Thank you, Minister.
It does, of course, stand in stark contrast to the total lack of legal intervention and support of the proponent in the case of the Keystone XL pipeline. I guess, on Line 5, we are all going to have to wait for that court decision, when obviously the President's direct intervention on request of the Prime Minister would have been helpful.
Given your comments and your concerns, which I share, about the world passing Canada by and your comments about your goals and aggressive targets for electrification, I want to also ask you about critical minerals.
The Prime Minister is in South Korea now, where 80% of their critical minerals are supplied by China. Then he'll be in Japan, which also asked Canada both for critical minerals and for LNG.
He says he'll be talking about the supply chain integration to replace dependence on Beijing's critical minerals. Of course, in these estimates, you have $5 million “in support of critical minerals”, but, in fact, fewer than half of the mining applications since 2015 have actually made it through the duplicate of an uncertain process your government has created. Mines do take up to 25 years to produce in Canada.
The James Bay lithium project, which is the most recently approved one, took six years, was just approved this year with 271 conditions and won't produce lithium until 2024.
The truth is that the only mine in Canada that has produced lithium since 2019 does it only as a by-product of tantalum. It is 100% owned and operated by a Beijing state-owned company that ships all of it overseas.
Minister, lithium is on the top of your critical minerals list, but there's actually no Canadian ownership of producing Canadian lithium mines right now, which is a major critical mineral for EV batteries. Another one that's critical, phosphate, isn't even on your critical minerals list.
Right now, the truth is that Canada produces zero rare earth metals needed for EV batteries and for wind and solar production, yet in the last six months, your government has put in over $1.4 billion tax dollars to fix the permitting process that you broke, which seems to pay for round tables and meetings, but obviously no actual outcomes that make a difference for Canada or for the world.
Can you answer two very simple and direct questions for all Canadians here? On what date will you actually implement the streamlined and accelerated process that will fix the mess you made, and that your own government does claim to want?
Secondly, on what date will Canada actually produce and export all of the critical minerals on your list for Canadian self-sufficiency and to stop our allies' dependence on hostile regimes?