Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much. I do have a binder of the backup material that is the basis for this. If the committee would like it, I'm happy to provide that.

Foreign Affairs committee  Let's go back to the Tanzanian example that I gave you earlier. We've seen tons of water projects where development NGOs have come in saying “I'll drill you a well”, etc., and you go back to those two years later and they're non-functional, because the community was not involved.

Foreign Affairs committee  In community development aspects, when you raise expectations and you make commitments, you need to live up to those commitments. If you don't live up to those commitments, then you're going to be faced with controversy with those communities. As anyone who has an agreement with a partner knows, if the partner decides to back away from the table, that's not going to make you very happy.

Foreign Affairs committee  I'm fairly familiar with Peru because I've been in the country many times and have been involved with projects there. There are two aspects that a company has to go through in entering into a developing country. We'll use Peru as a good case. If you're looking at financing your operation--because an operation can be anywhere from $500 million to billions of dollars in investment--you will probably have to get money from the banks.

Foreign Affairs committee  Correct, so what we've developed are the principles and the tool kits, and we're now looking at how we can embed these much more into our company members as we go forward. So it's always an evolving aspect, but the first step is to have the guidance and have that available. And it's available to anyone; you don't have to be a PDAC member to access that.

Foreign Affairs committee  There's opportunity in terms of the skills aspect, both for training on the site as well as for training in businesses to support the mine site. There are two aspects in there. It's not only just the training for jobs within the mine site and the ability to transfer that knowledge to go to other places, but it is also to develop their own businesses within the community, which supplements the traditional aspect in that area of agriculture.

Foreign Affairs committee  One of the things the PDAC has done was to develop e3 Plus, the guiding principles for corporate social responsibility. What had been missing for the junior sector is some guidance on how to do engagement, how to do community development, and how to do best practice in terms of environmental aspects for the exploration sector.

Foreign Affairs committee  First of all, let me address that report and give you some context as well, because it aggregates a number of incidents. There are 1,600 Canadian companies listed on the TMX; there are probably 700 listed on the Australian Stock Exchange and somewhere around 200 on the New York Stock Exchange.

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes. The ultimate goal is to not injure people, so whatever you need to do in order to do that--

Foreign Affairs committee  --whether it's European technology or Canadian technology, that's what needs to happen.

Foreign Affairs committee  Absolutely, and it gave you a bit of an insight in terms of the evolution in the proving experiences. It's very interesting. I've had this question on whether the safety standards in whatever developing country are the same as in Canada, and my response is “Look at the safety statistics of the operations in foreign countries.”

Foreign Affairs committee  There is a closure plan. All of the operations I've been involved with in developing countries have a closure plan. It's part of the accounting process to account for the costs to reclaim those sites. On the projects I've been involved in, we've looked at the post-closure land use aspects of what the place is going to be at closure so it can be integrated as part of the development.

Foreign Affairs committee  Everybody is following a set of rules in terms of best practice, I guess you would say, such as following the International Finance Corporation's rules and guidelines that dictate a number of these aspects. My experience in terms of working on the community development aspect is trying to promote that component within the country and differentiating yourself from your competitors in that regard.

Foreign Affairs committee  Absolutely. As we know, when your employees are content and happy and want to come to work, you're going to have a much more productive aspect. Whether it's working conditions, hours of work, your contribution to the community, all those things are positive aspects for people who want to come to work and contribute to the company as well as to what they're doing.

Foreign Affairs committee  The biggest obstacle to development is capacity building. Whether that is enforcement from a regulatory side…generally what we see is that laws in the world can have a lot of equivalency to Canadian law. The gap is in terms of capacity and enforcement, and the resources that government has.