I'll give you a history lesson.
Successive provincial and federal governments spent the last several decades taking our sector for granted and forgetting just how essential we are to this country. In the last five years, everyone has woken up. Governments of all stripes have woken up across the country and said, “Oh, what just happened here? We need more mining.” That's welcome. That's why I think it's mining's moment. It's not just Canada. The world has woken up to the fact that we need the things that make the things we rely on in our daily lives. Mining has been such a central industry for this country for so long that I can see how governments took us for granted. That's not necessarily to be critical. We were very big and kept growing. Then we started to slow down and people weren't really noticing. Now we are here.
Things are starting to turn around. We have to look at the gold sector, which has gone from the fifth to the fourth spot overall, worldwide, in the last few years. We've increased our production of gold by 31% at a very good time to be producing gold. We have more mines coming on stream, so our production is going to increase this year and next. We can do the same for copper. We can do the same for nickel. We can do the same for all the critical minerals we need, with the same focus and discipline.
Gold has the advantage of having prices that attract a lot of exploration and development. With the right tax incentives—my colleague just mentioned them—for development costs underground, we can increase our production of nickel and other critical minerals in the very short to medium term.
We can do this. We just need to now turn our attention to what's required.