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.