Thank you, Chair.
We will continue to push forward on this. This legislation has to be passed.
This committee had 56 meetings with 133 witnesses and over 112 hours of testimony. We know what the energy file is. We know what the sustainable jobs issue is. We need to get this legislation passed.
We are hearing from labour groups across the country who are very concerned. I'm hearing from investors who are looking to shift investment to the United States because they are seeing that Canada is becoming a gridlock, with the Conservatives blocking Bill C-49, when there are such opportunities.
To that, this motion that I read, or my attempt to speak to this, was referred to us because two pieces of legislation were referred to our committee. As someone who has been in Parliament for multiple years and in opposition for all that time, I don't always agree with how government works. I know that when government moves legislation to the committee, it becomes the priority of the committee. The committee has to address that legislation.
What we saw from the Conservatives was an attempt to monkeywrench that motion on Bill C-50 and Bill C-49 by introducing another study on top of that. I reached out to the Conservatives. I said that I'd be more than willing to look at that study, but that study would have to come in order. It doesn't get to pre-empt the work that has been given to us by Parliament. There is a timeline ticking on this. We need to get this done. This is what we're hearing from labour.
We have a series of these amendments that are very.... First, it was Sudbury. Suddenly, we're going to have people from Sudbury. It wasn't really clear who we were going to have from Sudbury, but we were going to get somebody from Sudbury. The Conservatives suddenly were really fascinated. It's funny. They didn't have anybody come when the coal transition happened. It was the New Democrats who brought representatives who went through the coal transition. They didn't bring anybody. Suddenly, they wanted someone from Sudbury.
I believe the motion was that they wanted representatives from the mining industry in Timmins, which I think is a great idea. I would love to have a set of meetings with representatives from the mining region of Timmins, maybe Val-d'Or, maybe Sudbury, but outside of this meeting on Bill C-50 and Bill C-49, because it would certainly be a huge education to my Conservative colleagues.
If they think that the mining representatives from northern Ontario are going to come down and back their climate-denying anti-investment in EV technology, I think they're going to be in for a big surprise.
We have Alamos Gold in Matachewan that's running 8,000 tonnes of gold a day underground. That's massive. When I go underground at Alamos, we talk about the really important need to move from diesel to electric trucks. That's a huge investment. Those ITCs will be huge for being able to move those kinds of underground pit trucks to battery power.
There's the Newmont mine. I would love to invite Newmont to come and talk about Borden. Borden is a mine that's running almost entirely green now. It is possible.
Again, this is something my Conservative colleagues would not probably know anything about. When you work underground in a diesel environment and work with oil from the drills, the lung cancers and stomach cancers are enormous, just from what you're breathing.
When you go into a clean battery-driven mine, the air is so much cleaner, and it drops your costs enormously. What you pay in battery investments, you actually make up in less cost for underground fans. When you have to run fans, let's say at Creighton, deep, 9,000 feet underground, you're pumping a lot of cool air down at those depths. When you run diesel motors at that depth, you have to run really heavy fans.
I talk to mining representatives, and I'm sure they would love to come to this committee to talk about how ITCs would help in those investments so that we could make switches. For example, I believe Vale, which is not in my region, but is in Ms. Lapointe's region, is running 72-ton haulage trucks now on batteries. That's a really transformative moment. People didn't think that was possible. Certainly the flat earth EV deniers would say that you couldn't run trucks that big. What they can do now, because of how they've tied the batteries to the braking energy on those pit trucks, is run from six hours to 10 hours. A 10-hour shift on a battery hauling 72 tons of ore is a major transformative moment.
I would love to have them come and talk about that technology and why they are absolutely committed to the clean-tech future, because they see the opportunities for mining.
Whenever I talk to people in the mining sector, they get it. If we're going to be competing against China and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where there are horrific human rights abuses, we need to have a supply chain that is free of the abuses that are happening in places like Congo, but also that has a clean energy footprint. We can't say we're going to be a clean energy superpower and get critical minerals unless our mines are able to start running on clean energy.
That leads to questions on the grid.
I know, Chair, when you were sitting as just one of the members, we were going to study the grid, something my Conservative colleagues don't seem to want to deal with. But the grid is important, because we actually can't move some of this battery technology for big industrial projects without dealing with issues of the grid.
I think it would be really great to have representatives of the Timmins mining industry. They would also explain to the Conservatives that Bill C-69 has really nothing to do with how mine projects are developed. I know Conservatives are going on that it takes 10 to 15 years to get a mine up and running, and they blame the Liberal government for that. Well, it always takes 10 to 15 years for a mine, because when you're talking about a multi-million dollar investment underground, you have to make sure you really know where you're putting your infrastructure. If you put the shaft in the wrong place, you're going to go bankrupt pretty quickly, and you're not going to be able to raise the money on the international market until you've done all the important steps that are necessary.
Take Doug Ford. He announced he was going to run a bulldozer through the Ring of Fire. Well, that didn't go so well. I wouldn't be betting any money on the Ring of Fire right now, because it was Conservative politicians who shot their mouths off about the Ring of Fire. If you go to Neskantaga First Nation, they're saying, “It ain't going to happen, because it's not done properly.” To build a mine properly, you have to have a proper environmental plan, a proper financial plan, the support of first nations, because when you have the support of first nations, things move a lot quicker.
For example, we had representatives from the Timmins mining region come—