Thank you to the member from Essex. That’s a very good question. I think I touched on it in my remarks. There are parts of our country—and I don’t know about internationally—where the permitting process is quicker. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be quicker, but it shouldn’t be quicker by lowering the standards. And I’m not saying that’s in this bill, but it’s not saying that it’s not, because it says we’re going to change who does the plans.

Can we make the process quicker? We’re not opposed. We need to make sure that we don’t do that by lowering the standards or lowering the financial package in case something goes wrong.

With First Nations as well, this government has said several times that this Critical Minerals Strategy—which we’re not opposed to, actually—will benefit First Nations. Well, the proof is going to be in how you deal with First Nations before you start, because if it’s going to continue to be divide and conquer, First Nations know exactly what’s going to happen: The project is going to be built and some of them won’t benefit at all, because that’s been proven through history over and over again.

We’ve seen this government appoint folks to tribunals, even, that have not had the experience or the qualifications for said position. So with this particular bill, when it permits the minister to exercise any power and perform any duty of a director of exploration under the act in place of the director, it does make me question whether or not we know if the minister—I mean, the minister right now might be wonderful. I don’t know. But what about future ministers?

At the end of the day, isn’t it important that the director—the person who is doing many of these processes—have the qualification, have the skills, and that they are connected mostly to community as well, too?

I thank the member for his comments—I really do—about the minister’s experience, which we share—extensive experience in the industry. I appreciate his story about his long-time friend who passed away who took him down the mine and his son who works in the industry and meeting with Agnico Eagle. As a matter of fact, I’m meeting with them tomorrow too, so I look forward to hearing about their experience.

At the root of it, I think we share objectives here for the mining industry. I must confess, I’ve been an MPP for eight months now, and I think I heard the opposition will be supporting the bill. I think that may be the first time in the House I’ve seen that, but I think it’s—

Interjections.

But as I understand the member’s comments, I think your concerns are more about the process with the bill than the outcomes. Is that fair, and could you elaborate on what you’re looking for to see it pass into law?

It’s a pleasure to rise today to speak to Bill 71. My riding of Kingston and the Islands has a mine. But, more importantly, it also has the Queen’s University mining engineering department, which is the largest in the world, and I just want to acknowledge the work that they do to support the mining industry.

We, the Liberal caucus, support the long-term success of the mining industry in Ontario and the well-paying jobs it brings—the economic development.

This bill, Bill 71, tries to allow mines to open faster, but, to me, the bill seems rushed. It falls short in several areas and may put at risk the reputation of Ontario’s mining industry. We believe the areas where the bill falls short can be fixed at committee, so we’ll be voting in favour of the bill at second reading, but to have the Liberal caucus’s support at third reading, several things need to be done at the committee stage, which I’d like to address now.

First of all, we need support from Indigenous communities if mining is to be successful. The Conservative government did not consult Indigenous communities before the bill was tabled. I believe that we must pause and do that at the committee stage. Let me elaborate a bit on that.

This came out during a ministerial briefing yesterday, and it is really important to make sure that Indigenous communities have buy-in. If we’re sloppy about Indigenous consultation, we’re really just hurting the mining industry. It really seems to me that there’s some indication here that the bill was rushed. This bill was tabled on the very last day that it could be tabled before the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada meeting that’s going on right now, and so the question arises in my mind: Is it a coincidence that they tabled it on the very last day and somehow they didn’t have time to do the Indigenous consultation? I think it’d be really important for the committee to pause and to hear testimony. What I understand is that the ministry is explaining the bill to Indigenous groups right now, and it would be very important, I think, to hear what they have to say about this bill and to take any appropriate action at committee stage.

We need young people to consider mining as where their career might lie. There’s a labour shortage in mining. One of the things we can do to help that along is to continue to improve the reputation in the mining industry in the eyes of young people entering the workforce. We should be able to say, and we often can say, that mining leaves things better than they were before.

There’s a part of this bill, Bill 71, that deals with the recovery of minerals from tailings and other mine waste. In that part of the bill, we should be very careful not to allow loopholes. In fact, I believe there is a legal loophole where either public health and safety or the environment could be worse after recovery operations from tailings or waste, and there’s a very simple change that can be made in section 18 of the bill. There’s a phrase in section 18 of the bill which should be changed. Let me read what it says right now. It says “the condition of the land with respect to one or both of public health and safety or the environment following the remediation is comparable to or better than it was before the recovery....” What I believe it should say is—we should strike the words “one or,” and if the condition of the land is going to be comparable to what it was before, then the condition of the land with respect to both public health and safety and the environment following the remediation should be comparable or better, because if you use “one or,” it means the other one could be worse, and I believe that’s a legal loophole that should be corrected in committee.

Furthermore, this bill uses the language “comparable to or better.” In the current legislation, there’s a different word that’s used. It’s the word “improved.” Clearly, we’re backing off. Instead of requiring these recovery operations to improve the condition of the land or the water, we’re settling for comparable. So there’s a problem here, which is that mining companies and the mining industry want to say that we leave the land in a better condition than it was before, and if we’re settling for comparable—well, it’s not worse, but you’re not encouraging young people to feel good about considering a career in mining.

Let me also say that I believe that the word “comparable,” which is not defined in the legislation—we were told in the ministerial briefing that this word, “comparable,” would be articulated in the regulations, and I believe that that word should be defined in the regulations before third reading.

We need the public to be confident that after a mine closes, the land and water will be in an overall better state than before. In the long run, this confidence supports the mining industry and the prosperity it can bring. Currently, ministry officials conduct the technical review, the technical certification of mine closure plans. This bill moves that role from the ministry to so-called “qualified persons.” The problem is that currently the term “qualified persons” refers to geologists and mining engineers who assess ore deposits in order to protect investors.

Now, for mine closures, we need completely different skills. We need completely different knowledge to certify mine closure plans. Maybe we’ll need biologists, maybe we’ll need environmental scientists or geochemists, and I believe that the regulations should specify this before third reading. One simple thing to do is just call them something else. Instead of the people who are used to writing reports to protect investors, call them something else. Call them “mine-closure-qualified persons,” and then specify in the regulations exactly what qualifications they need to have. I know that this is not a hard thing to do, because there’s a mining rehabilitation code, and you can just look in that to see what sort of things need to be considered when you close a mine and use that to explain what qualifications the qualified persons who certify mine closure plans need to have.

A final point is that the qualified persons who can certify mine closure plans—I would hope that they are in different firms. They’re often in private firms; I would hope that they’re in different firms from the qualified persons who write reports for mining companies to protect investors who write reports on how much ore there is, how much could be extracted. The reason is that there’s a moral hazard if you are, on the one hand, somebody who’s paid by a mining company to write a report for investors on how much ore there might be in a deposit and how much could be recovered. If you are in the same firm, in the same company, and you are a qualified person to certify mine closure plans, there’s a conflict of interest that we have to avoid, so I would hope that the firms that are employed are separate.

I think there’s no evidence that the government’s plan is going to improve the quality of the technical review that is currently done by the ministry, but if they are going to move it over to qualified persons, I would want to make sure that these qualified persons don’t have a conflict of interest. Let me just say that these qualified persons for mine closure, if they’re in a private firm, probably don’t have the financial resources to stand behind all of the economic consequences of their certification should something go wrong, and that could be bad for the mining company itself.

A final point: Let me say that the minister taking over the responsibilities of the Director of Mine Rehabilitation has the risk that political pressure will come into play when the minister is deciding, instead of the Director of Mine Rehabilitation, whether or not to accept a mine closure plan or to accept a deferral of a mine closure plan, which is something else that this bill allows.

To summarize, let me say this: Le caucus libéral appuie la réussite à long terme de l’industrie minière en Ontario ainsi que les emplois bien rémunérés qu’elle offre. Ce projet de loi tente de permettre aux mines d’ouvrir plus rapidement, mais il semble précipité, il laisse beaucoup à désirer et il peut mettre en péril la réputation de l’industrie minière de l’Ontario.

I think it’s okay to take the time to get this bill right so that mines can be built in a first-class way and without delay. There’s no need to rush this bill. It’s like taking your time and getting your stance right and taking your time on the backswing when you play golf so that your shot goes straight and stays out of trouble.

Next question.

That’s a very good question as well. I hope that the good players in the mining sector won’t let that happen, because they have worked very hard. The company I mentioned and other companies have worked very hard to gain that reputation. They’ve got a much better reputation environmentally than the Ford government. And I hope that they won’t allow that to happen, because not all players in the mining sector have that reputation.

And so it’s incumbent on us all, but it’s also incumbent on the government, to make sure that they have qualified people and that the political process doesn’t get involved in the actual scientific permitting process. That is very cloudy in this bill, when you’re moving it to the minister. It’s very cloudy, and I don’t think the mining sector needs cloudiness. They need certainty. That’s what they all need.

We can now move to the period of questions.

I appreciate interacting with my colleague from the independent Liberals. It did put a smile on my face when he said that we seem to be moving very quickly on this legislation with mines, because we’ve been only working on it for four years. Of course, the Ring of Fire was announced in 2007, and the previous Liberal government sat on it for 11 years. I can understand that he thinks we’re moving a little bit too fast for this.

I did hear that he’s ready for it to move forward into second reading, but I was wondering if he is supportive and specifically on—what I found so intriguing is that, having met with stakeholders, the waste of previous mining operations was almost impossible to mine out for critical minerals that are in there.

Is he very supportive personally of being able to mine out what was waste in a mine from before and to clean up that area?

Thank you to the member from Kingston and the Islands for his contributions to the bill analysis. The member earlier spoke about—or one of the questions was that the government has been working on mines for four years. But what I found kind of interesting was that, according to the briefing that the ministry gave, they hadn’t yet consulted with Indigenous communities.

Just wondering how the member feels or his thoughts on if they’ve been working on the mining file for four years, why not consult with Indigenous communities prior to bringing the bill forward and knowing where they stand?

My question for the member who spoke just now is about roads. Roads have come up during the discussion and the debate on this bill. Just recently, the First Nation of Webequie and First Nation of Marten Falls, who are leading the environmental assessment for the roads that are being built or will be built eventually, received approval of the terms of reference for their environmental assessment. They are leading that environmental assessment.

My question to the member is as follows: Does he support Marten Falls First Nation and Webequie First Nation leading that environmental assessment regarding roads, or does he not?

I did have a question written down here, but I think I’m going to change it, based on what the member opposite said.

Do you have a sense that there’s a risk of a divide-and-conquer strategy taking place, where Indigenous communities are pitted against each other in order to get what the government wants without actually genuinely consulting with all communities who are affected?

Thank you to the member across the way for your presentation. My question goes back to the concept of UNDRIP, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and I’m wondering if you can express in this House the ways in which this government has failed Indigenous communities.

We know that many Indigenous communities are without clean drinking water and this has been the case for years. Under this government, it’s been almost five years and there have been no improvements. We know that many Indigenous communities have to leave their homes due to flooding. For five years, this government could have been solving that problem, and they haven’t. So I’m just wondering if you can elaborate on what level of trust you feel Indigenous communities may have with regard to this government. Thank you.

It’s an honour to rise in the House this afternoon to speak in support of Bill 71, the Building More Mines Act. I will be sharing my time today with my friend from Sarnia–Lambton.

I want to congratulate the Minister of Mines, both on his historic win last June and on the first piece of legislation to modernize the Mining Act. I also want to thank his team for all their work on this, including Caroline Eisen, who was an intern in my office.

I also want to recognize the great work of the Minister of Northern Development on the Critical Minerals Strategy, which was published last year.

Speaker, this is an exciting time for the mining industry. As the minister said, critical minerals are essential for the transition to a green economy, and Ontario is the best place in the world to mine. Our mines have incredible potential to benefit Ontario, Canada and the entire world.

This is also exciting for my own family, including my son Joey, who is a student in the department of mining at Queen’s University. His class is here in Toronto this week attending the PDAC conference, and they had a chance to visit Queen’s Park yesterday and meet the Minister of Mines. I want to thank the minister again for making time in his busy schedule to meet with the students who will be our next generation of leaders in the mining industry.

Speaker, the minister put it well earlier: The demand for critical minerals in key strategic sectors is growing exponentially both in Canada and around the world. The International Energy Agency predicts that demand for lithium could grow by over 50 times by 2040, and the demand for cobalt, graphite and nickel could be 30 times higher than today, with other critical minerals not far behind. We simply don’t have the supply we need to meet this skyrocketing demand. These minerals are critical for the production of electric vehicles, green energy and batteries, but also for telecommunications, drugs, national defence, and much more. And in most cases, there are no substitutes for these critical minerals. We’re often forced to depend on foreign countries that don’t share our world-class standards on the environment, labour and human rights.

For example, over 70% of the world’s cobalt comes from the Congo, which relies on child labour, often in horrific conditions. I’m reading a book called Cobalt Red, by Harvard professor Siddharth Kara, that documents some of this, that was just published in January. Cobalt is toxic and is often found near radioactive uranium, and yet children in the Congo often dig for it with their bare hands, without any protective equipment. Many are victims of physical and sexual abuse, or even worse, they’re buried alive—their bodies never found. When the previous Liberal government created their electric vehicle incentive of up to $14,000 per vehicle, most of the vehicles that were eligible contained cobalt from the Congo—up to 15 kilograms per vehicle. That’s an inconvenient truth, as Al Gore might say.

I’ll give one more example. Ukraine has Europe’s largest deposits of critical minerals, worth trillions of dollars, including 500,000 tonnes of lithium in eastern Ukraine, one of the largest lithium deposits in the world. It is no coincidence that eastern Ukraine has been the focus of Russia’s genocidal and colonial invasion. Just before the last invasion began, Ukraine began to auction off exploration permits to develop its resources in lithium, cobalt, nickel and other critical minerals that could have made it a leader in the green energy economy of the future.

As the minister said, Canada and its allies urgently need stable and responsible sources of key strategic critical minerals. Fortunately, Ontario is home to tremendous mineral wealth, with a trillion dollars worth of mineral deposits in the Ring of Fire alone. We also have the highest environmental health and safety standards. But, as the minister said, the process of opening and closing a mine takes far too long and costs far too much. It shouldn’t take 15 years to get a mining permit. We need to do better.

Bill 71 would modernize the Mining Act, eliminating unnecessary red tape while maintaining Ontario’s world-class environmental protections. As I said, we need to take these steps to support the transition to a green economy. Many of the changes are based on the advice from mining industry experts and leaders, including many who are here in Toronto at the PDAC convention this week.

I’d like to give just one example, Speaker. Over the last two months, I had the opportunity to travel across the province for pre-budget consultations with the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs. We visited Kenora, Thunder Bay, Sault Ste. Marie, Ottawa, Kingston, Windsor and Essex, and the minister’s own city of Timmins. In Sudbury, we had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Nadia Mykytczuk, the president and CEO of MIRARCO Mining Innovation. She reports that Canada’s mines generate 650 million tonnes of mine waste every year, and there are billions of tonnes more at abandoned mines across the province. These are sites that are expensive for the government to manage and to ensure that dangerous elements like lead, mercury and arsenic don’t poison our lakes and rivers. But there are hundreds of billions of dollars of cobalt, nickel and other critical materials in this mine waste across the province. Modern biotechnology and biomining can help recover these critical minerals, including cobalt, using micro-organisms like bacteria.

That’s why it’s so exciting to see that, if passed, Bill 71 would make it easier for companies to get permits to recover minerals from mine waste sites, including abandoned mines.

Speaker, yesterday afternoon I had the opportunity to host the Treasury Board round table with the Ontario Chamber of Commerce and 15 leaders from local chambers around the province, including Timmins Chamber of Commerce in the minister’s own riding and the Greater Sudbury chamber. I want to take the opportunity to thank everybody who joined us and, especially, our moderator, Daniel, and Andrea Carmona from the Ontario Chamber of Commerce. I’m proud to say there was great excitement and support for Bill 71, and especially for the work we’re doing to build new, vertical, made-in-Ontario supply chains that would connect critical minerals from the north, including the Ring of Fire, to manufacturing in the south of Ontario.

Ford Motor Co. assembly in Oakville, where I worked for 31 years, is being transformed into a global hub for manufacturing electric vehicles.

In the parliamentary assistant’s community of Windsor-Essex, Stellantis and LG Energy Solution are investing over $5 billion in the first large-scale electric vehicle battery manufacturing plant in Canada.

And just last month, we were able to source a $471-million investment from Magna International, including a new electric vehicle battery enclosure facility in Peel region, with at least 560 new jobs.

Over the past two years alone, we attracted almost $17 billion in investment from global auto manufacturers to build electric vehicles and batteries right across Ontario, thanks to our Premier and his vision to make Ontario a leader in both responsible and sustainable mining, and manufacturing the cars and the batteries of the future.

Speaker, although the minister is right—some of the changes he’s making may seem minor to the people outside the mining industry—Bill 71 is a very important part of the Premier’s vision. It will help to unlock the full potential of Ontario’s critical minerals and provide real benefits to all Ontarians, especially in the north and Indigenous communities.

As the minister said, we will continue to consult with our stakeholders about Bill 71 as we move forward. But I want to join the minister in urging all members of this House to support this bill. We can’t get to the green, zero-carbon future that we all want without building more mines, and we need to build them now for the future of this province.

I had the opportunity in my research with regard to this particular legislation to study the bill that was introduced in 2009 by the previous Liberal government, which bill was quite lengthy, dealing with the Mining Act and added several layers, layer after layer of new provisions and regulations etc., to the Mining Act. I’m wondering if the member has had an opportunity to review that history. I don’t presuppose that he has, but I would like to ask him, has he had an opportunity to review the several layers of additions made to the Mining Act by the 2009 Liberal proposal, and what were his views on that when he saw it?

Thank you. Next question?

We’re going to move to further debate.

I thank my colleague for another excellent question. As I understand it from reading a recent news report, there’s a third First Nation through which the road to the Ring of Fire has to run that wasn’t consulted. They made a video at the conference downtown saying, “We weren’t consulted.” You’re going to have a lot of trouble down the road, clearly. This was an example of the Conservative government doing a sloppy job of Indigenous consultation, and it’s just going to hurt the mining industry.

I do remember when the Ring of Fire was an issue when I was a federal MP. There was a private company that at that time was looking into exploiting the mineral resources in the Ring of Fire. They gave up because it didn’t look like it was going to be economic. Here we are, we’re looking back and we’re throwing blame all around when, in fact, sometimes mining projects are not economic because the value of the mineral you would like to extract is just too low, and that’s why it gets delayed.

With regard to this mining bill, there is the potential for prosperity in the north from mining, but we have to work together with Indigenous communities. Everybody has to share the wealth. A project can’t benefit some and then hurt others. That’s not the way to move forward in a democracy. This government has, I think, made a mistake by not consulting Indigenous groups before tabling this bill, and I don’t trust this government to do a careful job of consulting Indigenous communities. I think they’ve done a sloppy job recently, and they’re going to hurt the mining industry.

The member for Sarnia–Lambton.

Second reading debate deemed adjourned.

Report continues in volume B.

It’s a pleasure to rise in the House today and make a few comments on Bill 71.

I listened to the debate all afternoon, and it has been very interesting and very revealing. I hear about blood diamonds all the time in the media, and I just learned today that there are blood EVs. Some of the people should be ashamed—who took advantage of those $14,000 subsidies and are driving around with one of these EVs, as the member for Mississauga–Lakeshore explained. I’d be getting rid of it tomorrow. We should be shaming those people. Anyway, I didn’t come here to speak about that.

The changes we’re proposing in the Building More Mines Act support game-changing growth in other sectors, like electric vehicle production. It will also help build an integrated supply chain for manufacturers by connecting mineral producers in the north with manufacturers in the south—no more looking around the globe for resources; we would supply those critical minerals from within our own provincial border. What an opportunity. I always say, I wish I was 30 years younger.

What I appreciate most about the Building More Mines Act that the Minister of Mines has tabled is that there are no proposed changes to our world-class environmental regulations.

As I mentioned earlier in my remarks, my riding of Sarnia–Lambton is the hub of energy and chemical production in Ontario. Our local industry and the people who support the companies in the Chemical Valley spend a lot of time and resources making sure they are continuously improving their environmental performance and meeting all of the rigorously demanding standards of the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks. I’m sure that the mining industry will do the same. I heard different people say, “Oh, it’s not going to work, and they’ll go bankrupt.” No investor is going to lend money to someone who doesn’t have strong environmental and safety regulations—not in this day and age. Our local industry and people who support the companies in my Chemical Valley spend a lot of time and resources making sure that they are always continually living up to those standards. It’s something that they believe in very strongly, and they are very proud, as they should be, of the success they have had to date in reducing emissions and developing renewables and the green fuels of the future.

I’m extremely pleased with the Building More Mines Act. The changes that we are proposing are about improving how the Ministry of Mines operates and finding those efficiencies. Modernizing the Mining Act is crucial to supporting our transition to the green economy. The need to modernize the act, in fact, reminds me of the changes we are making to the Oil, Gas and Salt Resources Act to support opportunities in carbon capture and sequestration—something I’m very interested in, from my area of Sarnia–Lambton, because of the geology there, with the former salt caverns and the geology. I’m very much looking forward to that.

The previous government prohibited carbon sequestration based on fears that it would be used at the time to extend coal-based energy production in Ontario—and that probably would have been a good idea.

Anyway, now that coal is a distant memory in Ontario, we as a government need to take another look at the rules around carbon capture and sequestration in our province.

Numerous stakeholders in Sarnia–Lambton have contacted me about the advances in technology and the opportunity they present to help our provincial manufacturing sector decarbonize.

Carbon capture and sequestration also unlocks new opportunities in clean energy, like blue hydrogen production or low-carbon petrochemical development—all things we need in the future. But we had outdated legislation in the province, which has been eliminated because of the red tape reduction acts, that prevented us from seizing the tremendous opportunities that lay before us.

So I was extremely pleased when our government recently introduced the Less Red Tape, Stronger Ontario Act, which included amendments to the Oil, Gas and Salt Resources Act that address the outdated prohibitions on carbon capture and sequestration. I look forward to that bill also coming before this House for third reading. I’m looking forward to speaking on it and a final vote on its future—and I see that the Speaker is looking at the clock, but I’ll keep going until she gives me the sign. Again, it was an important—