International Trade committee  I think maybe having an eye to raw material inputs and how those get taxed through processing in Canada is something that I'm attuned to, because that's really going to go to our direct competitiveness. I can never compete with my Chinese counterparts, or competitors, I suppose,

International Trade committee  There is still room for more battery plants. Regarding those $2-billion investments, I'd like to see us get a couple of them here in Canada, and I think we can. Just a little further upstream from that, it would be the cathode-active materials. The well-known household names wou

International Trade committee  There is some great information-sharing, which is good to see. There is good alignment, but let's face it, we're also competing for the same investments. In fact, we're probably jointly competing now with Europe, as well as Asia. To me, there is alignment of interests. There ha

International Trade committee  I don't know if we're too late. COVID-19 has hurt us a bit. NRCan used to lead trade missions into Asia. I did one or two of those and it was helpful to get in front of some of the bigger players, such as Samsung, SKI, and the like. That obviously had to fall away. I will give cr

International Trade committee  From an extraction perspective, first we have to find it in decent quantities. Although Ontario certainly has some prospects, as do the north and the territories, we're just not there yet. Coming out of the mining sector, we invest with the commodity cycle. When the cobalt price

International Trade committee  We're not yet exporting, but that's very topical right now. In fact, just this morning we were looking at some of the tax rules to import the material into Canada and then to process it. The nature of the chemical conversion and whether it's exempt or not going into various marke

International Trade committee  Absolutely. Thank you, that's a very good question. Right now in the supply chain, cobalt comes out of essentially nickel and copper mines. From the nickel operations, whether they are here in Canada, Australia, Russia or Indonesia, a lot of that ends up in the alloy market. Wh

International Trade committee  We're going to see less of it. The prevalent cathode is the nickel-cobalt manganese cathode. Where at one time, going back five years, about a third of the material was cobalt, now we're down to a point where we're somewhere closer to 10%. Tesla would be down to 5%. You might see

International Trade committee  We did a life-cycle assessment of our environment. On water consumption, in fact we return more to the environment than we take. Obviously, we're meeting provincial guidelines. There are no tailings. We're not capturing this water anywhere. We're using it in our process. We're re

International Trade committee  Thank you for that excellent question, Mr. Blaikie. It's an excellent question. For our refinery work, we're taking cobalt.... In fact, cobalt is not even produced in North America yet. That will come. We're taking cobalt from abroad, bringing it into Canada and creating the fi

International Trade committee  NRCAN has done a really good job at doing that. The auto supply chain that I'm talking with, the battery makers and the OEMs, are really focused on it. COVID really underlined the dangers of a global supply chain interruption and what that could mean. Onshoring is real. It's no

International Trade committee  I believe so, yes.

International Trade committee  That's an excellent question. I would say in many respects it does happen. I haven't talked about this yet for lack of time, but one of our really important competitive advantages in Canada is our energy grid. Our stated mandate is to produce the cleanest source of cobalt in the

International Trade committee  Thank you. That was an excellent summary, by the way, of the industry I'm in. I can't disagree with anything you said. I've had the pleasure of going to the White House a couple of times to discuss some of these very issues on cobalt and national security. What I find fascinatin

International Trade committee  Thank you, and I'll be brief. The answer, really, is no. With our mining sector, and the process experience we have in Sudbury, along with a lot of gold mills, we have the millwrights, the electricians, and the maintenance personnel that we need. We have a lot of the foundations