It's going to be challenging. Coming from the oil and gas sector, I saw this play out over the years. When your resource is more expensive than everybody else's, it's really hard to sell it. It's hard to sell it internationally. It's even hard to sell it in Canada. There's a reason why eastern Canada uses Saudi Arabian oil; it's cheaper than Alberta oil.
You can apply the same conceptual ideologies around lithium. If it costs me $8,000 to produce a tonne of lithium in Canada, but I can get it for $3,000 a tonne in Chile, why would I buy Canadian lithium?
I think the answer in the short term is to have the government subsidizing as much as possible our ability to innovate in the space and make sure that we get our operating costs down as low as possible. This happened in the shale gas sector as well. We drove down the cost of producing shale gas to a point where it was competitive. Competitive pricing and competitive production is a very important goal that we'll have to try to meet.
The other thing that's missing that Canada could probably step in and fill is that if you produce a tonne of lithium in Quebec today, you still have to transport that tonne of lithium to Asia to be turned into a cathode before it can go in a battery in the Gigafactory in Houston with Elon Musk. It has to go to Asia because there's no alternative here in North America. We don't do cathode manufacturing here and we need to in order to keep the supply chain local.
