Finance committee  Well, geoscience typically has a provincial activity base, as does mining. The Newfoundland and Labrador geoscience group is quite active in terms of their programming, but with limited funds. I'm sure they could always do with more support. The beauty of the federal program is t

Finance committee  I can speak to one example in the Baie Verte Peninsula. There was an open-pit mine, and the open pit was reaching the point of exhaustion. The company was interested in bringing other deposits, both from the local area and from Nova Scotia, into their mill. They proposed that the

Finance committee  Yes, sir, I do, from the point of view of where it's tracking right now in terms of exploration. There is a need to replace the mines that are becoming exhausted across the country and to see more dollars come into the Canadian exploration sector. Otherwise, those dollars will go

Finance committee  Yes. Everything we produce here is generally sold on the world market, so we have to have, in our own backyard, the mechanisms and means to be competitive.

Finance committee  We hear from companies all the time, and both orders of government, in terms of the regulatory aspect. In terms of compliance costs, I saw a study out of the United States that showed that in some cases, 20% or 25% of the costs of a project can be tied to compliance. If we as a c

Finance committee  It's pretty tremendous, actually. I mentioned in my comments that we have about 33,000 new claims being staked. A lot of that was staked in central Newfoundland. As an anecdote, we had a gentleman come down from Yukon. He was a very promising prospector. He walked the ground, saw

Finance committee  How much potential investment...? That is hard to quantify, to be quite honest, because it's commodity-driven and market-driven. The consensus in the industry right now is that we're ticking back up in the right direction in terms of overall valuations that are reflected in the

Finance committee  Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before the committee and to participate in this pre-budget consultation. I'm the executive director for Mining Industry NL. Our association represents 60 members actively engaged in mineral exploration, mine development, mine o