Thank you for the question from the member from Renfrew–Nipissing–Pembroke. I recently attended with the Premier the opening of Vale’s Copper Cliff south mine. It was a tremendous event. Vale was extremely happy to see the Premier go underground to celebrate the reopening of this complex.

Vale spent over $900 million to redevelop this mine, and they’re going to spend another $900 million with the Creighton mine to do the very same thing. Now they’re going to spend $1.8 billion to produce copper and nickel and cobalt, minerals that are essential to producing the batteries that are required to decarbonize Ontario’s economy.

This is totally supported by this government and this Premier. We’re very supportive of this. We’re very ecstatic that this is happening in Ontario, under the leadership of this Premier.

Mr. Speaker, our message is simple: We cannot go green without mining, and Ontario is the best place in the world to mine. The time is now to eliminate unnecessary regulatory burdens, improve timelines, increase transparency and improve business certainty.

We built the Kidd Creek mine in three years, and perhaps that was a little too fast, but we’ve got to do better than 15 years to build mines now.

Right now, we’re developing regulations that will help exploration companies find the critical mineral mines of the future and promote innovative, new strategies to recover critical minerals from old mine tailings.

There’s much more to do, but we will never stop driving efficiencies into how the mines are developed, because we know how important it is to Ontario and the globe to mine these critical minerals, to support decarbonizing our economy in Ontario, and to secure the supply chain—again, all efforts that are led by the Premier here in Ontario.