Finance committee  Thank you for the question. It's not an area where we have active members of our association. It is an area where there's an awful lot of investment taking place, especially in the United States, but also in other parts of Canada. The argument is that in the U.S. the use of mo

Finance committee  No, it would probably be companies within the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers--the oil and gas association.

Finance committee  Thank you very much for the question. Certainly, the mining industry takes its responsibility in the environmental and social area very seriously. I would highlight the mining industry's contribution to the whole emergence of the clean energy economy and the fact that minerals

Finance committee  It's not a concern with that. It's just a concern with the fact that anybody could lodge a complaint, whether it's a competing company in another country.... Then, the process in which the complaint is being investigated, that might take who knows how long. This sort of spectre o

Finance committee  I'd just add that there have been a lot of studies over the years as to why Canada isn't more effective at commercializing and I wouldn't have a lot to add to that. In the mining sphere, certainly there is a lot of attention being paid--and a lot of need for more attention--to

Finance committee  It's an interesting area, for sure. Right now, China controls the vast majority of rare earth production and processing. There's a lot of investment activity taking place in Canada, probably in four or five provinces and in a couple of the northern territories.

Finance committee  There is a need for Canada to bring some of these mine proposals into production. It's going to take a couple of years. The movement of rare earth around the world today is fairly small. It's a very strategic area as it relates to clean technology, defence technology, and commu

Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you as well for the invitation. I want to use my five minutes to just quickly highlight two figures from the “Facts and Figures 2010” document. You each have a copy en français et en anglais. Page 9 shows the distribution of the indust

Subcommittee on Canadian Industrial Sectors committee  Just very quickly on that, I think a challenge for CMIC, the Canadian Mining Innovation Council, still rests with the industry. We haven't had our own act together adequately to make the proper representations to Finance officials, etc., in the lead-up to the last budget. We're a

Subcommittee on Canadian Industrial Sectors committee  CMIC.

Subcommittee on Canadian Industrial Sectors committee  Our industry and our association confronted these issues fairly head-on about five, six, seven years ago. There were a number of accidents and so on internationally that didn't reflect positively on the industry. We introduced at that time something called Towards Sustainable M

Subcommittee on Canadian Industrial Sectors committee  Can I add quickly to that point?

Subcommittee on Canadian Industrial Sectors committee  The other dimension of this issue that is important is the aboriginal area. Certainly that's a component of the population that is younger than average. Over 50 impact benefit agreements, IBAs, are signed between mining companies and aboriginal groups in Canada. Those agreements

Subcommittee on Canadian Industrial Sectors committee  Sir, just to add a bit onto that, some of the larger companies have significant exploration programs as well. This is certainly an incentive that we fully support. In a sense, exploration can be viewed a bit like the R and D for our industry. It's helping to find the products tha

Subcommittee on Canadian Industrial Sectors committee  Sure. This is an important area, especially for an industry like ours where there is a lot of international trading and a lot of international investment. One area we pay attention to, although not as high-profile an area as free trade agreements, involves FIPAs, foreign inves