The mining industry is quite fragmented in many respects. We don't have a sense of national purpose. I heard this from the other groups talking--I think it was the biotechnology people--and I said to myself, “Gee whiz, it's the same thing”.
We in mining compare ourselves with Australia a lot. There is a country that has probably twice the dependence on the mining industry that we do, but still is able to...and they have the same governance. The control over resources is a state matter, as it is in this country. That's where I think our balkanization starts. We have associations all across the country. Each of these associations is a unifying force in itself, but we don't have a very strong, total networking of all of those associations. Certainly among governments and the various programs that affect our industry, there are lots of differences between the federal government and the provincial governments and so on.
I was saying to Mr. Lake earlier that Australia has a population half our size. They are rugged individualists, these people--and I've lived there--more than Canadians are. Yet when it comes to a national purpose, they seem to be able to get their act together. In everything that affects mining, whether it's education, whether it's innovation or exporting, they're ahead.
In Australia, for the mining suppliers of Australia, they undertook a program starting 10 years ago. They made this a priority to export more of what they call mining technology services, which is what I represent. They had a national goal to bring it from $1 billion to $6 billion. And do you know who was going around talking about that? The industry minister of the country was going around talking about that. So it became a program that was far more successful.
What we have here is a really fragmented approach to this. We have a lot of excellent silos in the thing, but we don't have a sense of national purpose in an industry that is the most dominant sector that Canada has in the world. It could be more dominant.