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.