What’s Holding Back Canada’s Mining Sector?
Canada must raise its level of ambition to compete in today’s rapidly shifting geoeconomic and geopolitical landscape. So far on the podcast, we’ve focused on how diversifying oil and gas exports can strengthen Canada’s power and influence. This week, we turn our attention to another strategic sector — mining.
Our guest this week is Photinie Koutsavlis, Vice President of Economic Affairs and Climate Change at the Mining Association of Canada. She joins us to discuss the current state of Canada’s mining industry.
Here are some of the questions that Jackie and Peter asked Photinie Koutsavlis: How large is Canada’s mining sector, and what are its main products? Since the January 2020 announcement of the Canada–U.S. Joint Action Plan on Critical Minerals, what progress has been made on the ground? Has investment and production grown — and if not, what are the main barriers?
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Episode 298 transcript
Disclosure:
The information and opinions presented in this ARC Energy Ideas podcast are provided for informational purposes only and are subject to the disclaimer link in the show notes.
Announcer:
This is the ARC Energy Ideas podcast, with Peter Tertzakian and Jackie Forrest, exploring trends that influence the energy business.
Jackie Forrest:
Welcome to the ARC Energy Ideas Podcast. I’m Jackie Forrest.
Peter Tertzakian:
And I’m Peter Tertzakian. Welcome back. Well, next week, we won’t be saying welcome back because it’s time for a break.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah. We’re going to take a break for the Thanksgiving weekend, but we have lots to talk about around this pipeline and we will get to that on our next time together. As you know, Daniel Smith, our premier of Alberta, announced a concept of a 1 million barrel a day oil pipeline that the province will advance. They have a little bit of money, $14 million, to get a better understanding of what it would take. Now on the weekend, Peter, you haven’t been taking a break by the way. October 4th, you wrote an article. It was in the hub. We will put a link to it in the show notes. Even if Alberta gets a new pipeline, what is next for the oil sands? And you talk about the pipeline and what it’s going to take to fill it.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah. Well, that’s the big secondary question is it’s fine to build a pipeline, it’s fine to get the sponsorship and so on, but the subsequent question as well, now you have to fill it with a million barrels a day so what would it take to fill it? And it’s interesting because by all accounts, give or take the cost of building a pipeline to the West Coast, a new one would probably be in the order of $30 billion, but the cost of building facilities to extract more of the resource and the capital investment required would probably be three times that at least, if not four. So these are big dollar amounts. It’s not that the dollar amounts aren’t there to do it, so it’ll be very interesting to see how it all works itself out.
Jackie Forrest:
And like you say, it’s the pipeline that’s already a challenge. As we can see, we don’t even have private capital that’s willing to step up to it right now, but filling the pipeline will also take a lot of additional capital. Well, we’ve been talking a lot about this geo-economic world order and the importance of Canada to diversify our exports, to build more infrastructure, to export our oil and gas to markets beyond the US. But of course, we have lots of other things including critical minerals, uranium, potash, and we wanted to learn more about that topic and how Canada’s doing in terms of growing our critical minerals.
And just as a reminder, back in 2020, that’s how long we’ve been talking about this, the Canadian government at that time with the US government announced a joint action plan on critical minerals, so we’ve been at this for a while, and we wanted to find out, has anything been happening?
Peter Tertzakian:
Yes. Well, we do need to phone a friend, and that friend is Photinie Koutsavlis, and she is the VP Economic Affairs and Climate Change at the Mining Association of Canada, so welcome, Photinie.
Photinie Koutsavlis:
Well, thank you very much, and thank you to be considered a friend. I’m very happy to be here with you.
Jackie Forrest:
And we met you this summer, or I met you this summer and learned a lot about what was going on with critical minerals, and I thought our audience should know about it as well. But first, tell us about the Mining Association of Canada and what commodities are your members extracting or trying to extract?
Photinie Koutsavlis:
Yeah, happy to do that. So at the Mining Association in Canada, and you’ll hear me refer to it as MAC very often throughout this podcast, we represent our members in Ottawa and we advocate for policies that support the growth and the competitiveness of our sector. But at the same time, we promote our best practices through or towards a sustainable mining standard, which is recognized both here in Canada and internationally. Our board members span the full mining ecosystem, so we have members from exploration, in the junior mining sector, from the mining and senior companies that are producing, melting, refining and semi-fabrication. And they produce everything from gold to copper and nickel to potash, uranium, diamonds, other base metals, critical minerals, and also our oil sands mining members. And with that, we also bring our associate members, so that’s the engineering firms, the financial institutions and service providers. So together, at MAC, we represent the entire, I would say, mining ecosystem in Canada.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah. Can you give us a sense of the relative size of those who do the mining versus those who do more of the downstream processing?
Photinie Koutsavlis:
Well, I could speak to the mining part a little bit better than I can to separate out the processing segment of the ecosystem. So mining is a very big part of Canada’s ecosystem and Canada’s economy, and in 2023, we contributed about $117 billion to GDP, so it’s about 4% of the entire economy. We employ 430,000 people. That’s direct. Indirect, that’s about 700,000. But what I also want to mention that it’s very important is that mining is the largest private sector employer of Indigenous people in Canada on a proportional basis. So we employ more than 70,000 Indigenous people, and also, there are over 500 active agreements, so that includes the Impact Benefit Agreement between mining companies and Indigenous communities across the country. So this really reflects the scale and the size of our industry and how it’s deeply connected to communities, and if you want, I could also talk a bit about our trade size.
Minerals, metals make up about 151 billion in our exports last year. That’s about a fifth of everything Canada sells abroad, and I want to say gold is our MVP and consistently Canada’s top export. I checked the spot price this morning. It’s over $3,900 per ounce. Export values exceeded $27 billion in 2023, and that’s also followed by potash where Canada supplies about a third of the world’s demand. Iron ore and metallurgical coal, they’re big contributors, especially to Asia and Europe, and then we also have minerals like nickel, copper and uranium that are increasingly important because of energy transition as well as energy security. So yes, we are a fairly big part of the Canadian economy.
Peter Tertzakian:
Well, let’s talk about where the minerals go to. So how diversified are these mining exports? Are they mostly going to the United States like oil and gas or do they go globally?
Photinie Koutsavlis:
Well, the US is by far our largest buyer, so that’s of no surprise, about $83 billion of the $151 billion I mentioned in mineral and metals exports in 2023, so more than half of that goes south of the border, but there’s still important diversification. The European Union takes about 21 billion, the UK about 13, and then China roughly is at 12 billion. So we also export significant volumes to Japan, South Korea and India, especially on iron ore, on metallurgical coal and base metals. So yes, North America does dominate, but Canada’s mining exports, they are global and reaching every continent
Jackie Forrest:
Well, certainly more balanced. So the oil and gas industry, now with the Trans Mountain, we have a little bit going to other markets, but it’s a very, very small, probably more than 95% today of our commodities, oil and gas go to the United States. Now, we started this conversation. We need to build new conduits to get more oil and gas to new markets beyond the United States. Is that an issue for the mining industry as well? Are the ports and railways a bottleneck for more trade with Europe or Asia?
Photinie Koutsavlis:
Yeah, these are huge, huge issues for our sector. Mining is the single largest customer of Canada’s railways, about 50% of total freight revenue, and the largest shipper by volume on both rail and marine, so when the system breaks down, it really does hit us directly. In 2024, we saw the first ever simultaneous halt of CN and CPKC service plus major port strikes in Quebec and British Columbia, and those disruptions, like I mentioned, hit the sector and also sent the wrong signals to our global investors about how reliable our ports and rail trade infrastructure is in the country. So many mining operations are effectively captive to single class one railway, which means that limited competition, higher costs and constrained services. And that’s why MAC has long pushed for reforms to the Canada Transportation Act, for focused infrastructure that would fund and also fix these bottlenecks.
And there’s projects and we’ve been hearing about, let’s say, the Port of Churchill Plus that shows what’s possible. We could modernize rail, port and road connections in the North, and at the same time, building Indigenous equity ownership into the model. At the end of the day, really, if we want Canada to unlock and fulfill this mining potential, we need to be able to compete globally, and we need the reliability, the modernization of infrastructure. I cannot stress that anymore. Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure, whether it’s power transmission, whether it’s transportation to Tidewater, that’s what our country needs to be able to actually move more product into mines in terms of construction, out of mines in terms of getting into Tidewater, and over to our export markets.
Peter Tertzakian:
Where are the big dollar decisions made? Are they in boardrooms here in Canada? In other words, to what extent is the industry and your membership international multinational mining companies versus domestically owned with headquarters and boardrooms here in Canada?
Photinie Koutsavlis:
Well, there’s still a number of Canadian companies that are domiciled in Canada. They have their headquarters in Canada where the final investment decisions are made. We obviously haven’t had as many as in the last number of decades, and we also have many more smaller companies that are now moving projects forward to those final investment decisions. Some are Canadian and some other are, as you mentioned, multinational where they have a portfolio of projects across many jurisdictions globally. And what makes that a bit challenging, Peter, is many of these multinational companies make decisions on where they would get, I guess for lack of better words, get most bang for their buck. So do they come and invest in a project in Canada or do they invest in a project in another jurisdiction in the world, and is it more certain? Are they able to get a better rate of return? So that’s what we compete against, is other jurisdictions and these multinational companies that could look at supporting one of their projects or on the books here in Canada or go elsewhere.
Jackie Forrest:
I want to just talk about the Ring of Fire because I think most of our audience has heard of this topic, but it’s one of those examples, I think, where we need infrastructure like roads and power to be the catalyst for investment. But there are others, right? Like Labrador I think has many opportunities like that too, but maybe just quickly describe that situation for our audience.
Photinie Koutsavlis:
Well, the Ring of Fire, as you mentioned, Jackie, it’s a very geological rich region in northern Ontario. It has a number of critical minerals and nickel being one that is, I would say, the most significant part of that geological deposit. It does not have the road infrastructure to be able to access that region, and there’s also a number of Indigenous negotiations and engagement that needs to be undertaken to be able to move forward in developing that region. So it’s a rich region, but at the same time, no different, as you mentioned, in Labrador, no different than in Nunavut, and something we’ve been hearing a lot about is the Graves Bay Road and Port project which opens up a very geological rich area in Nunavut and northern Canada, the Great Slave geological region. However, there needs to be a fairly heavy lift in terms of building the infrastructure, which can be billions and billions of dollars into that region to then open it up for companies to be able to have their projects be economic.
It’s about the economics of a project, and if you need to build out your own infrastructure, the economics of a project may not be as positive as it would be if the road infrastructure was there. If you’re building a manufacturing plant off the 401, the infrastructure’s there. Your energy and your power transmission is there and your accessibility to markets are easily found as well. Not so much in regions of our country that’s so vast, that does not have that infrastructure.
Peter Tertzakian:
But you know what’s interesting is that the oil sands boom of 20 years ago, a lot of the capital that was brought in by the multinationals did actually build things like airstrips and infrastructure, power plants, what have you, to extract this valuable commodity. And what you’re saying here is that the patient capital is left and we’re in this weird situation where everyone talks up critical minerals, but nobody’s willing to invest in it, not even to the point of the infrastructure. It’s just a very strange situation.
Photinie Koutsavlis:
Mining companies historically have also built out their own infrastructure. It depends on what you’re also mining. If you’re mining, let’s say, for diamonds, all you need is an airstrip and very little infrastructure to be able to move that commodity out. If you’re mining nickel or other base metals, it’s a different type of volume, that you need to have more trade enabling infrastructure and transportation to move your product. Many companies in the last number of decades have also built out their own infrastructure and there’s many examples of that in the North as well, but as you mentioned, patient capital and the investor has definitely shifted over the last number of years that we are not seeing that as much as we had in the past.
Jackie Forrest:
Hey, I will add too, the infrastructure in the oil sands, even back in the great Canadian oil sands days, you had a railway to Fort McMurray and you had some infrastructure. The government twinned the highway during the last oil sands boom to Fort McMurray, so the infrastructure that was put in in the Fort McMurray region was quite incremental to what was already there, where we’re talking places that are hundreds and hundreds of kilometers away from any infrastructure. So I think the scale of the issue is quite different.
Photinie Koutsavlis:
And the thing is in terms of mining, you can’t really move the geology. The rocks are there so you have to work with where that economic deposit is, and how are you able to access it? Whereas some other industries, you’re able to enable the infrastructure differently around your particular industry. On mining is you have to go where the geological deposit is, and it’s a very rural, northern, isolated parts of our country, and Canada’s a very large country which can be very hard to access at times.
Peter Tertzakian:
So against this backdrop is China’s strategy to dominate key critical minerals, commodities, all the way from getting the ore, mining it themselves and then processing it all the way through to final products like magnets and what have you. So talk about China’s influence on impacting the mining sector and how that affects us here.
Photinie Koutsavlis:
Sure. China is dominating the minerals metal sector. They have a complete dominance and it’s not just about having the minerals, it’s really about owning the price cycle and the processing choke points. So we’ll take nickel for example. Indonesia’s surge, it’s been largely financed and refined by Chinese firms. They’ve pushed global prices down by more than 40% in the past year. Nickel is now trading at about a third of its 2022 peak, and it’s not just nickel. Lithium, cobalt are also weak. And even though we have such strong demand signals for these metals, and we hear many organizations talk about what that could be forecasted, to quadruple by 2035, so very, very strong demand signals but the prices are not keeping up with that demand signal. And that volatility makes it nearly impossible for Canadian projects to get financed without some level of government support in terms of manipulating the market.
Rare earths, that’s what goes into magnet manufacturing or rare earth elements, but china controls 90% of refining capacity. So even if we mine them here, we really can’t process them currently independently. And base metal, China’s smelters and refineries, they set the benchmark with really cheap treatment and refining charges to undercut other operations, and they do. They undercut Canadian operations. In lithium, aluminum, graphite, China controls anywhere between 50 and a hundred percent of the processing capacity, and you see the strategy. Flood the market, drive down prices, control the midstream and downstream. For us, it’s not really a problem of geology. It means it’s volatile in terms of pricing. It’s tougher to get financing, slower project build-outs, and it’s all because of their aggressive predatory pricing and they really have a strong-hold on that downstream. That makes our projects, as I mentioned, uneconomic to move forward because you don’t have those strong price signals to attract investment.
Peter Tertzakian:
We’ve talked about this, Jackie, on podcasts past about state capitalism and how we’re in a different world here where it’s not just free market against free market corporations from one country, free market against another country. We’re dealing with heavily state backed enterprises that have an intent to dominate industries in the world from a geopolitical sense, so it’s not a surprise that we can’t compete with and against that.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, and I think we’re slow to wake up in Canada to this new reality, but the Americans have figured this out and I think are ahead of us, and it’s worth talking about what they’ve been doing to solve this problem. Because what we’re doing in Canada is saying we’ll put up this regulatory environment, that we want you to come here and go through the process and some private investor to invest in this stuff. But the Americans are recognizing, with the Chinese making the prices so low, nobody can justify an investment, so there’s a couple of examples I wanted to talk about and get your perspective on.
There was a deal with MP materials. This is a company that makes those magnets that Ford Motor Company had to say they were slowing down their production of cars because the Chinese were limiting access to these magnets. So the US government, it was the Department of Defense, has taken a 15% stake in the company and also guaranteed price floor, and taken an off-take agreement, I understand for about 10 years so that this project is guaranteed they have a demand and a price for their product. We just heard last week, a company called Lithium America, which is actually a Vancouver based company, they have a mine in Nevada and the US government has taken a stake not only in the corporation but in the mine, a 5% share. And there’s rumors actually over the weekend that the government in the US may take a stake in another company called Critical Minerals Corp, which has a big critical minerals project in Greenland. So not only are they supporting the development of critical minerals within the borders of the United States, but even maybe outside.
So is this the approach that Canada needs to take? Are we doing anything like this?
Photinie Koutsavlis:
Well, thanks for the question, Jackie, and I’m going to just back up just a little bit in terms of the actions the United States has taken and how that has impacted the mining sector and also what Canadian governments have also been undertaking. And in the US, first, the Biden administration really shifted the landscape with the Inflation Reduction Act. There were some real great goodies in terms of tax credits and production credits for critical minerals, for batteries. It was a very powerful incentive, and it also was paired with the Department of Defense’s Production Act that even floats some funding to Canadian projects, and some of them were also co-funded from Ottawa as well.
So then we shift to the Trump administration and they’ve really doubled down. They’ve gone further into reshoring, onshoring, trying to build out their mining sector domestically, and they’re using everything in terms of executive orders and targeted financing and also backing some big flagship approaches, which he just walked us through. And the bottom line is that Washington is using everything they possibly can to strengthen their domestic supply chains and they’re looking at every tool that they have in their toolbox, and they recognize that without reliable domestic allied sources supply, they cannot sustain their defense procurement and manufacturing industry.
We could still talk about clean energy and electric vehicles in terms of what they’re trying to support within industries in the United States, and it’s a good lesson for Canada, back from the Biden administration and the IRA to what the Trump administration is undertaking currently. But the interesting thing is that in terms of equity positions within mining companies, it’s actually Quebec who was a first mover in this space.
Through Investissement Quebec, the province has long taken direct equity positions in a number of projects. A couple that I can mention is Nemaska Lithium and Nouveau Monde Graphite, and they’ve been pairing capital with strategic oversight to move projects from feasibility, so they were more in the project upstream stage, through to construction. Nemaska is now under construction and they’re targeting lithium output next year in 2026. Nouveau Monde is nearing a final investment decision for its integrated mine and battery material plant in Bécancour. And at the federal level, we have our Canada Growth Fund, which is also starting to make a few more equity positions or take equity positions in mining companies.
They did take a 10% equity stake in foreign mining, which I’m sure we will be talking about that when we get to our discussion on the National Major Projects office and the national projects of interest. So they’re based in Saskatchewan, and they’ve also provided a hybrid financing package to support Nouveau Monde’s development in Quebec, which is a nickel play. So they do also have the goal of de-risking capital intensive projects and try to crowd in private investors. So while the US examples is they’re bigger, there’s more component parts to it, especially the MP materials. There was a loan, there was an off-take agreement, there was equity position and there was a price floor. That is a huge play. In Canada, I’m not certain that we have the capacity to make such huge plays into one company, but they’ve been an example of similar private equity investments in mining.
Peter Tertzakian:
It’s interesting, whatever the mechanism, whether it’s equity interests or others, we’ve argued that alignment of state and industry is mandatory, that proverbially paddling in the same direction, and it sounds like Quebec is aligning itself with its industries. Now moving on to, say, permitting and regulations, does that kind of alignment in this country create a better environment for permitting and regulations? And maybe just talk about how long it takes to permit a new mine and everything else that goes with it?
Photinie Koutsavlis:
That’s a great question, and I’ll be sure to say that it depends on who you ask, Peter, and you’ll get different answers from different groups and different people. And timelines for environmental processes, approvals and permitting can really vary. Some projects have faced long delays, and there’s been some positive examples as well, and I’ll focus on the positive one for a moment and that’s Foran’s McIlvenna Bay Project in Saskatchewan. They were able to move through a provincial environmental assessment in about 18 months and then secured its federal authorization soon after. So why I mentioned that is we can do it. There are examples out there where there could be shorter timelines and still be able to keep a robust process and strong oversight in place. The key is to make these kinds of outcomes the norm, not the exception.
You mentioned alignment between government and industry, and if I speak to a number of our members who have been working with the agency and other departments, they have seen a real shift in terms of trying to find where those efficiencies can be, where you could reduce duplication, where you’re able to find some more efficient timelines, if I could put it that way, and be able to move projects faster into the process, but once again, not compromising oversight, not compromising the environment. So there’s been a realization in government that we need to work and work together and try to find where those pain points are. Is it perfect? Absolutely not, but at least it’s a work in progress and it has been improving over time, and we do have some good examples and a number of our members who’ve had better experiences working with federal departments and agencies through that process.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, one of the things we’ve been hearing, like in BC, it’s going well when the provincial government leads the assessment and then the federal government stays out of the way, and it’s interesting with this Saskatchewan example that you talk about, that that was a similar sort of construct. So hey, Major Projects Office, if you’re listening, maybe that’s the way to go. Let’s about the Major Projects Office. We learned that of the five projects that were on the first tranche of the major project list. Two of them were mining. We have this Red Chris mine expansion in Northwest British Columbia and this McIlvenna Bay Copper mine in Saskatchewan. So what do you think being on the Major Projects Office list means for these projects and how do you think it’s going to help them go forward?
Photinie Koutsavlis:
Right. First of all, we were happy, out of five projects that were listed as being in the national interest that were referred to the office, two of them are mining projects. We were pleased to see that. Now, what does it mean for these projects? Both of these projects have their permits in place. In terms of the Red Chris Mine, that’s operated by Newmont. They’re looking to amend their environmental assessment certificate with the province to transition from an open pit to a larger scale underground block caves mine. They’re working through a consent-based agreement with the Tahltan Nation and the province of BC. That was created under the Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, DRIPA, and that the approach ensures Indigenous consent, essential in the process. So they’re working through that, and then once they’re able to get that certificate, then they move into that final investment decision.
Foran and McIlvenna Bay already has their permits, they have strong Indigenous partnerships and they’re in construction, and they will hopefully be able to hit production mid 2026. So these projects do not need and did not need any help on the permitting side from the Matrix Projects Office, but from my understanding, the project office, the MPO, was brought together to also see how we could push these projects to the finish line. So is there policy changes? Is there infrastructure needs? Is there financing that needs to be crowded into these projects to get them through to that final investment decision and then into construction and then production?
For both of these projects, there’s something called the Clean Technology Manufacturing Investment Tax Credit. So it was one of the suites of investment tax credits that were actually announced by the government a number of years ago to actually level the playing field with the US’s IRA credits and other incentives. This investment tax credit provides an income deduction on companies’ tax forms when they purchase equipment, whether it’s machinery or processing equipment and one of the six battery metals, and copper is included in one of those six battery metals. Both of these projects are copper projects. However, the government and Finance Canada at the time had set a threshold for the production of copper at 90%, so the value of production from your output needs to be 90% copper for you to leverage this tax credit.
As our geology is polymetallic, meaning many other metals come along with copper, these two copper producing companies were not able to leverage that tax incentive because it didn’t produce 90% copper. It comes with silver, it comes with gold, it comes with zinc, it comes with other metals as well. Through our lobbying and advocating the government of Canada, we were able to have the government move that threshold from 90% to 50%, and it found itself in draft legislation for the Income Tax Act in our fall economic statement, and as you know, that fall economic statement did not move forward because of prorogation. So these two firms are still not able to leverage the tax credit, which would be material for Newmont to make that final investment decision, material for Foran to be able to have the capital to continue their construction into production.
So what we see is the Major’s Projects Office is helping support and maybe push the government to make sure that this tax change is actually made. Hopefully, we’ll see it in budget on November 4th. So sorry for the very long answer to your question. The NPO for these two projects wasn’t really permitting related, but more on the capital and financing side to make sure these projects get greenlit, and also push them through to the finish line.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, it certainly helps when you’re trying to raise capital to say, “Hey, this is one of the projects that our federal government says they’re going to push through.”
Photinie Koutsavlis:
Absolutely.
Peter Tertzakian:
Okay. So let’s wrap up, Photinie, by talking about climate change and emissions policy and emissions in general, because your title includes… Well, it’s economic affairs and climate Change at the Mining Association of Canada, so maybe talk a little bit about that subject. Where are we at in terms of emissions? What are the pressing issues on the mining side? To what extent are emissions regulations burdensome from a capital investment standpoint, so on and so forth?
Photinie Koutsavlis:
Yeah, happy to do that, Peter. In terms of global mining emissions and the mining sector in Canada, by global standards, Canada is actually a leader when it comes to low carbon mining. Our emissions intensity is among the best in the world and the trend is moving in the right direction. Between 2014 and 2023, the sector’s greenhouse gas intensity fell by about 3% per year. We’ve also cut sulfur dioxide emissions per facility, and while other measures like particulates and energy intensity are more mixed, but still improving. So the overall picture is that Canada is widely recognized internationally as high performing and a low carbon jurisdiction, and that does give us a little bit of an edge. But in terms of climate policies and the clash they could have with the competitiveness of our sector, Canada’s climate policies do raise costs within mining operations, and carbon pricing can be one of the big ones for our industry, but they don’t exist in a vacuum.
The mining sector does recognize that we can’t just produce the materials for decarbonization and clean technology, but we also have to decarbonize our own operations. And that’s why it’s been embedded as a commitment into our frameworks, like V towards sustainable mining standard, we have a climate change protocol which helps guide companies on their energy efficiencies and GHG targets.
I do want to talk a little bit about the clean electricity regulations. It can be a factor, but it depends on where you are in Canada. Mines and smelters, they are very big power users. Like I said, it’s impacts depends on which jurisdiction you’re operating in. You’ve got hydro rich provinces, Quebec, BC and others, Manitoba, that the regulations reinforce an advantage you already have, which is very low emissions power. But in places that still rely on fossil fuels, Saskatchewan, Alberta, the challenge is to make that transition and that transition doesn’t compromise affordability, reliability and the competitiveness of the sector. So it depends where you are in Canada. Some of these policies and regulations would affect companies differently.
Peter Tertzakian:
Well, great. It’s been a fascinating discussion, Photinie. So we’ve been talking with Photinie Koutsavlis. She’s the vice president of Economic Affairs and Climate Change at the Mining Association of Canada. I think we covered the waterfront, or shall I say the minefront in terms of the issues, but one thing resonates and that is the need for infrastructure and the need for capital to get the critical minerals moving. And this country is so privileged in having the critical minerals, whereas most countries don’t. So it strikes me that getting the right infrastructure and the regulatory constructs and the capital is secondary because if you didn’t have the resource, you wouldn’t need any of the above. So anyway, it’s been fascinating. Thanks so much for joining us.
Photinie Koutsavlis:
Well, thank you very much for having me.
Jackie Forrest:
Thank you, and thanks to our listeners. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on the app that you listen to and tell someone else about us.
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