Mario Simard
Jonquière—Hébertville—Pays-des-Bleuets, BQ
Opening remarks
Madam Chair, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but there's no interpretation into French.
Meeting 45 · September 24, 2026 · 15:32–17:32 (2h)
45-18 witnesses · 136 interventions · 13,873 words
The committee continued its study of Canada's clean energy, clean technology and critical mineral export opportunities, hearing from policy institutes, industry associations and nuclear and resource advocates. Appearing were Heather Exner-Pirot and Jamie Tronnes of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, Pierre Gratton and Photinie Koutsavlis of the Mining Association of Canada, Jeff Nankivell of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, Todd Smith of Candu Energy/AtkinsRéalis, and Margareta Dovgal of Resource Works. The meeting opened with the election of Stephanie Kusie as first vice-chair and Mario Simard as second vice-chair.
Exner-Pirot argued that energy and minerals are now strategic assets, that a new commodity upswing favours Canada, and that the country's problem is converting advantage into projects, calling Bill C-39 a positive step. She urged a deliberate conversation about nuclear enrichment and suggested exporting compute rather than gas molecules, and said she disagreed with Simard's view that private capital is reluctant, citing LNG Canada, Woodfibre and Cedar LNG as privately financed. Tronnes said Canada-U.S. trade uncertainty has grown, called countertariffs largely ineffective and urged a return to the table, and welcomed the mega deduction while saying moves must be faster.
Gratton said mining contributed $111 billion to GDP in 2024 but has stagnated for two decades, with copper, nickel and zinc reserves and refined output falling and seven smelters lost since 2016. He said the mega deduction will matter more than Bill C-39, which he nonetheless welcomed for Fisheries Act and navigable waters changes, and warned that new copper smelting would require Chinese technology and state support. Koutsavlis identified northern infrastructure gaps—Grays Bay, the Slave geological area, northern B.C., Ontario and Quebec—as making many deposits uneconomic.
Nankivell said Canada's clean export potential is real but uneven, with the Asian opportunity lying in grid expertise, embedded clean electricity, services and midstream processing rather than electricity itself. He recommended distinguishing competitive, commercializing and emerging areas, focusing on midstream capability, and organizing partnerships around bankable projects, and he disagreed with Simard that Canada lacks aluminum processing capacity, calling it a long-term project.
Smith said CANDU is a uniquely Canadian export, citing Conference Board estimates of up to $4.8 billion in GDP and 2,200 jobs per exported reactor, with Poland, Turkey, Romania and ASEAN as prospects. He asked for EDC and CCC financing support, properly resourced CNSC capacity and streamlined nuclear co-operation agreements, and told Simard that nuclear's value lies in baseload power for data centres over a century-long lifespan.
Dovgal argued competitiveness comes from taxation, regulatory certainty and market access, that commercial risk should stay with private investors, and that government should examine whether its own rules deter investment before subsidizing. She criticized industrial carbon pricing and the west coast tanker ban under Bill C-48, defended marine transport safety, and said announcements are only as good as the activity they unlock.
In the closing procedural exchange, Mantle moved a motion requiring the Canada Border Services Agency to provide the committee with the SIMA handbook, which the agency now treats as an internal enforcement document; Naqvi proposed seeking further information over the break week and reporting back, and the motion remained on the floor.
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Mario Simard
Jonquière—Hébertville—Pays-des-Bleuets, BQ
Opening remarks
Madam Chair, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but there's no interpretation into French.
Heather Exner-Pirot
Director, Energy, Natural Resources and Environment, Macdonald-Laurier Institute
Opening remarks
Thank you, Chair and members of the committee, for the invitation to appear today. I'm joined by my colleague Jamie, who leads MLI's D.C.-based subsidiary. Her work focuses on energy and critical minerals as they pertain to policies on the Canada-U.S. relationship. She is well placed to take your questions following the opening remarks. I want to make four points today about Canada's opportunity in clean energy, clean technology and critical mineral exports. First, the international environment has changed faster than Canadian trade and industrial policy. Energy and minerals are no longer ordinary commodities. Security of supply, geopolitical alignment and resilience increasingly carry economic value. We can see this very clearly in Canada's recent engagement with Europe. Energy security, critical minerals, defence, AI and compute are increasingly being discussed together as components of economic security and strategic autonomy rather than as separate policy files. At the same time, I believe we have entered a new upswing in the commodity cycle. Years of underinvestment in resource supply are colliding with rising defence expenditures, electrification, AI and data centres, and…
Pierre Gratton
President and Chief Executive Officer, Mining Association of Canada
Opening remarks
Madam Chair and members of the committee, thank you for the invitation to appear before you this afternoon. I want to begin by recognizing that we are gathered today on the traditional and unceded territory of the Anishinabe Algonquin nation, and I acknowledge the hundreds of indigenous nations across Canada on whose traditional lands our industry operates and with which we have strong partnerships. I'll begin by saying that I agree with much of what the previous witness spoke about. She set a nice overall global context for the situation in which Canada finds itself. I'm going to zero in specifically on the issue of value-added in the critical mineral space and provide just a bit more context to what that looks like at this current time. Mining is foundational to Canada's economy. In 2024, our sector contributed some $111 billion to GDP and directly employed almost 440,000 people, with direct and indirect employment reaching 710,000 people. Our exports total $152 billion, representing 21% of Canada's exports. Our industry also remains the country's largest private sector employer of indigenous people on a proportional basis. However, in inflation-adjusted terms, the mining…
Jamie Tronnes
Executive Director, Center for North American Prosperity and Security
Opening remarks
I would say that there is definitely more uncertainty in Canada along the trade file—as it pertains to Canada-U.S. trade, I should specify—than there was a year ago. We have even more tariffs on us now than just the section 232 tariffs, and on January 1 we are looking at a potential 50% tariff on autos, which would be catastrophic for the auto sector. However, Canada is making some significant moves to try to attract more foreign direct investment and to demonstrate that in this new era of uncertainty for every single sector that touches trade with the United States, Canada is trying to send a message of being a safe harbour and a secure investment. When you have the entire world looking for places to put their capital, Canada is starting to look like a place where it makes a lot of sense to begin developing the large-scale production of things, like mining infrastructure and other extractives infrastructure. Canada has a very strong advantage in that the rocks—or the oil, as it were—lie where they lie. Therefore, it is incumbent upon Canada to try to speed up, as much as possible, these major infrastructure projects that will make use of our natural endowment of minerals and…
Photinie Koutsavlis
Vice-President, Economic Affairs and Climate Change, Mining Association of Canada
Opening remarks
Thank you very much for the question. As we all know, Canada is a very big country, and most of our geological endowment is found in areas of our country that cannot be accessed by road, rail or even port. Some of those areas have very rich endowments, and there are a number of projects in their very early stages in those particular areas. However, the infrastructure deficit essentially makes those projects completely uneconomic to move forward. The areas we can possibly look at are in the northern parts of Canada. The Nunavut Grays Bay road and port project is a prospective area in the Slave geological area. Northern B.C. has enormous potential as well. Heather called it the golden triangle. I think they're also trying to turn it into the golden triangle or the copper corridor. That's important to mention, because there's a significant deposit of copper in northern B.C. In Ontario and Quebec, we have the possibility of lithium as well. If you look across the number of critical minerals we have, where they're located, where the projects are and the fact that you can't move the rocks, we need to open up those particular areas to build up the projects and move product to…
Jeff Nankivell
President and Chief Executive Officer, Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada
Opening remarks
Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee, for the invitation to appear today. My role here is to focus on the Indo-Pacific dimension of all of this. I'm drawing on the work of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada on critical minerals, economic security and Canada's partnerships with countries such as Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, the Philippines and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. A list of the relevant APF Canada publications on these topics—and there have been quite a few in just the last year—has been submitted to the clerk of the committee, along with the notes for my opening remarks. Energy security, in all its aspects, has been a core focus of our successful Canada-in-Asia conferences. As mentioned by Ms. Exner-Pirot just a few minutes ago, we have been convening this conference annually in Singapore since 2023. Clean tech has also been a theme in that conference, and it has been a main theme of our long-running series of trade missions to Asian markets for women-led businesses. My main message today is that Canada's clean economy export potential is real but uneven. We have world-class assets in uranium, hydroelectricity, clean grid…
Todd Smith
Vice-President, Marketing and Business Development, Candu Energy Inc., AtkinsRéalis
Opening remarks
Thank you very much, Madam Chair. It's great to be here. Thanks for the opportunity to appear before the committee on behalf of Candu Energy and AtkinsRéalis. AtkinsRéalis, as you may know, is a Canadian-headquartered engineering and nuclear technology company. We employ over 42,000 people globally. Through Candu Energy, we're proud stewards of the CANDU technology, a Canadian technology and one of Canada's most successful advanced technology exports. CANDU reactors have operated safely and reliably for more than six decades. We've deployed them in Canada, of course, but also internationally in places like Romania, South Korea, China, Argentina and others. I'd like to start off by making three key points here today. First, CANDU is a uniquely Canadian export opportunity. Canada is one of only a handful of countries in the world that's developed, built, operated and exported its own nuclear reactor technology. Few Canadian innovations have the potential to create economic value over such a long period of time. CANDU is not simply a reactor. It represents a complete Canadian ecosystem that includes engineering, advanced manufacturing, fuel production, project management…
Margareta Dovgal
Managing Director, Resource Works Society
Opening remarks
Thank you so much, Madam Chair, and thank you to members of the committee for inviting me to be here. At Resource Works, we examine how resource development contributes to Canada's prosperity and well-being. My work focuses principally on oil and gas, but we also track nuclear, electricity and mineral processing, areas that I understand the study is tackling today. Across these sectors, the question is about what makes investors commit capital, build productive capacity and reach customers. Canada understands oil and gas, competitiveness and export capacity reasonably well, despite a decade of political choices working at cross-purposes to that. That experience helps us understand how good industrial policy can enable export growth and diversification. Getting this right matters for wages, public revenues and affordability. The business case differs across the three sectors being evaluated. Nuclear exports involve technology, equipment, fuel, finance and decades of service, as Mr. Smith just mentioned. Electricity needs supply and grids. Mineral processing needs plants, feedstock and buyers. Each depends on the ability to build and on market access, where needed, through…