Actually, I had the pleasure in 2019 to be at the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada conference, where we announced a historic event. It was an MOU that had been signed by Webequie and Marten Falls to lead the environmental assessment for that all-season road to be built up into their territories. No government before had ever signed something like that. That was a historic event. I can’t emphasize it enough: No government before ours had ever signed something like that with the Indigenous community to ensure that the pathway to prosperity went into their communities, so that those communities that have fly-in resources, that only have road access by winter roads, will have full access with an all-season road, led by Webequie and Marten Falls.

What this bill will do is pave the way for us to make sure that Webequie and Marten Falls can continue down the path that they have started to build that all-season road and provide the same level of supports that we have in southern Ontario for those rural, remote and Indigenous communities. It’s a game-changer for them.

A road coming in would have to be removed; buildings that were there would have to be removed to bring it back to the state that it was prior to the mine being built. What this allows us to do, though, is leave things where it makes sense to leave it. As I said in my speech, in my riding, when the nepheline syenite mine closes, there’s the option for that cell tower to actually remain because it’s servicing everyone that’s there. I talked about Cordova Lake and the road that was there that feeds more than 300 residents. These are the things that this bill will allow to us do that do not happen right now.

The mistake was “prior to the mine being built.”

I go to my doctor and I ask him for medical advice; he gives me the medical advice. If he does something wrong, if my doctor makes a massive mistake on it, the doctor has the opportunity of no longer being a doctor through a malpractice suit.

This makes sense—having qualified professionals review it and say, “Yes, this makes sense,” or “No, you need to make an adjustment here; you need to make a change there to it.” We’re asking those professionals who have the education, who have spent their life learning about this, to weigh in on the decision on it because that is what they are trained to do.

Thank you to the member from Whitby for that question.

We know right now that electric vehicles are something that we’re transitioning to. The federal government has said that by 2030, all new vehicles need to be electric. Ontario has an opportunity with our manufacturing might in the south and our raw materials in northern Ontario to put the two together, to have the full life cycle here in Ontario, so that you mine the materials in an ethical, green manner, you process it in Ontario in an ethical, green manner, you build it in Ontario in an ethical, green environment, and what you end up with is a global reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Ontario is the only jurisdiction in the entire world that has everything together in its borders to make sure that we lead the world in that green revolution.

The member from Hamilton said, “Just trust us.”

I’m going to trust a professional engineer. I’m going to trust a doctor. And I think our entire professional university system is based on the fact that these highly educated people are trustworthy; otherwise, we wouldn’t have a single building built in this province—because someone signs off on it and says, “Yes, this is safe.” We wouldn’t have any of the things that we have, because if we didn’t trust the scientists, there would be no scientific advancement. This makes sense.

Another piece of opposition that the NDP has put forward on this is that the closure plan assurance should be paid for up front. They should put the millions of dollars right up front. But we know that it can take, as I said earlier, up to 15 years for that mine. Is it reasonable to say you should put, on day one, millions of dollars up front before you know what’s going to happen, just in case? Or is it possible that over the course of time for the development of the mine we will have technological advancements and it makes more sense to do things slightly differently at the closure? And at every step of the mining process, then, before you get to that next step, you would put down that financial assurance. That, to me, is reasonable. That, to me, says, as the mine is being developed, as there are enhancements, as we know more, you can make the adjustments on your closure plan before the mine opens.

I’m going to come back to something locally, for me. In my riding of Peterborough–Kawartha, we have the only nepheline syenite mine in Ontario. Nepheline syenite is used to reduce the amount of energy required to make glass. It’s used to make latex paint more scrubbable. So when you go into Home Hardware or Home Depot or Pro Hardware or any of the hardware stores and you buy paint that says it’s scrubbable, so that you don’t wash the paint off when you’re washing the wall, that has nepheline syenite in it. That nepheline syenite mine has been operating now for close to 60 years; they believe they have another 105 to 115 years’ worth of nepheline syenite. Does it make sense, today, to say, “Your closure plan in 100 years must be identical to what you said it was going to be 50 years ago,” or does it make sense to make adjustments to those closure plans as technology changes?

One of the things that we know is, the side effect or by-product, a waste product from silver mines, when we first started mining silver—there’s a big chunk of silver downstairs in the museum part of Queen’s Park; it’s a really nice big rock. When we were mining silver, silver was a mineral that people wanted. It was a valuable mineral. The waste product from mining silver is lithium. At the time that the silver mines first started in Ontario, there was no use for lithium. Does it make sense to have a closure plan that says, “You’re going to throw that lithium out,” or does it make sense to say, “You can adjust your closure plan. You can go to that tailings pond and you can remove the lithium that is one of those critical minerals that we need for the green evolution to move to electric vehicles”?

What a novel concept: to take a step back and say everything that we do in our legislation has to be mobile enough so that, as technology changes, that technological change that is to the benefit of people can actually be implemented in that mining closure plan.

Does it make sense to say, “If you’re making adjustments to that closure plan, there will be a change in what the financial assurance is, so you should make adjustments to that financial assurance as you’re developing it”?

A number of the mines that will be closing shortly—and we do have some that are getting close to the end of their life—have certain infrastructure that has been put in place. Previously, all of that had to be removed, regardless of whether there was a benefit from it.

Again, I’ll come back to the mine in my riding. Perhaps there’s a cellphone tower there—I actually know there is a cellphone tower there. But hypothetically speaking, let’s say that there’s a cellphone tower that’s there. When that mine was developed 50 years ago, they would have torn down everything in 100 years when that mine is no longer commissioned. Is there a value to the community for that cellphone tower to remain? It’s providing service to the greater Cordova area. Under the previous incarnation of the Mining Act, that cellphone tower would have to be torn down. This change allows for that cellphone tower to remain, so the mining company can go back to the community, can go to Bell or Rogers or Telus or any other cellphone provider and say, “This tower exists. Would you like it?” If they were to say yes, there’s a benefit to the community for it. “We would love to be able to take that”—under this proposed change, they would.

We’ve got a number of places in northern Ontario—and my good friend from the riding of Kiiwetinoong and I have had a number of conversations about this, and he has talked to me a number of times about how there is that lack of road access to a number of communities.

You have road access going into every mine because you have to get the product out. Under the current legislation that we’re changing, once the mine closes, you would have to find a way to remediate that road and remove it and put the area back to the state that it was in prior to the road being put in.

Again, I’m going to come back to my riding on this, because I think it’s important that we actually look at that from a realistic perspective. I’m near the Cordova mine. I’m on Cordova Lake. The Ontario government built a fish hatchery in the 1930s on Cordova Lake, and they built a road in to the fish hatchery. In the 1990s, that fish hatchery was closed. But from the 1930s to the 1990s, land was severed off, and there are more than 300 residences that are fed by that four-kilometre-long road. If we had followed the Mining Act when we closed the fish hatchery, we would have removed that road. Obviously, a fish hatchery is not the same as a mine, so it didn’t fall under that jurisdiction. But think about that: You have more than 300 residents in my riding who have access to their property, who have built homes, who have built cottages, who have raised their families for the last 90 years, and the Ontario government would have come in and ripped the road out. That doesn’t make any sense.

I get that there is opposition to some of the things that we do. I get that the NDP’s job is to say no to everything, because that is what the opposition is supposed to do. They’re supposed to stand up and say, “Whatever you’re doing is wrong, and you should look at it a different way.” But sometimes what they should be doing is looking at it and saying, “These are good things. We’re not going to talk about that. We’ll talk about something else instead that’s in it.” Sometimes there are good things in a bill that—even if you’re on opposite sides of the political spectrum, you can look at it and say, “Yes, this is something that makes sense.”

I would like to think that most of the NDP members are looking at this bill and saying, “If there is infrastructure that’s in place already, if there is something that is not going to cost the community anything for it to remain and it has a benefit to the community for it to remain”—members of the opposition are going to look at that and say, “Let’s avoid talking about that, because that one actually has some value.” I think this is one of those cases where that has significant value.

We know that we have some First Nation communities that flood consistently. We also know that in just about every mine, there is a mining camp that has been set up. Staff members, mine workers come in; they stay in those residences during the time that they are working in the mine. They go home, the next shift comes in, and it’s a rotation through. They’re typically modular homes, and it’s set up so that multiple people can live. They’re almost university dormitory style or college dormitory style. To me, if we know that we’ve got communities near the mine that seasonally have to be evacuated, if we know that there’s the potential for forest fires in the area and that we’ve got communities that have to be moved out of there for a short period of time, perhaps—and it’s not every case—it makes sense to leave that housing to be used on an emergency basis when it’s needed on those seasonal opportunities.

When you look at what’s happening in this bill, everything in here is about expediting the process in an intelligent way so that there is benefit to the community, there is benefit to the supply chain in Ontario, there is benefit to the green economy. You cannot be green without having mining in your jurisdiction.

There were a number of things I was going to say when I first stood up and talked, but I think I’m going to try to bring the temperature down a little bit on some of the things. Normally, when I stand up for these speeches, I don’t usually talk about some of the statistics on things, but I think that I’m going to make an exception today and talk about some statistics that I find rather interesting on it.

The Fraser Institute did a study back in 2014, and they looked at all the mining jurisdictions across Canada. Keep in mind, this was 2014, so some of the data is a little bit old, but there is an interesting thing on it. One of the things that they looked at was the change in time to get permit approval on mining over the last 10 years. Here’s where I want to go with it: In Ontario, up until that date, the length of time it took to get a permit either somewhat increased or considerably increased by a total of 68%—68% of mining companies who tried to get a mine approval, up until 2014, saw the length of time to get the approval increase 68% of the time. Where I find this interesting is that a neighbouring jurisdiction, Manitoba, in that same time period, saw “shortened considerably” or “somewhat” or remained “the same” 51% of the time. Why do I bring up Manitoba? The Canadian Shield represents 72% of the land mass in Ontario, and it goes through Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba. The only thing that divides the Canadian Shield is the imaginary lines that we draw for provinces So here we have Canadian Shield in Manitoba that has exactly the same mineral content as what we have in Ontario and Quebec, and Manitoba found a way to do mining permits 51% of the time either the same over the last 10 years or in a shorter period of time.

Quebec had a change after this report had been done, and their change started around 2015. They saw a significant increase in funding in the mining industry. They’ve had a reduction in the length of time it takes for a mine to be permitted in Quebec.

Again, the only difference between the minerals in Quebec and Ontario is the imaginary line that we draw between them. That’s it. What’s in the ground is in the ground, and it is almost identical in Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba. If you find lithium in Quebec, you’re going to find lithium in Ontario and you’re going to find lithium in Manitoba. It is the same mineral makeup: It’s the Canadian Shield. What’s the difference, though, between them? That is the administrative side.

Another interesting statistic that came from that report was that 38% of the time taken for a permit was considered administrative time. Simply having the request sitting on someone’s desk somewhere—38% of that time. The average time it takes to build a mine or to get the permits to do a mine is 12 to 15 years. More than a third of that is simply administration—four to five years of administration. Where is there value in an administrative delay? It’s not consultation. It’s not studies. It’s simply administrative delay. And one of the things that this bill will do is eliminate some of that administrative delay.

One of the things that is in this bill is a change so that, for closure plans, someone can sign off on them if they have one of the proper designations. We do this already in so many different things. If you look at the building permit process, if an engineer signs off on it, that engineer is putting their designation on the line for it.

I’m going to give a personal example of it, because I spoke to the chief building officer in the township that I’m in because I wanted to build another garage at my place. I said to him, over the course of this past winter, I had a number of pine trees that died. Some kind of a disease came through. I’ve got 34 of them on my property that have died. I’ve cut down about 26 of them so far. The smallest one is around 12 inches in diameter, and the largest is almost four feet in diameter. I said to him, “This is still really good wood, and I hate to just chop it up and burn it, because there’s a lot of value in it.” Some of those trees—the one in particular that’s almost four feet around is close to 60 feet long. I said, “What can I do if I want to use this to build a pole barn? Because it’s not milled lumber. How do I show it?” And he said, “Your property isn’t zoned as agriculture. If it was zoned as agriculture, you could just go ahead and build it. You could build a pole barn. There’s no problem with that. But your property isn’t zoned as agriculture. So what you can do is get an engineer to sign off, to say that those trees at those certain widths are strong enough to hold the weight.” We do that for building permits. I can build a pole barn on my property using the trees from my property if I have an engineer come in, evaluate the wood and say, “Yes, this is fine. This is safe,” because the engineer is putting their professional opinion on it and their professional record on the line. That makes sense. That’s why the engineer went to school—to do those things.

What we’re proposing in this bill is basically the same thing, on the closure plan. Instead of having to go through an administrative process on it, if we have someone who’s qualified to review the plan and say, “This is safe. This makes sense. This will improve the environmental perspective of the area or improve the land itself,” and they sign off on that, what they’re saying is, in their professional opinion, this makes sense. We do that with doctors. We ask a doctor, “What should I do about whatever ailment?” And the doctor says, “In my professional opinion, here’s what you should do.” I’m a type 2 diabetic. My A1C levels were increasing because the drugs I was on were no longer working. I went to my doctor and I said, “Doc, what can I do about this?” And he said, “In my opinion, this is the drug we should change you to.” And we accept that, because he’s a qualified professional. We’re asking his opinion. This is no different than what we’re proposing here, and yet if you listen to the opposition, not only is the sky falling, but the sun will never rise again if we do this.

It makes sense to cut down on administrative time if we have someone who is a qualified professional to stand up and say, “This is appropriate.”