Mr. Chairman, honoured members of the committee, thanks for your invitation to be here today to share my thoughts on the resource aspect of the Arctic sovereignty question.
I'm going to read sparsely from notes, but I am going to try to speak from my own passion. My family has built and founded some of the most interesting brands this country has been able to share around the world.
In the 1970s, we built a company called SCIEX, which deals with mass spectrometry. Forty years later, it remains the world leader in a $7 billion per year industry. It focuses on the environment and medicine and on being able to see issues in people and the environment that you just otherwise can't detect. SCIEX remains a tremendous success to this day.
In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, we built a company called IMAX Corporation. IMAX is giant screen theatres, as I'm sure you know. It carried a Canadian passion around the world in being able to take people places they otherwise couldn't go and to share with them—although it has become a very commercialized operation—educational opportunities and visions of the Arctic, Antarctic, Ontario, and Canada that they otherwise would never be able to see. That was a technological innovation in visualization.
We built a small piece of what became BCE Emergis. We had a passion for communication in this country. Although we can't really say we knew what we were doing at the time, it was the birth of the Internet. What we built became part of the backbone for the communication line that Canada has in place today. We assisted in the governance of a Canadian company that sat at the diagnostic heart of most CT and MRI machines.
I'm not trying to impress you with my CV. I'm trying to say that we build technologies that work, that become globally adopted, and that are all about visualization.
For my family, one of the driving factors has always been and remains a passionate need to give back to Canada something that was given to our family. This is the greatest place to live on this earth. We've always tried to construct within our companies a social construct, a social partnership. My father used to tell me it's more important to create a job than to earn the bottom line. We have created 20,000 jobs over the years.
We are very proud to see the country benefit from the fruits of our activities. We have delivered transforming solutions in the fields of environment, culture, medicine, communications, entertainment, and others, always with a uniquely Canadian brand and style. Even though these companies move into the hands of other owners, Americans largely, we put in place whatever we can to make sure that for the longest period of time their operations and headquarters remain in this country.
Each and every one of these companies is about seeing what otherwise can't be seen, or visualizing what otherwise can't be visualized.
I'm personally passionate about the Arctic sovereignty issue and about the Arctic in general. Let me try to give you a bit of a foundation.
My great-grandfather was Bishop Rix. He was bishop of New Caledonia, stationed in Prince Rupert. I know it's not quite the Arctic, but it's pretty damn close. He instilled in my family over the decades a passion for everything about northern Canada that exists today. I can still recall the cathartic event as a boy when I learned that the United States had sent their submarines into what we believed were Canadian waters without permission, and thus challenged—I didn't know what to call it—our Arctic sovereignty. I've never forgotten the sense of surprise, helplessness, and frustration that incident left imprinted on me. Although it sort of stews at the back of the mind, it always comes to the forefront as a childhood impression.
I recognize that this debate has evolved into something more than simply lines on a map. At its core, this is about the reach of Canadian jurisdiction and economic opportunity. At its core, it's a race. It's no longer entirely about defence or monitoring, although it's important. It's about claiming our birthright, about claiming the growth that our birthright can bring to this nation.
I'm very proud of the foresight the Canadian government has had since 1841 when it first put £1,500 aside for the geological exploration of Upper Canada. Ever since then, one of the foundation strengths of this country has been its ability to peer forward 50 or 100 years and ask how we are going to unleash the potential of this country well into the future.
The establishment of the geosurvey and its work in the thirties, forties, and fifties was phenomenal in laying a foundation for economic stability and growth that makes us one of the strongest and most admired economies in the world today.
Technology evolves, as do social imperatives. Today we find ourselves facing a more difficult exploration challenge as the targets become deeper and more complex. At the same time, we find ourselves alerted to an increasingly important set of environmental issues that are so key to our future.
That is the preamble. Let me tell you the advertisement about Gedex. For the past 14 years, we have been building our opus, which is a company called Gedex, which is transformational to the world of discovery in resources and in security and defence. Gedex is a technology developed and built in Canada by Canadians that can, in a way never possible before, overfly terrain and understand what is under the ground, from a resource perspective, down to 10 miles. It is essentially the achievement of our family's goal to turn the top 10 miles of the Earth's crust into glass for discovery purposes.
I want to make a couple of things clear. It's very easy for people to come in and say they have achieved a goal or that they have a technology that can do x, y , or z. I ask you to think about our past performance and what we've successfully delivered before and understand that is what we have been passionately quietly and carefully building for 14 years.
It is not just me who is saying that. We're partnered with some of the largest companies in the resource industry: Rio Tinto, De Beers, Anglo American, Cliffs Natural Resources. Every quarter we're adding more. Next will be one of the major oil companies.
We are also partnered, and appreciatively partnered, with the Canadian government. We made this case some months ago. We think it is incredibly important to do so because Gedex is about four things that are relevant to today's discussion: speed of discovery, economics of discovery, the environment, and creating an unfair advantage at the diplomatic table. The fourth is as important as any of the other three.
On speed of discovery, I recognize this is a bipartisan committee and everybody has a different perspective. Everybody has different objectives and ambitions, but it's important to hear what I'm saying in the sense that we've taken the time to try to cover all of those aspects from a very Canadian perspective.
On the speed of discovery, we seamlessly integrate with existing technologies. That means we are hunting for elephants in elephant country. The geosurvey and current technologies have identified macro areas and said there is probably something here, and that's fantastic, but it's like looking for one glass of water in something the size of this room in the dark. It will take a long time to actually vector in on what you are trying to find. What does Gedex do?
Gedex allows for an immediate vectoring, which has a massive economic impact on Canada, on Canadians, and on the Arctic. It immediately allows us to say, “Don't drill. Don't look here, here, and here.” The savings in saying that are enormous. We'll come to the environmental savings as well later. It also zeroes in. The traditional number is one out of about 300 drill targets proves successful. Maybe we're one out of ten or one out of three, but it's a phenomenal improvement, which frees up capital in Canada to focus on other more productive things. We rapidly cover vast areas of terrain, and the vectoring is of significant value.
Regarding the economics of discovery, because we help find things faster with more certainty, there's a tightened time to exploration and to exploitation, and that means job and tax base creation. That's a gift to the Conservatives in the room: jobs and tax base.
There are fewer wasted dollars and almost critically an opportunity to dramatically enhance the pre-tax royalty base on any project. Let me touch on that. Governments are terrific. They understand they have an asset they are entrusted with, and they exploit that opportunity by taking royalties and taxes from what's extracted. That's terrific. To be able to identify more specifically where the opportunity lies means they can extract a higher royalty base from commercial operations that are going in to extract those opportunities. That has to happen.
In regard to the environment, these are non-intrusive flights. There are no seismic activities. There are fewer wasted drill holes and less disruption on the environment, both physically and in terms of supply chain. The ability to say an area is barren of resources is incredibly important.
You create national parks on a regular basis, and I think that's great. It's part of a blue-green strategy that lies at the heart of this country. At the same time, wouldn't it be great to know that the park you're creating has nothing of significant resource value under it? Why don't we work together to figure that out?
In terms of unfair advantage, if you're going into a diplomatic negotiation and you actually know or have a pretty good sense as to where something exists and where other things don't, you have an unfair advantage at that table. We'd like to find a way to partner with the government to create that unfair advantage at the diplomatic table and make sure Canada is defending what's worth fighting for diplomatically.
Gedex stands ready to serve this country by a far-reaching and foresightful partnership that can have positive ramifications for the next century and beyond. Gedex is almost perfectly constructed to become a critical tool in the Arctic discovery and development program, and if managed properly, at the diplomatic level as well.
We view sovereignty mapping as our core business. We're in constant negotiation with countries around the world to discuss the value of sovereignty mapping, and we hope this will become part of the discussion. We can assist and partner with the Canadian people in realizing, protecting, and exploiting their birthright.