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 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.