Thank you very much.
It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you to the committee for inviting us to speak to you today.
I am here with my colleague, Ben Chalmers, vice-president of sustainability, who is also responsible for MAC's new international social responsibility committee.
I just want to apologize at the outset. I have to leave about 15 minutes before the end to go to Rideau Hall. Some of our members are getting an NSERC award today, and I'm expected to be there, but Ben will stay through to the duration for any questions you may have.
The Mining Association of Canada represents the majority of major mining producers in Canada. We mine a diversity of minerals and metals, including base metals, gold and precious metals, steel-making coal, diamonds, iron ore, uranium, and oil from the oil sands.
All of our members subscribe to MAC's award-winning corporate responsibility initiative called “Towards Sustainable Mining”, or TSM. TSM is a condition of membership for Canadian operations, and includes annual public reporting against a range of comprehensive performance metrics, subject to external verification at the mine-site level. It is the only system of its kind in the world in our sector and has been recognized as best in class by groups such as Canadian Business for Social Responsibility.
TSM is applied to the international operations of several of our member companies on a voluntary basis. As well, I would like to share with you a table—I believe it's been circulated—that we now publish that shows the level of MAC member company application of 19 different international standards and programs.
As you know, rising commodity prices, driven by China and other emerging economies, are creating opportunities not seen in decades for the mining sector. We have estimated that there is as much as $140 billion in new private sector investment to be spent across Canada in the next decade or less. At the same time, this global commodities boom will spur increasing investments by Canadian companies overseas.
Canada's mining sector is one of the country's most significant outside investors, responsible for about 10% of Canadian direct investment abroad, while the total value of Canadian mining assets abroad is valued at $109 billion. Two-thirds of these assets are in the western hemisphere, just under 50% of which is in just three countries: Mexico, Chile, and the United States.
It's important to underscore that Canadian mining firms investing abroad bring direct returns to Canada and Canadians. As the Conference Board of Canada showed in a 2011 report, Canadian direct investment abroad translates into overall long-term benefits for Canada and its regions by improving productivity, jobs, trade, investment, tax revenues, and worker skill levels. This report also noted that Canada's mining sector is a leader in this regard.
Canada has the second-most top 100 mining companies in the world, trailing only China, which may raise a number of questions for you as well.
All of these statistics I'm mentioning underscore the important role Canadian mining can play in assisting development outcomes in the developing world.
As you may have read in Embassy, MAC strongly supports the decision CIDA took to invest in three mining NGO partnerships in Africa and Latin America. All three partnerships will help address the most fundamental obstacle to ensuring that benefits from large-scale private sector investment in the developing world are optimized, that obstacle being lack of capacity.
The World Vision and Barrick project in Peru will help local economies diversify, building supply chains to service the mining sector and other parts of the domestic economy, not unlike what we have created and achieved here with many aboriginal communities across the country.
In Burkina Faso, the project between Plan Canada and IAMGOLD will help youth receive skills training that matches labour market needs in a variety of sectors.
In Ghana, the WUSC and Rio Tinto project will support the capacity of local government to implement development plans and diversify the economy.
Canada is late to the idea of public-private partnerships in the field of international aid. The U.S., Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and many other countries have been doing this for years. By aligning ourselves with the private sector, CIDA is tying itself to the market economy, and therefore to far more likelihood of enduring success.
Some have labelled CIDA's contribution as a subsidy, but this is not correct. As I and others have pointed out, including Carlo Dade, senior fellow at the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa and the former executive director of the Foundation for the Americas,
Co-funding has never meant subsidizing; it means both sides investing money or other resources in win-win projects that benefit the public. Given the resources that the private sector brings to these projects, this is almost always a better deal for taxpayers.
What this means, in my view, is that we should be encouraging more projects like the three pilots I mentioned. We should be encouraging our sector to think beyond the mine gate and to work with NGO partners to optimize outcomes in host communities. We certainly should not be criticizing firms that show leadership by doing the right thing, in the right way, with the right partners.
In our brief we also rebut some erroneous statements made to this committee by MiningWatch back in November. I won't belabour these, but would just like to draw your attention to how Ms. Coumans misrepresented the findings and purposes of the work of Dan Haglund, whose work was commissioned by the International Council on Mining and Metals. The ICMM, with Dan Haglund, have undertaken important policy work precisely to help the mining industry ensure its investments avoid the potential risks of the so-called “resource curse” and instead optimize the potentially enormous benefits from multi-billion-dollar capital investments.
Thank you very much.