For committee members who don't know, graphite is listed as one of the critical minerals on the NATO list, and Canada has a good supply. It's an obvious fit that we should be the ones to increase production. I think there's a good case for public sector support to make that happen, and we've been able to bring supply on fairly quickly. There are obviously other uses for graphite, including in battery supply chains. In general, I am in favour of it.
There's always a risk, so we should always be attuned to the risk that these become uneconomic and just purely subsidized. If there isn't enough offtake, on the other hand, and no one is using the product, it becomes a waste of money vis-à-vis other opportunities we may have had. I'm not saying this is so in this specific circumstance, but any circumstance will have that risk, so we have to make sure we have the proper frameworks and the proper assessment of which projects to fund and where they go.
The mining is maybe the easy part for Canada. The second level where I think we need more attention and where maybe it's a bit trickier is in the initial refining and chemical processing of many of these metals. I have a little list, which will be in my report, of things that seem clear to me where Canada should either play a role or ensure we're supporting our allies to play a role. They are rare earth separation, graphite spheroidization, gallium recovery and refining, antimony refining, high-purity germanium refining and niobium alloying. I'm sure this list exists somewhere in the committee, DND or NRCan. I hope those lists exist. Again, I appreciate why they wouldn't be made public.
When we say “critical minerals”, I know we're not talking about sophistication yet. When we say, “NATO's list of 12 minerals”, again, that's not a level of sophistication. When we start to talk about specific phases of processing and refining and specific end uses and end-users, that's when I know we'll have finally reached such a level of sophistication that, in the event we need a war footing, as Dr. Huebert says, we would be in a position to provide materials into those systems.