Labour retention in the mining industry is the number one issue they keep talking about—productivity, productivity, productivity, and it has to do with finding skilled workers. It's getting increasingly hard. There are labour shortages not just in western Canada. Even in eastern Canada it's getting very hard to get the welders and the heavy-duty mechanics, all those people you need to run a mine. It's the number one thing that the industry has said.
The next two are on geological mapping. This one particularly interested me. I'm probably the only member of the committee who has done geological mapping first-hand. But our geological maps are a huge infrastructure resource for our mining and mineral industries in the country. The work of the Geological Survey of Canada and the geological production by our scientific bodies in this country has been enormous. On a per capita basis, we are much larger than most of the rest of the world. It's important that we continue to build on this, because if this degrades, it lowers our ability to produce future mineral resources. That's why I argued for it and put it in there. It's actually quite interesting when the geological people start to present their background and history.
Regulatory issues are, again, a huge issue for industry. That's why we put it in there. It's something that I think is being looked at with the major projects office, and that could be involved. That was one reason.
On resource development in the Arctic, the Arctic is an important area of Canada, geographically huge, really represented by only three or four members of Parliament, depending on how you count, and it's something that, for sovereignty and natural resource reasons, we should look at.
And I believe we've talked about the greening of electricity.
But as I said earlier on forestry, the Conservatives on this side, in the spirit of trying to get consensus here—and because we have two members who know what trees are and one member who'd like to see trees someday and find out what they look like—reached out for it. The Liberals and the NDP had spoken about it, and our understanding was that, with all the questions that the Bloc Québécois were asking in the House, they wouldn't have had an objection. So we hadn't realized this would be a little bit of a problem for them. That's why we were working to try to gain consensus here.