I’m standing today to add my voice to the chorus of support for the Building More Mines Act. In reading over the act as well as the rationale behind it, I was reminded yet again—I can usually find a connection almost anywhere—of one of my favourite authors, Douglas Adams, the mind behind the wonderful book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, known for having the words “don’t panic” inscribed in large friendly letters on its front cover. But to be more specific, I was reminded of his description of the Vogons, an alien race of officious interstellar bureaucrats. The Vogons “wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.”

It turns out the process by which Ontario has been opening and closing mines has been operating in a way that I feel Vogons might find astonishingly similar, and this bill aims to fix that, and our firelighters will have to be sourced elsewhere.

Right now, it can easily take 15 years to permit a mine. That kind of timeline is never going to work if we are going to accomplish what we promised to accomplish for the mining sector, for northern Ontario, and for the many communities and people who make northern Ontario their home.

What does the current sort of Vogonesque bureaucracy look like? If we talk about mine closures—closure plans, specifically—a closure plan is a plan that sets out in detail all the steps that a company will take to rehabilitate the mine after the mining is done. Of course, a mine does not last forever. At some point, you exhaust the resources within it that you’re looking for, but at that point you close the mine.

Under the existing legislation, a mining company has to file the closing plan for the mine before it in fact actually even begins to mine, which is challenging, as a mine can last 100 years or more—and in fact, some have. It’s quite challenging to predict what is going to happen 100 years on and how you are going to close and rehabilitate that mine, as you are stuck predicting the future.

The other issue, of course, is, before you open a mine, you have to file the financial security, which is the money that it’s going to take to close the mine and restore the location as much as possible to its original condition. None of that money is used for producing product or getting it to market, but it has to be posted in advance before you even start producing. So you’re investing in a project, having to put up a large amount of money before you are allowed to start on that project or to start making any money off of that project, and you also have to read the tarot cards to determine exactly how long that mine is going to last and how you are going to plan and finance its closure, before you have been able to open it.

As I said, this is why I thought of the Vogons when I was reading the rationale behind the Mining Act. Mining remains a very specialized industry, and with these very arcane current rules there aren’t a lot of places where you can go to find financing for a mining project.

Investment in the mining sector offers incredible benefits to all of Ontario. Those benefits go far beyond just the supply of critical minerals for EV battery projects. The new roads proposed as part of this investment will create economic opportunities for First Nations and northern communities. It will make it easier to access health services and education. Easier transportation of goods improves food security. It also reduces the cost-of-living increases that are increasingly borne by those living far up north. This isn’t about imposing southern Ontario transit choices on the north, though.

I want to highlight that the terms of reference for the all-season, multi-use road that will connect to the Ring of Fire were designed and submitted by the Webequie and Marten Falls First Nations.

There’s also the benefit from resource revenue-sharing. Back in 2018, there was one thing that the NDP, the Liberals and the PCs all agreed on, and that was resource revenue-sharing. It was, essentially, a non-partisan issue because everybody realized how much sense it made to give First Nations actual partnership and ownership in the projects that were occurring in their traditional territories.

I really appreciated, first of all, your use of classic literature, with your references to the Vogons.

My question to you is, I will say, one of timing—through the Speaker, of course. We heard that it takes 15 years to get a mine up and running. I come from an IT background, and I’ve seen the changes and the progress made and how technology keeps on moving forward and changing. If we have to wait 15 years for that next mine, do you think the technologies that are being explored across the world will actually have moved beyond what is currently planned? Do you think that timing is appropriate for the evolution of our green technologies?