Natural Resources Committee on Oct. 24th, 2011

[Richard Moore]

Ultimately it does, through the taxes collected from the mines—

[François Lapointe, NDP, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Yes, I understand.

[Richard Moore]

—which come into operation as a result of the discovery.

[François Lapointe, NDP, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

But it isn't a ratio of $5 in the Canadian treasury for $1 invested. If we invest $1, it may generate $5 in investment. That we can understand.

[Richard Moore]

No, no, you're right.

[François Lapointe, NDP, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

But we don't know how they arrive at the $5. It's too complicated for mere mortals, and we don't know why.

[Richard Moore]

Well, this figure is calculated by examining, over a five-year or ten-year period, expenditures by government on data sets, and then it looks at the expenditures by mineral exploration companies following up on the results of these data sets. So the government spends, we'll say, $10 million on providing this data, and the mineral exploration industry ends up spending $100 million on collecting more data and exploration.

[François Lapointe, NDP, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

I also wanted to know whether you are complementary to Natural Resources Canada, and if so, how.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

The translation seemed to be cut off.

[François Lapointe, NDP, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Okay.

Between Natural Resources Canada and what you do, could you tell me what is complementary and what is totally different in your work, your research?

[Richard Moore]

The geological surveys provide basic data, which is an indication of what mineral resources might exist in the provinces and in the various states, but it's a long way from actually knowing it's there. So the exploration company then says, okay, we think there may be something there. In that case, the statistics generally say that for every one hundred projects you take on—in other words, you think something's there and you're going to explore it—in one in a hundred cases you're right. But then of those cases, only one in five is economical.

It's a continual process of hypotheses building based on data. We use the government data to hypothesize that there is a mine there. We collect our own information in much more detail and find out most of the time that we're wrong.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Thank you, Mr. Lapointe.

Our time for this meeting is up.

I thank you all very much, the Canadian Space Agency, the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada, and the Geomatics Industry Association of Canada, for your presentations and for the responses to questions. It will be very helpful to us in our study.

Again, thank you very much.

The meeting is adjourned.