Natural Resources Committee on Nov. 3rd, 2016

[Michael Fox]

Every industry is a bundle of disciplines. Mining is one of them, as well as geology, geophysics, environmental science, and mining engineering. You have to pick one stream of activities. In this case, I mention the environmental assessment, which has biophysical disciplines. In the example I gave, with the $27,000 in what was then called a comprehensive environmental assessment, there were three phases. The $27,000 was supposed to allow the communities to review the EIS guidelines and, I'm assuming, be part of the studies and then the peer review—the three stages.

What do you do with $27,000? What consultant would come out and help them, in a remote community, for $27,000? That's probably your travel budget to go north.

When I hear this new government talk about enhancing indigenous participation, I don't know how that is done without providing more resources to the communities or providing more resources around the environmental assessment. If it's business development—which is another stream of activities and a different set of skills, understanding, and capacity—then there are start-up funds and training that's tied to that particular project.

When I hear the words “enhance community engagements” or “enhance indigenous programs”.... I know, from my own experience, that we know what the needs are. Past and current programs are not meeting those needs if they want full and meaningful participation in any project across Canada.

[Douglas Morrison]

I'd like to respond to this issue, as well.

The fact is that you have to take a less myopic approach to this. This is not a Canadian issue. Canadian consulting companies and Canadian mining companies have been negotiating with local and indigenous populations in South America, Africa, and many other parts of the world for 25 years. We have lots of experience in how to do this really well.

How can it possibly be that we cannot do it equally well here, in our own backyard? This is not an indigenous issue; it has to do with a decent approach to communicating with communities, whether indigenous or not. The communities in South America and Africa do not have a special constitutional right for consultation. Companies do that in order to gain social licence. It is not sufficient to have a permit from the government to operate your mine. You cannot operate a mine with riots at the gates. It's good business practice.

It should not be based on indigenous rights and the Supreme Court. We cannot continue to work these issues through just because the Supreme Court says so. We need to take the approach that we are doing this because it's the right and decent thing to do.

[Prof. Roussos Dimitrakopoulos]

Can I add something?

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Sure.

[Prof. Roussos Dimitrakopoulos]

There is one small thing that probably is of interest.

I showed you earlier a figure and we called it the mineral value chain. On it you will see that there are processing streams, there are customers, there are products, and there are also waste dumps, slag, and so on. The interesting part here is that technologies such as these allow us to integrate all these elements into one optimization. By optimization I mean operations research and decision support. It's interesting in these kinds of technologies. One is the waste. I can easily mix and blend materials that I've sent to different destinations to produce gold or whatever it is. There is no reason that we cannot do the same with what we call waste and produce mixtures of materials that have given characteristics that respond to the growth of certain trees and plants, etc. There are examples of that.

It's the same thing if I go to the waste, to finish up. The waste management under these kinds of concepts simply says, “How can I put what I extract from the ground and don't use back, and optimize the sequence of when to do this kind of thing?” There are also examples of that.

The interesting part with the communities in this—and no one has looked at it yet—is to add them into this real optimization I showed you. Do you know what will happen? These kinds of things capitalize massively on the synergies between the different parts when they look at them as a whole.

What do we need? First of all, with communities, funding, and all of us look for funding here, funding there, so why can't we, in our strategic planning, which would be a bigger word for this kind of stuff, have technologies that integrate funding at a time that it suits the whole thing to maximize the benefits for the community? I showed you earlier the 15%, 20%, 30% more cash flow we can generate. This all can happen, will happen, and you realize that new technologies have a hell of a lot of contribution to make.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

That takes us to the end of our time.

Thank you very much, all of you, for taking the time to be here. Your contribution is immense and we are all very grateful.

On that note, the meeting is adjourned. We'll see everybody on the 15th.