I've been working on this for about 10 years—looking at the supply chains. If we look at the Bloomberg scoring for battery supply chain potential, Canada was number one in the world two years ago. Now we're number two. It's about potential, though. The reason we're number two is that we have access to critical minerals. We're one of the only countries in the world that have full access to every critical mineral required for the EV supply chain. That includes lithium spodumene in Quebec. It also includes lithium brine in Alberta and nickel in Ontario. Copper is a very important element. We can have copper smelting in the Alberta heartland.
This is the critical mineral stuff we've been talking about for a while. We're starting to see some action, but we really need to move quickly. We can't just keep talking about potential when people around the world are moving very quickly. China is moving very quickly to buy mines around the world. They currently control upwards of 80% of all these critical minerals and their processing.
For Canada, vertical integration is the name of the game when it comes to producing a competitive product. The reason China has cheap EVs is not that they have cheap labour. They have cheap EVs because they have dominated and controlled the supply chain in a vertically integrated way.
You can go back to the Tesla battery days of 2021 and listen to that speech: “We're going to make a vehicle for $25,000.” Well, that's great. Everything they talked about was in regard to vertical integration. They were going to control lithium in Nevada. They were going to process it there. They were going to have cathode material. The idea is that vertical integration will be the name of the game, but that requires coordination. It requires industrial policy.
We've seen some hints of that. Where we are right now is way better than where we were five years ago. We were nowhere on EVs in the supply chain. I think we still have a long way to go. I'm saying that the Chinese are dominating this market globally. I'm not dismissing the security concerns, but is there a way we can partner with them on joint ventures? The U.S. is considering it. The CEO of Ford told Trump that they want to go with him to China to talk to BYD and CATL. We should not leave ourselves out of that conversation when obviously our partners in the south are looking at the same options.