Natural Resources committee  Absolutely, and it's more than just extraction. It's the value added along the line. For us, because of the nature of this, it should be understood that it's not just a commodity. If we don't understand what our customers demand and what their customers demand.... That's what China built.

Natural Resources committee  That's an excellent question. I'm going to take it in two parts. I think it's fundamentally important, because folks like Tesla and all the manufacturers are looking for, one, trace provenance—that is, traceability—and a reduced carbon footprint. A part of the contributors to carbon footprint is how we move material all over the world.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you for the question. You're bang on. You can look at northern Quebec, as some of these processing facilities are energy-intensive, so we would want clean power. You see initiatives by Rio Tinto for scandium light- weight materials for vehicles. In some of the cases we would have to look at southern Ontario.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you very much. Mr. Chair and members of the committee, thank you for the invite today. I speak on a subject very different from the agriculture or oil industry. Despite Canada's vast resource wealth, our critical materials remain largely undeveloped and not strategically leveraged, primarily because of a lack of understanding about their significant climate, national security, broad economic and local community benefits.

Natural Resources committee  Two things have happened recently in the U.S. I'm sure you've been appropriately briefed, or you will be. One is the contemplation of the GREEN Act, where the Trump administration put caps on the number of electric vehicles that could be produced in the U.S. by each manufacturer.

Natural Resources committee  I won't talk about vaccines. I'm not even going to go there, but it's associated with all these minerals and capabilities that we have. So goes the technology. If we're not producing the product, we don't have control of it. How did the Chinese build an entire infrastructure? They created 100 million jobs just around rare earth.

Natural Resources committee  I'm not sure who the question is directed to.

Natural Resources committee  I don't mind jumping in on some of that. It's something that comes back to the discussion we had before, and that's value adding. If some of those manufacturers that use the graphite in some of the end products are located here, or if it's through Canadian content requirements, that would be incented, but on a raw commodity basis, Canada is going to have some challenges on the value-added side—we know that—because of our metallurgical capabilities.

Natural Resources committee  Pierre, why don't you go first? I don't get translation somehow.

Natural Resources committee  Good afternoon, and thank you again for the invitation to appear today. The world is undergoing an economic transformation, with innovative technologies, clean technologies, driving the pace of change. Both the IEA and the World Bank stress the significant role of minerals and metals, especially non-traditional materials like lithium, graphite, rare earths, scandium and others, for a low-carbon future.