Foreign Affairs committee  China is changing the playing field quite a bit. These are typically state-owned companies that go in with a lot of resources and do a lot of development work in some cases. The Chinese state bringing a lot of their resources to bear is creating some challenging circumstances for the private sector in parts of Africa.

Foreign Affairs committee  I'll back up again and refer to these three projects by way of examples. They are pilots. This is new for Canada, although, as I mentioned in my statement, many other countries have been doing this kind of work for years. The debate that's taken place here in recent weeks around this has given these three projects more notoriety than they deserve, in the sense that these projects very much developed bottom-up.

Foreign Affairs committee  I'd like to go to the middle question: what is holding us back? We have seen examples of significant resource investment in extraction. We've seen places where the results of this investment have not been shared across the population base, where there are examples of corruption, and where we haven't seen the development we thought this investment would bring.

Foreign Affairs committee  China's an interesting question.

Foreign Affairs committee  There are a few things to say. The International Council on Mining and Metals, which is the largest international group representing the mining industry, represents the world's biggest companies. It's a condition of membership to be part of the extractive industry's transparency initiative.

Foreign Affairs committee  That's right. We want a consistent set of rules and a consistent set of reporting requirements in the EU, the United States, and Canada, for example, so we don't have to take the numbers and report them in three or more different ways. That's no good for civil society either. They then have to try to parse through that and figure out what it means.

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes, I think that's right.

Foreign Affairs committee  There are many different things to say here, so I'll try to stay focused. First, I'll just mention that the person heading up De Beers in Botswana is a Canadian, Jim Gowans, our former chair. Botswana is, unfortunately, an exception within Africa: it's one of the most successful countries there.

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you to the committee for inviting us to speak to you today. I am here with my colleague, Ben Chalmers, vice-president of sustainability, who is also responsible for MAC's new international social responsibility committee.

Environment committee  I would just point out that if you look at the quality of environmental review that goes on, it's tremendous. The amount of attention that is brought to all aspects of a major project is huge. I'm thinking of this image of the daughter of someone who is involved in the Mt. Milligan project.

Environment committee  Could I jump in, though you didn't ask me, just to point out...?

Environment committee  Industry, environmental groups, and first nations are calling for the renewal of that funding.

Environment committee  I'll give you two that come to mind. Well, Australia's environmental assessment can take as little as six months. Even with our improvements, which are significant, we're still much slower than Australia.

Environment committee  I wouldn't have enough knowledge to say, but I'd be surprised if Australia was much different from Canada.

Environment committee  Their distribution of power is different from ours, so there could be reasons there as well. The other example I'll give you is Baffinland. This goes back a couple of years, but they were going under a Nunavut review board environmental assessment for their bulk sample—this is a major potential iron ore mine, and this was for a large bulk sample.