Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to the members of the committee for the opportunity to appear today.
My name is Alison Cretney. I represent the Energy Futures Lab and the Future Materials Alliance, a multi-stakeholder coalition focused on western and northern Canada's role in critical materials supply chains.
I want to be clear about my expertise. I'm not a trade policy expert, and I can't speak to the specific mechanics of U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum, but what I can speak to is the structural vulnerability that makes Canada exposed to this kind of pressure and what a more durable response could look like.
This committee has convened around addressing the immediate crisis of tariffs threatening Canadian jobs, but the deeper problem your mandate points to is structural and long-standing. We've been hearing a lot about the integration of Canadian steel and aluminum sectors across shared value chains, which, of course, has huge benefits, but it has also created a structural dependence and, when trading relationships shift, Canadians pay the price.
For many of Canada's other mineral and metal resources, the problem, at least for now, is somewhat different. For decades, Canada has extracted and exported raw and semi-processed materials while other countries capture the value-added stages: the refining, processing, manufacturing, high-skilled jobs and the economic and geopolitical leverage that comes with controlling critical supply chains. What we're seeing in steel and aluminum should be understood as a cautionary tale.
When we think about the full value chains that are now in the process of being built for critical minerals and other metals, we need to think ahead. We need to consider how Canada can build integrated metallurgical materials and manufacturing ecosystems that support resilient and sustainable domestic value chains and how we can produce the electronics, batteries, defence systems, clean energy infrastructure and other products that Canada and our allies need while also being more resilient to policy changes south of the border.
We have an advantage in that, for critical materials, we are still early enough to make choices. This is the system-level challenge that the Energy Futures Lab is working to address by creating the Future Materials Alliance. The alliance is bringing together industry, indigenous nations, governments and investors to build alignment around how Canada can move beyond extraction to sustainable, resilient value chains for critical minerals and metals. This means that Canada will have to address that missing middle of refining and processing capacity, but it also means that we need to build the coordination capacity to make it happen.
If we're serious about sovereignty and supply chain security, we must be just as serious about the ecosystems that make industrial strength real. A centralized lithium processing hub in the Prairies is a good example of what coordination can unlock. No single brine producer in Saskatchewan or Alberta can justify a refinery alone, but collectively these projects could justify a shared facility that enables the economics for all of them while anchoring a new industrial cluster that could serve producers from Manitoba to the Northwest Territories over to B.C.
That kind of outcome doesn't happen project by project. It happens when someone's holding the system view, building the shared intelligence, aligning the stakeholders and making the connections that no single company or government department can make on its own. Other jurisdictions have recognized this. China built its dominance by coordinating refining, chemicals, technologies, equipment, power, logistics, skills, finance, policy and incentives over decades. More recently, Europe created the European Raw Materials Alliance, and the U.S. created the critical materials alliance. These are not project-funding vehicles. They are coordination platforms designed to build the ecosystems that make projects viable in the first place. Canada has not yet made that investment, so that is the challenge and the opportunity that we now face.
In summary, we hope that Canada has learned the lesson that project-specific investments and targeted industrial incentives on their own do not necessarily lead to resilient supply chains. There are numerous examples where substantial world-class resources and determined project proponents did not translate into facilities, jobs or competitiveness, in part because the surrounding ecosystem was missing. In the absence of an aligned strategy and coordinated ecosystem, even well-funded projects can stall or never reach a final investment decision.
As we see it, there are three areas for this committee to consider. None of them will solve today's problems of tariffs on steel and aluminum, but they may help us avoid repeating this conversation in the future.
The first is building out midstream metals and materials processing capacity so we capture more value domestically and reduce exposure to external shocks. The second is better aligning critical minerals, metallurgical and advanced manufacturing policies, which today often sit in silos. The third is using procurement, industrial strategy and cluster development approaches to strengthen domestic ecosystems and not just individual projects, because coordination is in itself a form of intervention.
Chair and members of the committee, the pressure Canadian workers and industries are facing right now is real, and the committee is absolutely right to take this seriously.
Beyond short-term tariff relief, the most important response will be the one that reduces the likelihood of facing the same vulnerability again. The lesson from steel and aluminum is not to retreat from integration, as we've been hearing, but, rather, to pair integration with greater domestic capacity and value creation. That creates industrial resilience, leverages Canada's high environmental standards and creates high-skill jobs. That gives Canada genuine leverage in the supply chains the world is reorganizing around right now.
We have the resources, the talent and the industrial capacity to do that. The gap is definitely not capability. It's coordination—work that the Future Materials Alliance is focused on.
Thank you. I look forward to your questions.
