Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to begin by acknowledging that we are gathered on the unceded territory of the Algonquin people.

I appeared before the Senate Energy, Environment and Natural Resources Committee on Tuesday as part of its prestudy of amendments to the Impact Assessment Act contained in this bill. The MAC's Senate committee brief has been submitted to your clerk for distribution, so expect that soon.

Today I will focus my remarks on two aspects. The first is the proposed clean technology manufacturing investment tax credit, which even as an acronym is a mouthful.

The mining sector welcomes the government's efforts to build a critical minerals value chain and sees what has been described as a generational opportunity for Canada. The tax credit, if expanded and implemented correctly, could secure Canada's place as a reliable, responsible critical minerals supplier to our trading partners and the North American supply chain that is a getting built.

In its current form, however, it falls short of properly tackling the major challenge facing industry, which is having enough critical mineral supply to feed the various supply chains. It will thus not achieve our national objectives to attract the necessary significant capital investment to support our energy transformation and security.

We have seen lots of news about new investments in battery plants and electric vehicles. We have read a lot about Canada's and the west's exposure to China's market dominance in metals and how critical minerals are needed to fight climate change and support the energy transition that is under way; however, unless we secure the right conditions to enable the industry to produce additional tonnages of nickel, cobalt, copper, lithium and rare earths, as well as find, permit and build new mines, we will fail to address both challenges.

In fact, the new automotive investments we have attracted to Canada will be forced to rely on foreign imported feed sources, leaving Canada at greater risk of increasing its dependence on China. The past two decades have seen a sharp decline—