Mr. Chair, I thank MP Van Bynen for the question.
I think what you're seeing is a tectonic plate shift in terms of our decision in Canada to be a country that makes things, not one that just exports things. For a lot of our life, we've been drawers of water and hewers of wood. We send it off to other countries to actually get the value-added jobs.
Now we are changing that approach. We're going to make sure that our children and our children's children are actually part of a supply chain that is going to not just provide batteries, but extract and refine the critical minerals to get to those batteries. We're going to see that across the country, whether it's Stellantis or Northvolt, or what we're seeing in Newfoundland and Labrador, in Atlantic Canada and in Edmonton in some of the examples that I've already mentioned. The Stellantis plant is just one example of 2,500 good-paying, long-term union jobs once the plant is up, and at least 1,600 construction jobs for Canadians.
I think we have to have an adult conversation about what it means to have technical experts from another country come to our country to help do the technology transfer.
There's a technology company in Calgary called Eavor. It does deep-hole, geothermal drilling to provide heat and electricity. We've exported this technology to Germany right now and, guess what, there aren't any technicians who understand how to do this deep, geothermal drilling. Can you guess which technical experts are going to Germany to set up shop and do tech transfer? It's Canadian engineers, Canadian geophysicists and Canadian drillers.
Are we saying that South Koreans shouldn't be able to send over their technicians to actually help Canadians understand how we do a battery plant? We've never built batteries in this country before, and we actually need the expertise of our friends from Korea—our trading partners under a free trade deal signed by the Conservatives—to come and set up shop.
What's really dangerous, Mr. Chair, to Mr. Van Bynen and other colleagues, is if the Conservatives turn up the rhetoric too hot. Dave Cassidy, the Local 444 union president, said this. There's another $3-billion ancillary plant that could go to us or to Mexico. If the Conservatives are talking about doom and gloom and the sky falling with some workers coming to help us do a tech transfer, that $3-billion plant is at risk.
I don't want to see foreign direct investments scared away because of misinformation.