International Trade committee  I'll give you an example. At present, China is buying niobium oxide from Brazil, where one of the mines is actually 100% Chinese. China buys niobium oxide in the form of ferroniobium and converts it in order to obtain various products made of niobium. Those products then come ba

International Trade committee  As I was saying, South Korea has been in touch. We know that that country has a strong interest in niobium produced here in Canada. For tantalum, I mentioned the Philippines. The Philippines would be a buyer for certain products. We mustn't forget that Canada also has know-how.

International Trade committee  I can tell you, sir, that it has to be part of the equation. In my presentation, I have the full cycle from exploration to recycling. For now, for us, what we know how to do is the exploration, producing the oxide and producing the precursor for the battery people. This is our f

International Trade committee  I fully agree.

International Trade committee  That's right. It's thanks to the progress made by Toshiba; it isn't science fiction. Toshiba already has three types of niobium batteries on the market. That company is taking the market by storm—a market that will probably be very specialized—because of the speed with which the

International Trade committee  First of all, actually, I have people working on that, so they're doing some samples for Toshiba and Aecon, and what we're trying to do is perform and produce the oxide in the greenest way. We've been working on that for the last year and a half, and that's our money. We were not

International Trade committee  Big time. Lithium is a very good example as well. You need to spend a lot of time to find the right recipe because every rock is different. People think it's lithium, so it's easy. You know the recipe, but usually you cannot apply it. You can take, let's say, the main recipe to p

International Trade committee  Exploration is feasible, actually. It isn't complicated to find critical and strategic metals like copper and nickel, and it's easy to produce them. For niobium or lithium, the difficulty lies in the metallurgy: the metal extraction stage and the oxidation stage. That difficulty

International Trade committee  It should be working. I can continue in English, if you want. Can you hear me better?

International Trade committee  Okay. Again, I am representing NioBay Metals, which is based in Montreal. We're playing with two special metals, which are niobium and tantalum. Those are critical metals for our economy. We call them green metals. Niobium in particular creates an alloy with steel. It allows th

International Trade committee  I didn't change anything.

International Trade committee  I understand that.

International Trade committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. My name is Jean‑Sébastien David and I am the president of NioBay Metals. NioBay is a mining company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. We are recognized for our work on the extraction of two critical and strategic metals: niobium and tantalum. We have