s mind-numbingly dull. So I would study and I would make these virtual large networks in my basement. I would study all morning, and then around lunchtime I would walk my son down to the mailbox. They just had a central post office. Copper Cliff is beautiful. It’s a really cute small town. I would walk to the post office, pick up the mail, and then I would stop at the Inco hiring office on the way by because I wanted to get into their IT section over there. It got to the point where Jen Genkins, who handled that office, would hear the door open and she would say, “Nothing today, Jamie.” It was a regular routine for me to go back and forth.

Then I went through the hiring process and got hired and was very thankful, as well. When I was telling my kids that I wasn’t going to be fixing phones anymore and that I was going to be working at the smelter, my son Sam got really excited, because Sudbury is known for the Superstack. Sam said, “Dad, you’re going to make clouds.” I just loved the expression. It reminded me of when I was 16, not fully understanding what the smelter was—and my son seeing, literally, pollution by that time coming out of the Superstack and thinking that plant is where clouds came from.

There is a point to me telling that story, Speaker. We were talking about regulations, and the parts of the bill I disagree with are about changing the regulations, loosening them up a little bit.

The history of Sudbury is that Sudbury looked like the moon, and in fact, NASA trained scientists there—not specifically because it looked like the moon; it was because they thought they’d have similar minerals. But it really could have substituted for the moon.

I grew up thinking that rock, if it was exposed to air, would turn black, the same way that a pop can would rust. I had no idea that this wasn’t normal. I knew rocks were different colours, because if you broke one open, it had different colours inside. But all rock in Sudbury that you could see outdoors was black.

The regreening of Sudbury happened throughout my lifetime. But growing up, as a child, I joked very often that it was really easy to go sliding because you could just pick a hill and go in any direction; there aren’t any trees in the way to block you.

We really did not have a good history with the environment in Sudbury.

Over the years, there were more and more pollution controls limiting how many tonnes of pollution could come out of the Superstack. Back then, the theory for the environment was that the solution to pollution is dilution—“Just build the stack; it will spread out. There’s lots of room up there.” Actually, they could follow our pollution to Alaska; they could trace it and say, “This is yours.” The government got involved. Elie Martel, who sort of held a combination of my seat and the member from Nickel Belt’s seat, but ahead of mine, really worked hard on this. The members of my union, Local 6500, used to sneak into the plant and measure how much sulphur there was in the plant, and CKSO radio used to announce it to the community.

I grew up at a time, as well, when I would be out with my grandmother and the sulphur would gum up your mouth. My grandmother and my mom—everybody—would spit, because you couldn’t get it out of your mouth. You couldn’t swallow it. You’d spit it out. This was a normal thing.

If you fast-forward to today, the mining companies in town will shorten that story to, “One day, we decided to clean up the environment”—and they did decide, but they decided when the government said, “You have to.”

Even the year I was elected, we were working on a clean air project. I’m very proud of the success we had, and I’m proud to have been involved in it. It was basically the government saying, “You cannot have any more pollution coming out of the stack,” and the company saying, “We’re inventing the technology as we’re building it. I don’t know what we’ll do if it doesn’t work.” It did work. But it is very difficult, when you are raising a lot of capital to do stuff, if the government doesn’t say, “Here’s the metric you have to hit.” Even if you want to hit the metric, it’s hard. If you’re competing around the world for capital and you can’t say, “It’s a requirement for me to do this,” sometimes you won’t be able to do it, even if you want to.

That’s why regulations are important—especially regulations that taxpayers ultimately will pay for the cleanup of, or that will affect the water, the environment and the communities that live nearby.

I want to close out on this as a summary because people in my community—I hope they can watch the whole thing, but sometimes they’re busy and it’s good to do a bit of a summary.

I started off by talking about the bill. At its core, it’s good. I think all of us understand the importance of mining. I think, as well, it’s important to understand how much mining and minerals are all around us. But it’s just a slightly flawed bill. The story I’ve heard very often is about the eagle and the owl—you try to make your good decisions, and as the eagle, you look for ways to improve this. I think that if this passes through second reading—and I think it will—we can really work to fix this bill and make it even better. But we need to address those flaws. They’re really important. These flaws that we need to address—they’re flaws, I believe, that mining companies have as value statements, that mining companies would like to see as well. I could be wrong, but that opportunity to get it right is by shopping this out, having real consultation with mining companies, with communities, with miners—and “miner” is the person who’s actually doing the physical mining.

I was talking to Gord Gilpin, who was the mine manager when I got elected and is now—I forget his title—Ontario division. Congratulations, Gord. Gord, as well, is a miner. In the whole industry, everyone is called a miner.

All of us in here have to make sure that we’re matching the values of our communities, matching the values of the mining industry that is out there, making sure that we’re listening to those experts who are in the field. I talked about a long history of mining in my family and stuff, but I’m not an expert. I know about people who have been doing this work for the last five years while I was working here. We have to hear from them.

We need to travel the bill, and if we’re not willing to travel the bill—I encourage us to, because northern Ontario has a new perspective. But if the Conservative government is not willing to travel this bill, they have to have real deputations; not the deputations where you decide that we’re going to minimize it and it’s only going to be five hours and three people at a time are going to talk, and you can only ask them three questions because the time is limited—real consultation. We’re all aligned on this being important and being successful. Let’s really connect to people. I hear very often about the motto here, about hearing the other side—I forget what it is in Latin; I’m looking on the walls for it—and not just hear the other side across the aisle, but let’s hear from the other side in northern Ontario, the mining companies. Let’s hear the other side everywhere.

I want to pick up on the thing that we talked about—when companies that we say are “too big to fail” actually do fail, and who pays the price.

Before I was elected, I did work at Bell Telephone; I was a telephone operator. I also worked in corporate social responsibility, at a financial institution. The idea was that corporate social responsibility means you do the right thing, because it fits your value statement, but it also has significant impact on the bottom line.

When things go wrong in companies, they often have to pay the price. But in this instance, the flaw that you’re pointing out is that when things go wrong, the people who pay the price when companies go bankrupt—and we know that with small mining companies, there are lots of insolvencies. When things go wrong—they either go bankrupt or there is an environmental disaster—we pick up the tab as taxpayers and also investors, who have limited protection here as well.

Did you want to say a little bit more about who pays the cost when things go wrong?

Thank you, Speaker. I want to ask the member opposite, through the Chair—I listened very carefully to his remarks. Clearly, he and many other members of His Majesty’s loyal opposition are supportive of the mining industry and see the benefits for the north, for the Indigenous communities in our province, and the ripple effect across the entire province.

Are the member and his colleagues going to support this bill or not—and if not, why not?

I appreciate the brevity of the question.

The short version is, yes, I think we’re going to support this on second reading because the core is good, but it’s flawed, like I said several times, and I think over the last hour I spelled out why it’s flawed.

There have been disasters when it comes to the mining industry and other industries, and the outcome, when you don’t have good regulations in place, is that the taxpayers have to pay for it. It’s not a small fix and a small cleanup; it’s millions of dollars—federally, billions of dollars. So we have to ensure that if you’re going to be profitable—this is what it means to be in the free market. If you’re going to invest and you’re going to make a profit—and mining companies who are successful make a lot of money—you have to be liable, as well, when things go wrong.

There’s a reason these regulations were put in place. If there are reasons why we need to adjust them or look at them differently—but I think saying, “Not to worry, it will never happen”—it has happened many times in the past. We have to ensure that mining can be successful, but also that the communities and the environment where they operate can be successful as well.

I wouldn’t call this fearmongering. It’s a defence the Conservative government loves to have any time there’s a criticism to a bill—when you say, “Here’s a flaw in the bill. Here’s something I think we could work on to address,” it is always addressed as fearmongering. It doesn’t matter if we’re pointing out facts. It doesn’t matter if we have validators saying, “Here’s what happened specifically to me and why this doesn’t work out.” It is always painted as fearmongering.

We aren’t trying to cause fear. We’re trying to make a bill that will be even better than this bill. We’re aligned on the importance of mining, but if we want this to be successful and we want communities and First Nations communities to be involved and accepting; if we want people to invest here—she talks about investment. There’s not a mining company in the world that is going to invest in a province that doesn’t have strong environmental controls and a good relationship with First Nations communities.

I was listening intently to the member from Sudbury.

As I’ve mentioned many times in the House, I grew up in northern Ontario, in a little mining town called Capreol, actually, in the Greater Sudbury area. I was in Sudbury when they built the smokestack, and I recall the black rock. There were no trees whatsoever. When I did go back years later and saw the trees, I was truly amazed. I also know that mining is the lifeblood of so many small communities; it certainly was for Capreol.

This is a good bill. There’s nothing in this bill that takes away any of the environmental protections that are currently in place. It doesn’t impact the regulations.

My concern—to the member opposite—is that this is fearmongering and that we are going to send a negative message to companies that would be interested in exploring and investing in northern Ontario.

Does the member recognize how important investment in the future of green technology is to the northern Ontario mining community and economy?

And will you refrain from sending a negative message to potential investors in the north?

Thank you to the member from Sudbury for an excellent presentation on the government’s bill, An Act to amend the Mining Act. And thank you for highlighting the environmental considerations and concerns that we have, considering this government’s track record on the environment.

We’re talking about a government that slashed funding from the Indigenous conservation efforts; that has refused to follow the Environmental Bill of Rights; and that even formed a youth environmental council, which apparently has members—but there has never been a meeting. There are so many other things that I could flag.

What I’d like to ask you is, for any work around mining, why is it important for us to have environmental assessments? Why is it important for community leaders to be at the table to have that conversation with the government?

We are going to go to questions, and I’ll recognize the member for Durham.

I enjoyed the discourse offered by the member from Sudbury, and I particularly appreciated his personal reflections on his career in mining and the importance it had for him and his family. He also made some comment with regard to how important mining was to Sudbury, his riding. As a factual matter—Sudbury produces $3.3 billion of gross domestic product out of the mining industry, which I’m sure is enormously important to Sudbury and to the people in and around Sudbury. The member also said that mining was the cornerstone of Sudbury, and I agree with him.

So my question to the good member is this: In light of the fact that Sudbury is probably going to be one of the main beneficiaries of this legislation, does he support it and will he vote for it?

Next question?

That is a really good question.

Mines are so large, and for a lot of places—I can argue, most places—it’s the centre of commerce.

Sudbury has diversified, but mining is really a cornerstone of it even today, as much as they’ve diversified, and so they’re tied to that community.

When I talked about the most valuable thing coming out of the mine being the worker—it’s the workers who are related, too. It’s between seven or eight spinoff jobs for every mining job that happens there—so it’s all the local economy that happens around it. So it isn’t just the shareholders; it’s the stakeholders, it’s the people who live there, it’s the people who were there before the mine was founded and who will be there after the mine was founded. That’s why you want to talk to them—because they all have a goal of this shared prosperity.

Also, at the end of the day, mining companies are just names; they’re not people. When they go away, the people are there afterwards—and so they have a lot of value in what happens to the areas where they live.

Mining is incredibly important to me. It’s important to my riding. It’s important to the union I belonged to and the workers who are there. It’s important to the people who manage it, the non-unionized workers who are there. It’s important to our community. I am invested in this bill being successful, because I know how important it will be to other mining communities in the north—primarily in the north, but all over, where they find deposits. So I’ll be voting in favour of this, because I think the core of it is really important. But because I think mining is so important, because it’s so important to me and my family and my community, I want to make sure we get this right. I want to fix the flaws that it has to make a really great bill we can all be proud of.

I would like to share my time this afternoon with the member from Haliburton–Kawartha Lakes–Brock.

Speaker, it is my pleasure to address this House this afternoon to speak about the importance of moving forward with Bill 71, the proposed legislation, the Building More Mines Act, 2023. This bill confirms our government’s commitment made to all Ontarians to attract more investment and secure the critical minerals that support Ontario’s auto sector and our supply chain for new technologies like batteries and electric vehicles.

This legislation in particular proposes steps to modernize the Mining Act by creating the conditions for Ontario companies to build more mines safely and efficiently. We will be leading the way by investing in exploration and innovation through our new Critical Minerals Strategy and by reducing burdensome and unnecessary red tape so that companies can build more mines and we can further grow this sector for the benefit of the entire province.

This bill, Speaker, proposes key amendments to certain Mining Act regulations that would improve the province’s mining industry, making Ontario the leading jurisdiction in the world for mineral investment and development. Amendments to the Mining Act are long overdue. Years of neglect and lack of action from the previous Liberal government have set Ontario back at least two decades in this industry. Unnecessary red tape and bureaucracy were hindering the growth of the mining industry.

It should not take 15 years for the ministry to issue a mining permit. The current process to open and close a mine is too time-consuming and far too costly. It leads to project delays, cost overruns and lost opportunities for Ontario’s mineral exploration and mining sector. Now, more than ever, at this time, when Ontario is securing game-changing investments in its growing automotive sector and supporting our made-in-Ontario supply chain for new technologies like batteries and electric vehicles, we need these amendments and this legislation.

I want to emphasize again that the proposed changes would benefit the entire mineral sector and advance Ontario’s plan by connecting mineral producers in the north, including those in the Ring of Fire—we would connect them with the manufacturing sector in the south. We are the first government to lead the way for this essential sector by investing in exploration and innovation through our Critical Minerals Strategy and cutting unnecessary red tape so that companies can build more mines, creating the environment.

As the minister stated in this House earlier today, the reality is that governments lead the way and create the environment so that mines can be built. Governments do not build the mines directly. In doing so, we are expanding growth and prosperity for all Ontarians, and especially for northern and Indigenous communities. Prosperity for the northern and Indigenous communities is a welcome change after years of neglect by the Liberal government. And that will result in prosperity, prosperity that will result in well-paying jobs and economic growth that First Nations and northern communities will benefit from. The primary driver for this growth and prosperity will come from this legislation, and it would allow these communities to take control of their own destiny and create the prosperous future they deserve.

A prosperous future for all, Speaker, is what has been the hope for all of us, so that our children and grandchildren can look forward to an even better life than what we’ve experienced in the present tense. It all starts with getting more mines in the ground faster, and that is what we intend to do. Contrast this with the sorry Liberal record of ignoring the mining sector and refusing to ensure that Ontario could become a supplier of critical minerals and a manufacturing hub for electric vehicles.

Now, His Majesty’s loyal opposition claimed to be the champions of the environment. The members opposite supported the previous Liberal government’s sole-source contracts for expensive wind turbines and undermined the oil and gas sector at every opportunity as they preached about the immediate need for electric vehicles.

Well, given that the opposition seems to be having trouble understanding why these amendments in this proposed legislation are so important and not at all flawed, I’ll give them a simple equation: No mines would mean no supply chain for electric vehicles. Put another way, we will not be able to produce the electric vehicles that all parties, including the NDP, say they want. We will not be able to produce those electric vehicles if we don’t build more critical mineral mines in the province of Ontario.

Now, if the opposition won’t listen to us—because I still believe that persuasion is possible in this House. We’ve seen the NDP put partisan concerns aside and actually support our legislation. They’re saying it’s flawed, and I’m saying—

Interjections.

Thank you to the member from Durham for an excellent presentation in his time. We are all so excited about this bill on this side of the House. It’s Building More Mines Act, 2023, and as my colleague from Sarnia–Lambton said, it’s one of the most exciting pieces of legislation that has come before the House because we’re building Ontario in many ways it hasn’t been built before.

I want to thank the mining sector for the consultations, the opportunities, the feedback in building this bill with us, and the Minister of Mines—who’s a new member, but all his career, he has spent in mining—for the stories he told this morning and for such knowledge and depth, we’re really happy to have him in our caucus, our government.

And the PA to the Minister of Mines, the member from Essex—happy anniversary, by the way—but his love of mining, he said in his speech, how excited he is to be part of this legislation and part of the great things that we are doing for the province of Ontario. And I know that PDAC is in, which is the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada, which is the largest convention held in the city of Toronto. Not many people know that. I know my northern friends over there are nodding their head. They know. But it’s the world’s premier mineral exploration and mining convention: 30,000 attendees, 130 countries. I think we should all be pretty darn proud of that in the province of Ontario. It shows that we are a mining powerhouse: 40%—I think my friend from Essex said—of the mining financing is done in Toronto. So we’re here, and we need to move ahead for many reasons which everyone has discussed here. But to move ahead for the province of Ontario, economically, environmentally—this is a resource that we need to capitalize on so that we can address climate change and we can be green.

The statistics for the mining industry in Ontario are quite shocking. A lot of people don’t know—I know it has been mentioned: $13 billion annually to Ontario’s GDP, 28,000 direct and 47,000 indirect jobs are associated with mining. It has got the highest proportion of Indigenous workers of all industries in the province at 11% of direct mining jobs in Ontario, and 25% of direct mining jobs in Canada are in Ontario. So two thirds of these direct mining jobs are in northern Ontario, and that’s why my colleague from Durham was really trying to get a fulsome answer about the support that maybe members of the opposition have or should have, definitely, for this bill. But those statistics are impressive.

It was mentioned sometime this morning that Ontario is the leading world producer of gold, nickel and platinum group elements, and Ontario produced approximately $3.1 billion worth of critical minerals, with 10 of the 36 operating mines in Ontario producing critical minerals. I know the members opposite and hopefully many other people who are watching today have heard about our Critical Minerals Strategy. Because we have such high productions of gold, nickel, copper and platinum metals, the world’s largest mining companies operate in Ontario and recognize our great potential.

I know my predecessor Chris Hodgson—I say predecessor as MPP for Haliburton-Kawartha Lakes-Brock, before I had the great honour to represent the constituents there—he went from here to be president of the Ontario Mining Association. So he’s held that for over 20 years. His quote is, “As the world shifts to a greener, more connected and more tech-driven economy, the demand for Ontario’s responsibly mined minerals will continue to grow. This represents a generational opportunity—to create rewarding jobs, build a strong domestic mining-to-manufacturing supply chain, and be a key player in the global energy transition. Given that we are competing with jurisdictions across the world to feed the decarbonization-driven commodity super cycle, the government must take bold action to help Ontario succeed. This includes addressing current challenges in the Mining Act and providing a regulatory pathway forward for our industry leadership in the global marketplace.”

I say to Chris, “Well said,” because if we fail to meet the necessary demand of our weakened supply chain—we’ve seen the world go upside down, as I say—it could cause cascading effects here in Ontario, throughout the country but throughout the world. I don’t think we can ignore that. We have to move. We can’t wait 15 years for a mine to be sited. We all need to work together, and this piece of legislation is a step towards that.

Our labour, human rights, environmental and health and safety standards have dominated markets around the world. Our economic partners want a stable supplier of responsibly sourced critical minerals, and Ontario has the resources to make the best use of its mineral-rich deposits to be a global supplier of minerals like nickel, cobalt and lithium, used in manufacturing batteries for electric vehicles, smart phones and more. Our incredible groundwork for the production of electric batteries, thus producing electric cars—which I believe we have pretty common consensus in the Legislature among all parties that that is our goal of what we want to do. So we’re paving the way for this exciting sector, and we’re going to continue, and must continue, to invest in exploration and innovation through programs like the Critical Minerals Strategy and cut this unnecessary red tape that makes us uncompetitive.

So we are positioned to reinforce our critical minerals supply chain and create the conditions for companies to build mines more efficiently while maintaining our proud environmental standards and upholding the duty to consult. We have the mineral resources and the expertise to supply and manufacture the innovation that we need. We’ve got untapped potential in the mining sector. I’ve heard it for many years, and I’m so glad that we’re a part of the government. The Premier and the many ministers associated with this file have driven this forward so that we can continue to drive the prosperity that is so essential for not only our province but—like I said, the whole world is going to be able to connect with us on this matter.

The commitments made by this government will boost the supply chain. The critical minerals are already integrated into the global supply chain. We have taken many actions and investments by the government. Premier Ford announced the $5.8 million to help junior mining companies to explore for critical minerals in the province. I was kind of surprised to hear—the member from Durham actually said, “You voted against that strategy.” That is so important. I can tell you, I’ve listened to Chris Hodgson for many years on the advice and especially the mining—which he has been part of for many, many years, even when he was on the government’s side before he went to work for the Ontario Mining Association—and been at many of the events that celebrate the junior mining program. They’re essential to get a leg up, to search for what can be done in the future and how we can make it come to fruition faster.

I want to say that when I heard the member from Essex speak today about the perfect domestic supply chain—it’s very important, and I don’t think we understand that enough. We want domestic supply change. We’ve just been through the pandemic. And listening to the processing part—so not only mining but processing here in Ontario. The northern members know the cities that are involved: Timmins, Soo, Sudbury. All these opportunities exist—and new communities, First Nations communities, to come on board and to be trained and to work hopefully at even higher numbers than we spoke about today. For them to invest—because you know when we speak of economic prosperity, we want everyone to succeed. We want northern Ontario to be part of the auto manufacturing sector, and they are for the very first time. We’re giving opportunities to the people in northern Ontario that they’ve never had before.

When we say we’re excited on this side of the House with this legislation, we are, because the Building More Mines Act will create this modern framework in which we can make these developments come faster. We can make people’s lives better. And we are putting out that shingle: Consistently, Ontario is the best place to do business in the world. I am so happy that we’re speaking about this legislation, as PDAC has been going on since Sunday and all the many people that are there, and that we can showcase we’re open for business in many, many ways.

Madam Speaker, I know that other members of the Legislature want to speak to this piece of legislation. I think we should all be positive. We should all be in support. We’re going to go to committee. We’re going to hear concerns that maybe the opposition has. As we do, we will listen, but we have an opportunity that is just so exciting for the province of Ontario with this piece of legislation. I was pleased to be able to speak to it and to support it.