Thank you.
There are a few different things, I suppose.
Brian, I understand the goal here. I understood that we were going to have a subcommittee meeting on Tuesday of next week, and then we were going to hit the ground running the following week. If it's a matter of seizing an additional week and a half or so, I'm okay with that, but I just.... If we look at this study in particular, what I would look to get out of this is that we'd have the minister and/or his officials attend before us, and I would put one question to them, which is “What was the advice of the preliminary analysis of the department?” If the preliminary analysis was “don't do a full review and here's why”, then I'm not that interested in spending six meetings looking into it.
Now, if the preliminary analysis was “do a full review” and the government did not, declined, to do that full review, then I think it's worth enquiring. I'm a bit worried that we're skewing our entire agenda here without knowing the answer to that preliminary question, and we're allocating six meetings. I would like the minister to talk about his mandate letter, not only critical minerals, and to discuss the net-zero accelerator and to discuss the digital privacy legislation that is likely to come to us this spring if we can retable it from the last session.
There are a number of things that I would like to ask the minister about, and I would encourage colleagues who are interested specifically in Neo Lithium to put their questions to the minister. I think we should have him before us sooner rather than later.
We should have Ian Scott for a meeting. My idea was to have the minister and Ian Scott for preliminary meetings to hold time as we invite other witnesses for a longer-term study. That was my hope.
If we want to get into how we can use this committee most effectively and do some work next week, I'm open to that idea. I don't see a six-meeting study for Neo Lithium specifically when the likely answer back from officials is that “our recommendation was not to do a full review based on the facts as we know them”. I can't imagine that we're establishing a schedule of six meetings today, right now, over what we know. I would just encourage us to be a little more strategic about it. Yes, let's use our time, and if we want to get going next week, let's do it, but let's get going in a little more of a thoughtful way. That would be the approach I would suggest.