Subcommittee of the Standing Committee on Finance on Bill C-38 committee  I would agree with what my colleague has said.

Subcommittee of the Standing Committee on Finance on Bill C-38 committee  I don't think it should make any difference. First of all, for mining projects we fully expect to have mines on the list that will follow in regulations, so we expect the same number of projects to be assessed in the future as have been up to now. In fact, we've even speculated t

Subcommittee of the Standing Committee on Finance on Bill C-38 committee  Of course, it's a major issue. There are many different ways of looking at this. If you're a junior company trying to bring a mine into production, time is everything, and delays in projects, or the uncertainties built into projects that can lead to delays, can literally kill a p

Subcommittee of the Standing Committee on Finance on Bill C-38 committee  Thank you, distinguished members of the committee, clerk, staff, and observers, for the opportunity to appear before you today in the examination of this important piece of legislation. My name is Pierre Gratton. I'm president and CEO of the Mining Association of Canada. MAC re

Foreign Affairs committee  Reaction...?

Foreign Affairs committee  I've found myself agreeing with her most of the afternoon. For our members, certainly, our primary interest is that there be something that applies equally to all and is the same: that the reporting standards don't vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and that we can all have

Foreign Affairs committee  Well, there are two parts. I said earlier that there's an increasing recognition that transparency is good for business. There is an issue between mining versus oil and gas and transparency of royalty payments. Oil and gas royalties tend to dwarf ours. There are some fundamental

Foreign Affairs committee  Is that for me or for...?

Foreign Affairs committee  I'll leave you with that. You're better placed than I.

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

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 arou

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,

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 transparenc

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. The