Thank you.
I'd like to thank the committee for inviting me to address this important issue, as well as thank my colleagues who are talking today.
I'll take the lead from Kirk on the sad report yesterday to save Ontario's economy. I'm just going from what Evan Solomon kept saying on CBC last night about the need for more lotteries and liquor stores. What we want to say about resources is that I am proud. I think Ontario and Canada need to take a second look at what drives this economy, who we are, and what brought us here. If the solution is between liquor and gambling on the one hand and developing the north on the other.... That's offhand, but it's what we're seeing in the media.
Let's have some attention on our assets as Canadians--hewers of wood and drawers of water. What's wrong with that? We can go ahead in Ontario developing assets that in today's dollars are in the trillions and trillions of dollars. People take numbers from when nickel was at a $1.65 to $2.50, or when gold was at $250, but if you apply today's prices, you're talking about trillions of dollars. I encourage you to look at it that way.
An important issue that is not going to go away and is relevant throughout the world is first nations. That's in the paper I submitted to you. I am co-founder of a drilling company that's partly owned by the first nations, CYR Drilling International. I have financing in AurCrest by the Lac Seul First Nation. They put in half a million dollars and sit on our board of directors. This issue will never go away, and it needs to be addressed.
If you look at Australia, you will see that they have just 4.5% unemployment and a net migration of labour from the urban centres to the interior. That's all around jobs in the resource sector, and they're proud of it. I am proud.
Canada has 7.8% unemployment, but we have native reserves with 90% unemployment. To take the resource sector where it needs to go is to address this problem. I feel that this problem has been ignored both federally and provincially. It has been handed off to us, the businessmen and businesswomen, the entrepreneurs.
If we have no road map.... I have a different agreement with Webequie. Two years ago the Ring of Fire was blockaded, and we were the only company sanctioned to drill, because we had an agreement in place with Webequie. I'd started a drilling company with them. With Lac Seul, they sit on my board of directors, but not everybody has half a million dollars to put into a junior mining company. They received a $27 million payment for mismanagement of their timber rights years ago. I was then contacted by another group in Thunder Bay that had just received $175 million, asking if would advise them on how they might spend that money.
That leads to a potential answer that needs a lot more looking into: establishing a way for the first nations to be involved in the ownership of the companies, because it's not just staking and line-cutting or owning a store that's necessary. Everybody in Canada, whether they've been here for a month or a year or several generations.... I am proud to be a Canadian, and we have that one last item we need to take care of, and it's instrumental to where our assets are. Our resource assets are in the first nation territories. They need to be involved.
It's no longer something that can be left to develop organically. We have to solve the problem and have a study or committee to look into a fund that might support them to buy into junior companies to get these resources. The resources are out there, but as Kirk said, people are leaving the country, and it's not just the big companies. I'm on the board of directors of a company called Bold, which is a major player in the Ring of Fire. That's their only property in Ontario; they're going to Quebec, and then outside the country.
For these assets to be valuable, people like us have to spend. I think, Kirk, you've spent close to $20 million, and I have no idea how much Noront has spent. We've spent close to $4 million in the Ring of Fire. A fortune has to be spent, but the first nations need to be involved in order to find those assets and bring them forward.
My main issue here--and I look forward to questions--is how we involve the first nations in the development of an asset that we as Canadians need to advertise a little more and need to be a little prouder of. It's a wonderful opportunity to bring the first nations and the rest of Canadians together. It is “the” opportunity.
Thank you.