Evidence of meeting #24 for Natural Resources in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was work.
A recording is available from Parliament.
9:50 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal James Maloney
Thank you.
I have one question for you, Mr. St. Louis. You mentioned crowdfunding. That's a subject I've had brought up to me by people who were traditionally the ones to raise money for small-cap mining operations. One, is this something the industry is in favour of? Two, how would it work? And three, is there any regulatory concern that people should be aware of?
9:50 a.m.
Manager, Governement affairs, Avalon Advanced Materials Inc.
I'll be frank, I'm not particularly knowledgeable on the details of crowdfunding. We haven't done crowdfunding. We've just seen, I guess, in other instances, such as the tech sector...which in a way has a lot of similarities with the exploration sector. It's high-risk risk capital.
This is something that I think has been done. Basically, let's say you thought you had a prospective deposit and you'd done a little surface work. You could publish that and say, “I need to raise x dollars to do X work.” You could potentially drill some holes, let's say, to verify that a deposit was there.
With regard to the regulations surrounding it, I'm not sure if they've really been developed yet. My guess is that there would probably need to be some work done there, though.
9:50 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal James Maloney
All right.
Thank you to all of you for taking the time to join us today. We appreciate your being here. I'd like to thank Ms. Fedorchuk in particular for getting up so early this morning.
Thank you. We will suspend and then move in camera.
[Proceedings continue in camera]