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.

Thank you for the question. In fact, yes, I did actually visit this laboratory called MIRARCO at Laurentian University. One of the areas of research they look into is how to efficiently extract the mineral value from mine tailings. I think it’s a good thing that we’re moving forward on this legislation. I know that there’s a section of the mining bill that deals specifically with recovering minerals from tailings and waste. It has passed, but it hasn’t been proclaimed. It calls on improvements in the state of the land or the site on which the tailings sit after the recovery operations compared to before.

This legislation tries to change it to “comparable,” and it lets you choose which one is comparable. Either the public health and safety or the environment, only one of them has to be comparable. As I read the bill, one of them could be worse. As long as one of those two, environment or public health and safety, is comparable, then it’s okay, and I—

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?

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—