Natural Resources committee  Yes. Let's remember that the oil price has gone from $110 a barrel to $45 a barrel. That is a very profound benefit to every single user of oil in Canada. The offset against a very small increase in a carbon tax, for example, is minimal compared to that. There has been this huge benefit to every single user of fossil fuels, and a carbon tax hardly changes that in terms of driving costs.

Natural Resources committee  No.

Natural Resources committee  Sure.

Natural Resources committee  Not at all. We are focused on silver. Canada is not a major silver producer in the world. Mexico is. Peru is. You have to go where the resource is. I can speak about Canadian mining companies that are working overseas. It's not as much impact on Canada specifically, on Canadian jobs, but it is certainly an impact on things like head offices, as well as what our reputation is in the world and how we are doing things in the world that we could maybe apply to Canada.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you very much. Thank you all.

Natural Resources committee  I'll try to be brief. The trade-off for government and the trade-off for everybody is how to balance regulation with business. How do you make an environmental regulation functional, so that it doesn't waste time and it doesn't waste money, with the relevant things and unimportant things, and it really focuses on the stuff that's important?

Natural Resources committee  Sure. Thank you very much. Mining can do a lot in the campaign that we all have to make to move away from a fossil fuel-based economy to a more sustainable clean energy economy. One of the problems of mining is that it requires baseload energy. That means energy 24/7. Typically wind and solar, for example, are intermittent forms of energy, so renewable energy isn't ideally suited to mining operations.

Natural Resources committee  Mr. Chair, and members of the committee, I also run a clean energy company and we're the largest producer of geothermal power in Canada. Geothermal takes the earth's heat and either makes electricity from it, which needs very high heat pools in the earth, or makes space heat to heat rooms like this, which requires much lower temperature earth heat resources.

Natural Resources committee  We're not in a bear market anymore. The mining industry went four or almost five years in a downturn, and that pretty much ended in January this year. Certainly gold and silver prices have gone up 30%, and most precious metals companies have raised a lot of capital that they needed to, and they're making money again.

Natural Resources committee  Do you have a coin?

Natural Resources committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Good morning, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to make these comments today. By way of background, I have personally worked in the minerals industry both in Canada and internationally for nearly 47 years now, since my very first job exploring for copper and gold in northern British Columbia in 1970.