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?

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.

Kawartha Lakes.

But he’s right in what he said: We are creating economic incentives, adding options for companies to provide additional financial assurance as construction milestones are reached rather than providing a lump sum up front to help reduce costs. That’s one of the other things—you can only talk so much in the time you’re allotted, but I wanted to put those points in.

Reducing regulatory burden: We heard you can’t wait 15 years to site. We’ve got to help these companies that are helping us and helping the world, really, to open up more quickly and efficiently, not compromising our world-class environmental standards. And all of that makes us competitive. We have to be competitive by adapting and modernizing, and that’s what we are doing with this act. It’s going to be more on par with the best jurisdictions in the world and in Canada, and that’s what we need to do to move forward.