I think what Mr. Williams has said is a lot more interesting than what I have to say, and I'm delighted and honoured to be on this panel.
You ask a perfectly legitimate question: what's in it for Canada? In the short term, the mining investment obviously repatriates income, and those economic benefits don't need discussion here.
This is why Canada is so well positioned now to take advantage of an opportunity that is created as a result of Prime Minister Batbold's visit to Canada. Prime Minister Stephen Harper made it very clear that the incentive for Mongolia to move ahead more expeditiously than they have over the last six years with a FIPA in order to provide some guarantees of asset protection for Canadian investors is that at the end of that rainbow, we start negotiations on a free trade agreement.
Canada will, as it has for the last 10 years, once again be ahead of the United States on the FTA. The American Congress has refused for several years to renew the trade negotiating authority of the President. This applied to President Bush; it applies to President Obama. He does not have trade negotiating authority, and Congress has an uncertain appetite for future FTAs. My impression is that the Government of Canada has no such reluctance and is in very many ways eating the lunch of the United States on moving ahead on its FTA program. It is likely that Canada can have an FTA with Mongolia much faster and much sooner than any other country, with the benefits that would produce.
Education exports: if a Mongolian is educated at one of Canada's fine colleges and universities, for the rest of his life, when he thinks of needing a major construction company, he's going to think of Lavalin, not necessarily Bechtel. If he needs to buy a plane, he's going to think of Bombardier and not of an American producer or Embraer or Fokker. If they get to the point of mass transit, he's going to think again of Bombardier and not an Italian manufacturer.
There is an awareness among very senior private sector Mongolians that an education in Canada is qualitatively different, and to many of them better, than in the United States simply because of the social environment. The president of MCS Holding Company, which recently had an IPO in the Hong Kong stock market, which established the capitalization of their company, which owns a piece of the Tavan Tolgoi coal project at over $5 billion, asked me for advice on where to send his sons. He wanted a small college in a safe environment where they were going to get a good education and where he didn't have to worry about them every day. I said Simon Fraser. I'm sure I've offended everybody else at this table who has a pet college or university, but he had two of his sons go there. The NAMBC has organized a Canadian Alumni of Mongolia organization, and we are about to hand it over to a self-governing board of landed Mongolian immigrants in Canada.
Finally, on the Toronto Stock Exchange, this mining company went to Hong Kong, and if there is a greater visibility for Canada, then more of them are going to come to Toronto. This is globally competitive now, and it's important to persuade foreign mining companies to list in Toronto and not in Hong Kong, Shanghai, London, New York, Chicago, or wherever. It is important to preserve the status of the Toronto Stock Exchange.
That's just a quick answer to a very good and very deep question, and those are some of the advantages I see.