Natural Resources committee  Thank you. It was a pleasure to be with you.

Natural Resources committee  I think the more manufacturing, demand and use within Canada for some of these products, the more this would greatly help to reduce the volatility in price. I think as the markets mature and there becomes more of a manufacturing base in Canada, that will help.

Natural Resources committee  It makes us wary, for sure, of investing in a brand new mine that would produce rare earths, because of that level of volatility. This is why we have looked at being creative and looked at what rare earths sit within our ore bodies today and whether we can extract them already.

Natural Resources committee  What we have to do as a society is to find ways to extract minerals with a zero-carbon footprint going forward. There's not a lot of point in creating a lot of emissions, a lot of CO2, to save something elsewhere. We have to do both together. The commitment that we've taken as a

Natural Resources committee  You're always best asking the first nations people their opinions about this, but we strive to be trusted to work collaboratively with the first nations people across the country. We've signed many agreements across the country in the last two years, working with first nations pe

Natural Resources committee  First, yes, it is a critical mineral. Scandium is a rare earth—one of the 22 rare earth elements. The reason we were looking into it is that we were going through a sort of creative process to see what else we could do to beat the critical minerals challenge. There are two big

Natural Resources committee  We really don't invest in mines unless we know that we have a mine with a long life and a low cost—and that position in the first quartile of the cost curve. That is absolutely key. We won't invest if we don't have that assurance, because we know that fundamentally it wouldn't su

Natural Resources committee  The way we see it, lithium is definitely going to be required in the longer term. Lithium's around to stay. It's about building something for the long term, which means, as I mentioned, the large ore bodies, the low-cost ore bodies. Those are things that Canada should be focusing

Natural Resources committee  Two to three years is a short time to bring a mine on stream, with all of its processing plants and facilities, which you'll need for something like lithium.

Natural Resources committee  That is a very important question for us. When we talk about the main workers, I'm not sure of the actual figures, so I apologize for that, but this is something we're very actively involved with—building, encouraging and keeping women, and anyone from a diverse background, in th

Natural Resources committee  From our perspective, there were conversations earlier about permitting and getting projects going, I think, at the very beginning. We're finding that actually Canada is very good relative to other parts of the world. What's particularly important in the speed is not so much the

Natural Resources committee  I'm really not a battery expert or a manufacturer of batteries, so I really couldn't say.

Natural Resources committee  There's very little in the lithium space at the moment, but there's a lot of talk about many projects in Quebec and Alberta. Phosphorous and phosphate mining is also a very interesting area. A lot of the batteries are lithium iron phosphate, and they're thermally a lot more sta

Natural Resources committee  The key thing is that, especially with the critical minerals, as I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of price volatility because these are new industries. We see the same thing with lithium. There is a lot of price volatility in lithium. The only way you can ensure production at

Natural Resources committee  Take ELYSIS, for example. It's a large collective investment of about $167 million. We're currently proposing something in Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean. First, I'm not sure that there will be fewer jobs, since we need to create something new. We need to manufacture a new type of high