Mr. Speaker, I am thankful for the opportunity to speak to this tonight. I am a late addition to the speaking role, but I am thrilled to be part of this.
I first want to say how incredibly proud I am of the members of PDAC, the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada. I have had the opportunity over the last number of years to visit its convention in Toronto, where I meet its people who are part of the mining industry here in Canada, the suppliers. Most importantly, I meet there the people who I had the opportunity to meet when I was in Africa. I have done extensive travelling in Africa and I will tell everyone why I am so connected there, but first I need to tell my hon. colleagues how important it is to speak about Ghana and Burkina Faso, two of the countries he mentioned.
One of the most important things we can do as Canadians is to help African countries take responsibility for their own resources and see the benefits of those resources in the hands of the people in Africa. In our budget three years ago, we established the Canadian International Institute for Extractive Industries and Development, which is a coalition of the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University and École Polytechnique in Montreal. I had a meeting with them in August when I was in British Columbia at UBC and we had a very robust conversation about the initiatives that the institute is taking.
Complementary to that, we have helped to establish the African Minerals Development Centre. Canada is the largest contributor to that initiative, having contributed $15.3 million over five years. I was at the funding conference last December in Mozambique and they are absolutely thrilled with the kind of work that Canada is doing to help them establish their own regulations and legislation to become independent, self-regulating countries, which see the benefits of those resources in their own countries.
I spent an hour with the minister of mines from Mozambique, the hon. Minister Bias, who has been involved in the mining industry for a good portion of her adult life. She is the one who is going to be leading the African Minerals Development Centre through the next two years as it establishes itself. It is going to be housed with the African Union and the African Union Commission in Addis Ababa. The oversight of the African Union is going to be responsible to the African Commission. The ministers of mines from every African nation who attended the conference in Mozambique are absolutely thrilled that they are going to have the assistance of Canada to get this institute established.
I will read a quote from the African Mining Vision website. It states:
The Africa Mining Vision is a pathway, formulated by African nations themselves, that puts the continent’s long term and broad development objectives at the heart of all policy making concerned with mineral extraction.
I also spoke about the adoption of this by the heads of state in February 2009, which was put together following the October 2008 meeting of the African ministers responsible for mineral resources development. They want to move from the historic status of mining exporter of cheap raw materials to manufacturer of supplies and knowledge-based services.
I was very pleased to be in Botswana the first time I was in Africa to see the centre where all of the diamonds, which used to be taken out of Botswana and sent to Amsterdam and Belgium, were graded and cut. All of those good service jobs were taken to Europe.
Now in Botswana, outside the De Beers facility where the minerals are actually graded, it is Botswanian people who have the opportunity to do the cutting and the polishing of those stones. It is creating really good, paying jobs for African people. Now, Botswana has moved to what is considered a middle income country in Africa. It is providing opportunities for the people there. It is exciting to see that those things are happening.
My colleague the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of International Trade talked a bit about the equator principles that Canada signed on to many years ago.
The other thing that we signed on to, because we believe that Africa and these emerging economies need to have control over their own resources, is the extractive industry's transparency initiative that we joined in February 2007.
The extractive industry's transparency initiative is the authoritative source on how countries can implement the EITI. It is the global transparency standard for improving governance of natural resources. There are 12 initiatives in all, but I will just read a couple of them into the record because it is important that people understand that we believe these CSR initiatives are so important. It says:
We recognise the enhanced environment for domestic and foreign direct investment that financial transparency may bring....
We are committed to encouraging high standards of transparency and accountability in public life, government operations and in business.
We believe that a broadly consistent and workable approach to the disclosure of payments and revenues is required, which is simple to undertake and to use.
There are nine others that I do not have time to read.
It is important for people in this chamber and for people who are watching to understand that I consider Africa my family. My son-in-law is from Ghana. My son-in-law came to Canada with a masters degree in physics. He completed a second masters degree here in material sciences, and then he went on and finished his doctorate in the United States in electrical engineering. Kofi and my daughter have just spent the last year living in Tarkwa, Ghana, where my son-in-law, Dr. Kofi Asante, has been guest professor at the University of Mining and Technology. Ghana was not called the Gold Coast for nothing. It has inordinate amounts of gold in its soil, and the job that my son-in-law has had over the last year is to help Ghana see the benefit of those resources go into its own economy.
With a doctorate in electrical engineering, Kofi is also helping Ghana utilize the solar power that it has. He has just signed a contract with the government to provide a 20-megawatt energy facility, so that the country can use its solar power. It is scalable to 70 megawatts, and it is such an exciting project.
I leave my colleagues with a very poignant story. My daughter was teaching grades 4 and 5 English at the school connected to the university. While she was there, she used letter-writing as one of her tools for teaching composition. She had the students in her class write letters to the school here in Ontario where she had taught. A little girl in grade 5 by the name of Ama wrote—and it is something that I have memorized because it underlines everything that we want to see happen in Africa. Ama wrote in her letter to a little girl here in Canada that she is so glad to be in school because she wants to be somebody in the future.
That says everything that Canada wants to see happen in these emerging economies. We want to give Ama a future, a hope, and an opportunity. Our companies that are investing there, doing really good corporate social responsibility, are going to help these African nations get on their feet, utilize these resources, and become sustainable, developed economies.
