My pleasure.
I am President and Chief Executive Officer of the Mining Association of Canada. I am very pleased to be here and have this opportunity to discuss issues of importance to our industry.
Because we are splitting this slot with our colleagues from the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada, although we have common views on many of our elements, I'm going to leave some of the key issues on geoscience and exploration to my colleague and I will focus on a few key issues that are important for the mineral producers and metal producers in Canada. I'll try not to duplicate the information that Mr. Nash and the department have put in front of you.
One of the things we're particularly proud of as an association is the fact that we were the recipient in 2005 of the GLOBE Award for Environmental Performance, and one of the key activities that we've taken on through our sustainable mining process is to become, in the area of both social and environmental performance, a responsible corporate citizen of Canada. That is an ongoing program.
Mr. Nash has mentioned a number of the key mineral facts,and I won't go over those again in detail, although I will make one distinction on R and D, because we have agreed that we'll put together a small working committee on research and development. You will note that the numbers in my deck on slide 3 are slightly different. They comprise for 2005, from Statistics Canada, $54 million in extraction research and development, $274 million in primary metals research and development, and $176 million in metal manufacturing R and D, for a total of just over $500 million.
This is an ongoing issue for many people, as to whether the industry is pulling its weight in R and D or not, like other sectors of the economy. This is a moveable feast that changes over time. In fact, a large part of our discretionary expenditures obviously have to go to defining the next ore body, and Tony is definitely going to talk about that. That is the primary draw on our discretionary expenditures, and you always have to bear that in mind when you're looking at the research and development numbers.
I have also put in place the same map as Mr. Nash has shown you, and that again is to simply remind you of the east to west, north to south breadth of this industry.
Before I go to challenges, I do want to stop for a moment and thank you very much for creating a natural resources committee. This is something we have not seen for many parliamentary terms. It is something that I think we badly need at a parliamentary level, to have a focus on the requirements of this industry and to recognize that there is no distinction between parts of the economy and that our resources are central to the future economic health, growth, and social, educational, and environmental programs of this country. If we are to seize the opportunities in front of us, we need a healthy and growing industry that meets all its responsibilities.
Let me turn to the challenges. First, and probably the most important for us over the immediate five-year to ten-year period, is in the skilled labour area. The Mining Industry Human Resources Council, formerly the Mining Industry Training and Adjustment Council, just released a two-year study that indicated that we are going to be in need, even under modest growth scenarios, of between 57,000 and 81,000 new people over the next 10 years. These are skilled people. These are mining engineers, they are metallurgists, they are lab technicians, and the system as we currently understand it, in terms of post-secondary education, geological schools, engineering schools and technical schools, is only going to deliver 9,000 to 12,000 of that requirement.
As Mr. Nash has indicated, this is the highest wage sector. We're ready to deliver on those jobs and we're going to need your help. We're going to need the government's help, both on the immigration side and on the skills recognition and upgrading side. We need to do a better jobs of gender balance in the industry. We need to do a better job in partnership with governments and first nations. In our aboriginal communities there's a future workforce for this industry, and that's a growing part of the Canadian demographic.
These become extremely important issues for us, and many of those solutions are beyond the control of the mining industry itself. They can only be achieved through partnership with government and our indigenous Canadians.
I would also put down another note there, that because the front end of many of the oil sands producers' businesses is open pit mining, their numbers are not included here. You could add another 35,000 to that total for oil sands alone.
So you can see that the challenge in front of us over the next years is really quite significant, and the implications of not meeting it means a slowdown in progress of development and inability to achieve the economic opportunity of the Chinese market and, following that, the Indian market, etc.
The sound solutions that we see are as indicated in a report done by the Mining Industry Human Resources Council, and indeed we would like to see support for that council and its work. We need the continuous investment between industry, government, community training, and education partnerships, and as I mentioned, we need to enhance our aboriginal participation in mining and we need to make it easier for skilled immigrants to come to Canada.
Another key challenge in front of us that I want to touch on today is project review, which is a multi-sector priority. I am currently the chair of the Resource Association Group, which is an informal gathering of the Mining Association, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the Forest Products Association, the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, the Canadian Electricity Association, and the Canadian Gas Association. We are all like-minded on this issue and on the need for improvements in this area, which stands in the way of billions of dollars of new investment. We need a more efficient process. We don't need less regulation; we need the regulation to work better and more efficiently.
Some of those key challenges that I indicate in those dashes there are multiple changing scopes of projects in terms of environmental assessment, lack of coordination between departments and between governments, oversight gaps. Amendments that were agreed on in 2003 both by first nations, us as an industry, and NGOs are not implemented yet. So this is one where solutions can be quite straightforward through better administration and can be more cost-effective.
This is also a key point that's been raised by the regulatory advisory committee, which is multi-stakeholder, to the Minister of the Environment. They passed a unanimous resolution calling on the government to implement the 2003 improvements.
Some of the key things here that we would like to see in how this could be improved are the passage of a new Canadian Environmental Assessment Act cabinet directive by the new cabinet; allocation of necessary funds to carry out the cabinet directive--the previous government allocated an additional $5 million per year; the creation of a central project office, similar to the Australian government model, to oversee and coordinate the project approval process; provide assistance to proponents navigating the system; and implement regulations to set schedules and timelines. Changes will enhance the rigour and quality of environmental assessment processes.
One of the key opportunities that we see for a natural resources committee is that this committee can become a champion of a booming resource sector that in previous decades was seen to be out of favour. However, now it is at the heart of the economic opportunities that confront Canada, and those opportunities we need to look at carefully. If we are going to seize them--and my colleagues will spend a bit more time on this--we need support for a geoscience strategy at the front end of the business, the jobs and skills agenda that I've outlined, and improved regulatory processes.
Merci beaucoup.