We all lament that it's taken so long in Canada to bring deposits to production. We've all seen now how that's impacting not only affordability but also our national security. We need to ramp it up.
There are many policies that have impacted this and created this. Part of it is just the Canadian cultural shift about 10 years ago to not appreciate the value of extractive resources and to think that they're bad, dirty or something we should be ashamed of when obviously they're a critical part of our lives and we should be looking at ways to build and attract talent to those sectors.
Some of it is policy such as the Impact Assessment Act, which often added redundancy to provincial assessments and timelines. It added some uncertainty to investors who were wondering when they'll get a return on their money and when they'll start producing. It didn't always give certainty there.
The industrial carbon price is also an issue in competitiveness, especially in the processing and smelting phases, but also in several others.
There are also the clean electricity regulations. We are starting to see some energy and electricity scarcity in this country. Mines need reliable access to electricity and we're starting to see that this is becoming a problem. We see B.C., for example, introducing legislation this week to ration electricity, so that it can maintain a carve-out for the mining sector.
There's a lot that provinces can do. Some provinces do better than others. Saskatchewan and Quebec actually do quite well on the mining policy front. Others need to do much better.
As to whether Bill C‑5 and the Major Projects Office are the solution, that's unlikely. There are literally hundreds of mining projects in the queue in Canada. Filtering private, proponent-driven projects looking to move to the next stage and looking to attract investment through the bottleneck of the MPO is unlikely to produce the outcomes that we're looking for.
A broader structural reform of how we regulate extractive resources, mining in particular, is what's needed to really unleash our potential.