Good afternoon, and thank you again for the invitation to appear today.
The world is undergoing an economic transformation, with innovative technologies, clean technologies, driving the pace of change. Both the IEA and the World Bank stress the significant role of minerals and metals, especially non-traditional materials like lithium, graphite, rare earths, scandium and others, for a low-carbon future. China controls much of the full-value chains around these critical minerals. Governments and industrials around the world have called for reliable alternatives to secure sources of supply.
Despite Canada's vast resource wealth, our critical materials remain largely undeveloped and not strategically leveraged, primarily because of the lack of understanding of their significant climate, national security and economic benefits.
The Industry Strategy Council, the forum of experienced business leaders assembled by ISED, recently issued a report and has created a blueprint for implementation, a road map for how Canada can enable critical materials value chains to be developed.
Over the past year, C2M2A, the critical materials alliance, has proposed a suite of recommendations around policy, investment, R and D, secondary sources, education and trade.
With the limited time available today, I'll just touch on three important themes and one specific recommendation.
The first is consumer demand. Consumer demand attracts production, which attracts value-added processing, which attracts raw material supply. “Demand pull” strategies provide stronger results than those built upon “supply push” strategies, an approach we have traditionally taken. Increasing demand for electrified transportation, battery supply, advanced materials and associated manufacturing is a key measure the government needs to expedite to fulfill our clean energy aspirations and ensure that Canada is competitive in this increasingly competitive global theatre. With clarity of Canadian-branded supply, auto and parts manufacturers could be encouraged to establish some of their current out-of-country supply sources to set up shop in Canada. This demand would facilitate reliable Canadian-certified or Canadian-branded mineral development and value creation, where Canada sets the benchmark standards.
The second is clarity of supply, which I just mentioned. Canada has made progress in reducing its capital and operating costs of GHG-reducing mineral production. Canadian resource and material producers must continue to strive to meet and exceed ESG standards, essentially certifying our offerings, the demand for which is of significant interest to consumers. Critically important, though, is the necessity to build value chains local to the demand pull, and to feed components to the factories located close to assembly plants.
The third theme is technology advantage to gain leadership. I'm aware of material research in Canada that has direct implications for local supply chains in an electrified auto sector. Materials for vehicle light-weighting of body structures, traction motors and permanent magnets with reliable production closer to home are all being called for. Canada must also be prepared to deliver materials for energy storage technologies, as well as to handle the rapid changes in those technologies. Advanced materials and process development capabilities are within reach at Canada's commercial and national labs.
The question before the house—and I use that term loosely because in your case you actually have a House—is how to spearhead and champion this critical material campaign.
I'd like to suggest that Canada establish a critical materials office, led by an internationally respected business leader and effectively staffed with economic development, technical, investment and policy experts from industry, government and multidisciplinary academia. The office should be mandated to pull together and create, where necessary, enhanced critical material value chains and work with provincial authorities to ensure regulatory alignment. They should also be prepared to see that the most promising material production and manufacturing pilot and demonstration projects move forward and move towards operation.
Leadership from ISED and NRCan, in partnership with industry, is key to our collective success. This is not a government exercise alone, but we can use our unprecedented Canadian ingenuity.
For the sake of time.... We have the raw materials. We should not be selling them and then buying back processed products. Time is sadly of the essence.
Thank you.