Thank you.
A very important part of the prospect of moving forward on critical minerals is to realize and discover what minerals we have and what their potential looks like.
As you point out, Mr. Cannings, sometimes the critical minerals that are produced are by-products or smaller components of a bigger operation. You have a primary metal or mineral that's being produced, and almost as a sub-item you also have the critical mineral that's produced as a by-product. It's interesting, because in some cases it's expected that those by-products will become the primary products over time and their importance grows.
The government recently, actually, included a renewal of the geoscience program under the Geological Survey, which falls under the responsibility of our department and my sector, of $130-some million over the next seven years. It's called the geo-mapping for energy and minerals program. It works predominantly in the north. Then there's a secondary program called the targeted geoscience initiative, which actually doubles up with the provinces to work in specific areas where we have opportunities to grow.
We also have research programs that are revisiting mining the value from waste, so taking waste or what might have previously been discarded product and materials produced at mining sites and re-mining those materials and extracting more value from them—extracting, for example, from some of the tailings and other elements, those finer materials that are actually quite valuable now in the critical minerals space.
I'll leave it at that for now, Mr. Chair.