It’s always a pleasure to speak about the incredible diversity of businesses in my riding of Simcoe-Grey. Today, I’d like to speak about a start-up company that is developing cutting-edge technology to harvest critical minerals from the ocean floor in an environmentally sensitive way.

Speaker, our government is committed to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by 30% from 2005 levels by 2030, and we’re currently 90% of the way to that target. But we won’t stop there; we will exceed that target, and we will grow our green economy at the same time.

The company I’d like to speak about is Impossible Metals, a company that just 11 months ago celebrated the opening of its Canadian headquarters in Collingwood. This month, I’m very proud to tell this House that Impossible Metals earned a spot on the prestigious Time magazine list of America’s top-250 green tech companies of 2024, coming in at 119.

Impossible Metals is developing an autonomous underwater vehicle that can pick up mineral-rich, deep-sea nodules while avoiding microfauna and marine life, with the goal of preserving biodiversity and habitat function. This autonomous underwater vehicle will be operating at depths of between one and four kilometres along the ocean floor.

I visited Simcoe native Jason Gillham at the Collingwood office last week, and he told me the team is in Florida as we speak. preparing to test their Eureka 1 prototype, and they plan to harvest nodules at a depth of one kilometre. If these tests are successful, they will begin the design and production of the full-scale autonomous underwater vehicle that will have the capacity to harvest and hold 100 kilograms of nodules from the ocean floor.

I want to congratulate the team at Impossible Metals on their remarkable achievements. There can be no doubt that, for this company, it is the ocean floor and not the sky that is the limit.