Evidence of meeting #45 for International Trade in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was export.
A video is available from Parliament.
Liberal
The Chair (Hon. Judy A. Sgro (Humber River—Black Creek, Lib.)) Liberal Judy Sgro
I call the meeting to order.
Welcome back to our new session. I appreciate you all being here. We have our witnesses ready, and I believe everybody is ready to start a new session.
Welcome to meeting number 45 of the Standing Committee on International Trade. We're welcoming three new members: MP Chak Au, Madam Kusie, who is not here today, and Mario Simard.
Welcome to the both of you. You have been introduced—
Mario Simard Jonquière—Hébertville—Pays-des-Bleuets, BQ
Madam Chair, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but there's no interpretation into French.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Judy Sgro
It's apparently working, so we will get started again.
I've already called the meeting to order and recognized our members. I'm going to turn it over to the clerk for the election of the vice-chairs.
The Clerk of the Committee Grant McLaughlin
Thank you very much.
We'll be electing both the first and the second vice-chairs.
Pursuant to Standing Order 106(2), the first vice-chair must be a member of the official opposition. I'm now prepared to receive motions for the first vice-chair.
Mr. Mantle.
September 24th, 2026 / 3:45 p.m.
Conservative
Jacob Mantle Conservative York—Durham, ON
Thank you, Mr. Clerk.
I'd like to nominate MP Stephanie Kusie for the vice-chair position for the official opposition.
The Clerk
Thank you.
Will there be any further motions?
Seeing none, it has been moved by MP Jacob Mantle that MP Stephanie Kusie be elected as first vice-chair of the committee. Is it the pleasure of the committee to adopt this motion?
(Motion agreed to)
I declare Stephanie Kusie duly elected first vice-chair of the committee.
Thank you.
Now, pursuant to Standing Order 106(2), the second vice-chair must be a member of an opposition party other than the official opposition.
I am now prepared to receive motions for the second vice-chair.
Ms. Lapointe, you have the floor.
Liberal
Linda Lapointe Liberal Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC
Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome.
I nominate Mr. Simard.
The Clerk
Ms. Lapointe moves that Mr. Simard be elected second vice-chair of the committee.
Seeing no further motions, is it the pleasure of the committee to adopt this motion?
(Motion agreed to)
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Judy Sgro
Congratulations, Mario. I look forward to working with you.
I have one other thing. You would have all received a copy of study that we are on now on Canada's clean energy, clean technology and critical mineral exports. The request for the study is $10,500.
Are there questions or concerns?
Are all in favour?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Judy Sgro
For the interest of our committee members, if you have any ideas for future study and want to have a discussion outside or inside at any particular time, please know that we're open to that opportunity. For any motions, please send them off to the clerk so he can share them with the committee.
Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted on Tuesday, June 9, 2026, the committee is commencing its study of Canada's clean energy, clean technology and critical mineral exports.
We have with us today, from the Center for North American Prosperity and Security, Jamie Tronnes, executive director. From the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, we have Heather Exner-Pirot, director of energy, natural resources and environment. From the Mining Association of Canada, we have Pierre Gratton, president and chief executive officer, and Ms. Koutsavlis, vice-president of economic affairs and climate change.
Welcome to all of you.
Our fourth witness had technical issues and was not able to be with us today.
I need to remind the witnesses that committee members will ask questions in either English or French. Please ensure that you have your earpiece next to your monitor so that we don't lose any interpretation opportunities.
Ms. Exner-Pirot and Ms. Tronnes, I invite you to make opening statements of up to five minutes, please.
Heather Exner-Pirot Director, Energy, Natural Resources and Environment, Macdonald-Laurier Institute
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.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Judy Sgro
Thank you very much.
Ms. Koutsavlis and Mr. Gratton, go ahead, please. You have up to five minutes.
Pierre Gratton President and Chief Executive Officer, Mining Association of Canada
Madam Chair and members of the committee, thank you for the invitation to appear before you this afternoon.
I want to begin by recognizing that we are gathered today on the traditional and unceded territory of the Anishinabe Algonquin nation, and I acknowledge the hundreds of indigenous nations across Canada on whose traditional lands our industry operates and with which we have strong partnerships.
I'll begin by saying that I agree with much of what the previous witness spoke about. She set a nice overall global context for the situation in which Canada finds itself. I'm going to zero in specifically on the issue of value-added in the critical mineral space and provide just a bit more context to what that looks like at this current time.
Mining is foundational to Canada's economy. In 2024, our sector contributed some $111 billion to GDP and directly employed almost 440,000 people, with direct and indirect employment reaching 710,000 people. Our exports total $152 billion, representing 21% of Canada's exports. Our industry also remains the country's largest private sector employer of indigenous people on a proportional basis.
However, in inflation-adjusted terms, the mining sector's contribution to GDP has remained essentially unchanged in nearly two decades, while the broader Canadian economy has grown by one-third. We have lost momentum in the production and reserves of several important minerals. This is not a recent development. Between 2015 and 2024, copper production declined by 23%, nickel by 44% and iron ore by 6%. Proven and probable reserves of the most major base and precious metals have declined over the longer term, with zinc reserves down approximately 94% from their 1997 high.
The Government of Canada has established a strong policy foundation through successive budgets, the Canadian critical minerals strategy, investments in enabling infrastructure, and stronger partnerships with trusted allies to start to turn this around. More recently, measures such as the productivity mega deduction have been announced to help reverse this trajectory and support increased mining production.
We welcome these measures, but we must be clear about timelines. New policies do not translate into new output overnight. Given the lengthy development and construction timelines for mining projects, it will take several years before these results translate into increased production. At the same time, our processing capacity has been shrinking. Between 2016 and 2024, we experienced a net loss of seven non-ferrous metal and smelting refining facilities, including closures in Flin Flon, Thompson, the Gaspé, Bathurst and Timmins. Refined production of cobalt, copper, nickel and zinc has declined by 23%, 25%, 54% and 22% respectively over the past decade.
Each closure and decline represents processing capacity Canada no longer has. The market for global processing capacity is highly competitive. Capacity lost in Canada does not disappear from the market. It moves to jurisdictions that continue to invest in it, most notably China, which now controls most of the global refining in the world.
The result is a tight market. Canada's copper smelting and refining capacity is now concentrated, for example, in two aging capital-intensive facilities. If Canada wanted to build a new copper smelter today, we would largely need to draw on Chinese intellectual property and have the Chinese come and build it for us, because Canadian smelting technology has not meaningfully advanced in a century.
Canada's opportunity extends beyond exporting raw materials. As we seek to diversify our trade beyond the United States, our minerals and metals are globally traded commodities of growing strategic importance to allied economies. Expanding domestic processing lets Canada capture more of that value at home, but realizing this opportunity begins with producing more. Canadian smelters and refineries depend on a reliable supply of domestic feedstock. Without increased production from new mines and expansions at existing operations, we will struggle to preserve our current processing capacity, let alone grow it.
To turn Canada's mineral potential into reliable supply, we must focus on execution. This requires a competitive fiscal framework that mobilizes private capital, predictable and timely permitting and modern transportation, electricity and communications infrastructure, particularly in northern and remote regions. It also requires measures to preserve, modernize and expand Canada's domestic processing capacity.
Lastly, I just note that our reach extends well beyond what comes out of the ground. Our expertise, technology, equipment and services that support mining operations do so around the world, making Canada's mining supply and services sector the third largest globally. This is a competitive ecosystem that we can build on to increase production, expand domestic processing and grow our exports.
Thank you. I look forward to your questions.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Judy Sgro
Thank you very much.
We will now open the floor for questions, and we will start with Mr. Mantle.
Conservative
Jacob Mantle Conservative York—Durham, ON
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses for appearing and providing the committee with valuable testimony.
My first questions will be for Ms. Tronnes and perhaps Ms. Exner-Pirot.
Ms. Tronnes, I'll start with you.
Last October, you were before this committee and gave testimony. At that time, you said that “current uncertainty in the trade market is wreaking havoc on investment” and that the Canadian government “has taken steps to try to reassure investors that Canada remains a strong place to do business.” You also said, “Until a CUSMA review is complete, this will remain uncertain.” You went on to say that “no less than the removal of Canada as a subject of section 232 tariffs” should be the Prime Minister's goal.
Obviously, in the year since you've been here, neither of those two things has happened. Moreover, we have more tariffs and countertariffs. Is there more or less uncertainty now in Canada than there was a year ago?
Jamie Tronnes Executive Director, Center for North American Prosperity and Security
I would say that there is definitely more uncertainty in Canada along the trade file—as it pertains to Canada-U.S. trade, I should specify—than there was a year ago. We have even more tariffs on us now than just the section 232 tariffs, and on January 1 we are looking at a potential 50% tariff on autos, which would be catastrophic for the auto sector.
However, Canada is making some significant moves to try to attract more foreign direct investment and to demonstrate that in this new era of uncertainty for every single sector that touches trade with the United States, Canada is trying to send a message of being a safe harbour and a secure investment. When you have the entire world looking for places to put their capital, Canada is starting to look like a place where it makes a lot of sense to begin developing the large-scale production of things, like mining infrastructure and other extractives infrastructure.
Canada has a very strong advantage in that the rocks—or the oil, as it were—lie where they lie. Therefore, it is incumbent upon Canada to try to speed up, as much as possible, these major infrastructure projects that will make use of our natural endowment of minerals and metals, and to start to build the domestic economy in a way that can provide Canadians with more certainty.
Conservative
Jacob Mantle Conservative York—Durham, ON
Thank you for that.
Do you have an assessment or a view on the efficacy of Canada's countertariffs? Are our countertariffs good for business or bad for business? What's your view of them?
Executive Director, Center for North American Prosperity and Security
My personal assessment is that countertariffs are not all that effective when it comes to being noticed by the Americans in terms of their overall.... It's not going to affect the overall American GDP in as strong a way as perhaps it will affect the Canadian GDP.
In a trade war, nobody wins. The longer that Canada is in this trade war with its largest trading partner, the more it's going to cost us as Canadians and us down here in the U.S. as Americans. I think it's incumbent upon both countries to try to get back to the table and try to remember that somewhere deep down, there is a USMCA or CUSMA deal on the table that needs to be revisited with much urgency in order to provide our respective businesses with more certainty and more of a path forward towards selling and buying across the border.
Conservative
Jacob Mantle Conservative York—Durham, ON
I think I heard you say that we should “get back to the table”. Is that your view?
Executive Director, Center for North American Prosperity and Security
That is definitely my view, yes.
Conservative
Jacob Mantle Conservative York—Durham, ON
Opposition members have been criticized by some in the media and by some in the government for trying to take a more active role in trying to contribute positively to the Canada-U.S. relationship, including by having the Leader of the Opposition visit the U.S. When you were here last year, you spoke about how lonely it can be as a Canadian down there in Washington. Do you think our efforts as the opposition are worthwhile, and should we continue those efforts?
Executive Director, Center for North American Prosperity and Security
Absolutely—the more the merrier down here. We need as many voices from across the political spectrum standing up for Canada in the United States as we can get.