If, as President Biden and the Prime Minister said in 2021, Canada and the United States truly want to be partners in the development of critical minerals and the battery industry, then it's impossible to say that electric vehicle batteries can only be manufactured in the United States in order to be entitled to tax credits.
It's a real problem. It's as if the Americans were saying that they wanted our critical minerals because they don't have any, but that the value-added products would be made in the U.S. That would simply repeat the business model of recent decades, or even centuries. According to this model, raw materials like wood, aluminum and oil came from Canada and Quebec, but the value-added products were manufactured elsewhere. After all, only a few months ago, 99% of lithium mined in Canada was going directly to China.
I was very pleased with the Canadian government's announcement that they would limit access to our critical minerals for national security reasons. I was talking about electric vehicles, but there is also the military sector and renewable energy. If we want to develop an industry, then we can't just dig holes and send what has been mined to other countries.