Thank you, Chair and members of the committee, for the invitation to appear today.
I'm joined by my colleague Jamie, who leads MLI's D.C.-based subsidiary. Her work focuses on energy and critical minerals as they pertain to policies on the Canada-U.S. relationship. She is well placed to take your questions following the opening remarks.
I want to make four points today about Canada's opportunity in clean energy, clean technology and critical mineral exports. First, the international environment has changed faster than Canadian trade and industrial policy. Energy and minerals are no longer ordinary commodities. Security of supply, geopolitical alignment and resilience increasingly carry economic value. We can see this very clearly in Canada's recent engagement with Europe. Energy security, critical minerals, defence, AI and compute are increasingly being discussed together as components of economic security and strategic autonomy rather than as separate policy files.
At the same time, I believe we have entered a new upswing in the commodity cycle. Years of underinvestment in resource supply are colliding with rising defence expenditures, electrification, AI and data centres, and growing geopolitical competition. This creates an unusually favourable environment for Canada. We have enormous reserves of uranium, potash, oil, natural gas and critical minerals; hydroelectric potential; world-class mining and energy companies; sophisticated capital markets and engineering expertise; and, perhaps most importantly, a reputation as a reliable supplier and ally. Canada's problem is not a lack of demand for what we have. It is our ability to turn our resource and energy advantages into exportable projects and products quickly enough.
That brings me to my second point. Canada needs to become much better at converting comparative advantage into actual projects. For commercially viable mineral and energy products, our first objective should be competitiveness. In an upswing, private capital will increasingly be available to finance new supply. Governments should focus on making Canada an attractive place to deploy that capital, with competitive taxes, timely permitting, enabling infrastructure, abundant electricity, access to markets and predictable regulation. In that respect, I think Bill C-39 is a very positive development. If implemented effectively, the proposed reforms could help Canada compete for global capital at precisely the moment when investors are again looking seriously at energy, mining, infrastructure and other capital-intensive sectors.
My third point is that Canada should think much more broadly about what constitutes a value-added export. Everyone wants Canada to export higher-value products rather than raw materials, but value-added does not necessarily mean taking every mineral and moving one step further down the processing chain. Sometimes our advantage will be mining. Sometimes it will be processing or manufacturing. Sometimes it will be to combine our energy resources with new technologies to create an entirely different export.
Data centres are a good example. Western Canada has enormous natural gas resources. Traditionally, we have thought about monetizing that by putting gas into a pipeline, liquefying it and exporting it as LNG, but there is another possibility: Use that gas to generate reliable electricity, use the electricity to power data centres, and export compute instead of gas molecules.
My fourth and final point is that Canada should be ambitious about the opportunity to become a nuclear superpower. Few countries possess as many pieces of the nuclear value chain as Canada does. We have some of the world's richest uranium deposits and are one of the largest uranium producers. We refine, we convert and we manufacture nuclear fuel. We have decades of expertise in reactor operation, refurbishment, regulation, engineering and nuclear medicine.
The federal government's new nuclear energy strategy recognizes this opportunity, and I think that ambition is appropriate. A global nuclear renaissance creates opportunities to export not just uranium but fuel services, reactors, components, engineering expertise and other nuclear technologies. If Canada seriously wants to become a nuclear superpower, I think we need to have a much more deliberate conversation about the nuclear fuel cycle, and particularly enrichment. We should determine what conditions would justify Canadian enrichment capacity, what scale would be commercially viable, what technologies and partnerships would be appropriate, and how Canadian capacity could fit into an allied nuclear fuel strategy.
It's clear that the world wants what Canada has. Our challenge is to build quickly enough to supply it. If we can do that, the combination of a new commodity cycle, rising demand for energy and compute, and a new geopolitical environment represents one of Canada's most significant economic opportunities in decades.
Thank you. Jamie and I look forward to your questions.