International Trade Committee on May 9th, 2024

[Maninder Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

Thank you for that.

Mr. Deith, you mentioned capital in Canada and critical minerals.

A few weeks ago, I was in Yukon, in Whitehorse, and we came across many country representatives who were there talking about capital investors in their country wanting to come to Canada to invest in this important space because we're building out an EV supply chain ecosystem, as you know. There are billions of dollars in investments coming to this country. A couple of weeks ago Honda announced a $15-billion investment by Japan, which is building out four plants, with 4,000 more jobs coming to our country.

Canada is the only country in the western hemisphere that has every component that can go into a battery, so many countries globally are interested in what we have here. When you talk about capital, which countries do you see the most interest from?

[Jamie Deith]

The capital intensity has actually been reasonably good at the level of what we might call the "downstream building" of plants and some of the midstream manufacturing facilities that feed those plants. By the time you get two or three steps up the supply chain to where the minerals actually come out of the ground, that's where there has been a severe lack of capital. Personally I think that's going to bite us, because it takes a long time for a mineral project to get going, and it takes a lot less time to build a battery plant than to build a mine, so we're going to be building battery plants without having anything to feed them.

As far as interest from other countries is concerned, my experience actually has been that we have had the most serious interest from Chinese investors, and that lasted only a certain amount of time. I hate to say that they were the leaders in terms of interest in investing in mining projects in Canada, but I suppose they had the experience and they decided that it made sense for them to continue doing that.

A lot of these minerals have no huge player, such as might exist in gold or copper production or something like that. There's really no giant source of international, multinational capital that is likely to come in and start the ball rolling as far as these things are concerned. So if you want to talk about why there's a bit of a vacuum in capital, those are some of the contributing factors.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Kyle Seeback]

That's definitely time. I'm having so much fun that we could do another round until six o'clock, but I'm not going to see the will in the room.

I have just a couple of reminders for the committee. On May 21, the committee will begin the seafood import study. We'll continue it on the 23rd. As a final reminder, the witness deadline for that study is Tuesday, May 14 at noon.

Thanks to all of our witnesses for coming today. You provided us with a lot of valuable information.

With that, I am going to adjourn the meeting.