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.