Thanks very much, Mr. Chair; and my appreciation to our witnesses.
I will start with my questions to Mr. Agnew in particular. I wish I had a briefing of yours ahead of time, because I was scrawling down notes like crazy here thinking of some good questions to ask you.
You talked about critical minerals, clean energy and defence. I would really like to go into those as far as how we co-operate and work together with our American partners here. We've recently done a study of this at the natural resources committee as well, and a bunch of weaknesses here have been exposed.
First, every critical element is going to take a 10-year mine development process, and probably longer because of new legislation in Canada applying to mines, called the Impact Assessment Act, which has been disastrous across the board. The length of time to develop those actual industries versus the time you actually set up a facility to fortify and manufacture those metals, which is about 18 months, is a big disconnect. In that cycle of 10 years or so, you have a cartel-like provider around the world, mostly China, in critical minerals that will continue to move that price up and down, so those mines in that process will become unviable, like in the United States with the Mountain Pass facility.
Tell me what you think, between Canada and the U.S., we should be doing in order to buffer those cartel-like tendencies to make our critical elements unviable at certain points in that commodity cycle.