Thank you for coming.
It's always hard—I'm not a regular on this committee and I feel like I've dropped into a conversation. It feels a bit like I've dropped into an alternative universe. I have about 4,000 Afghans living in my riding. I've never met one who is a geologist. I've never met one who is a geophysicist. I've never met one who is a miner. I've never met one who has worked in a mine or knows anything about mining. I've talked to all of them. So either all the miners, geologists, and geophysicists have stayed in Afghanistan and are busily working or the industry really doesn't exist in any meaningful way.
Are there geologists there? Are there geophysicists? Does this geological survey compare to the Geological Survey of Canada in its expertise and what it can do? I worked as an accountant in a steel company responsible for an iron ore mine. I know something about what it takes to run a mine. It not only took having iron ore in the ground, it took a railway to get the iron ore out of there to a steel plant, which means it took a steel plant too. It took trucks to move finished product out of the steel plant, which took roads. It took a regime with a governance system that made the roads safe to travel on. It took labour-management relations. It took a capital market. It took a market for the steel. This is a huge thing.
I feel like I'm Alice in Wonderland dropped into this conversation that makes absolutely no sense to me. We have a dozen parliamentarians sitting around here talking in la-la land, and we have professionals taking their time to try to inform the committee. Help me. Is this realistic in the foreseeable future?