Toronto, Ontario
March 2, 2009

Check Against Delivery

Introducation

Thank you for that introduction.

I am pleased to be here, and extend a warm welcome to everyone – especially those of you visiting Canada for the first time.

The Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) is one of the premier mining associations in this country. It hosts the largest conference on mining exploration and development in the world.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to comment not only on the challenges your industry currently faces but also on the action that our Government is taking with industry and with mining communities to weather the current economic recession.

This collaborative approach will see us emerge from the current downturn to take advantage of the rebound.

Major Assets

As you know, mining is a mainstay of the Canadian economy and is vital to some 150 rural northern and Aboriginal communities across the country.

The industry directly employed over 363,000 people in 2007, and contributed $42 billion to Canada’s GDP from mining to downstream processing.

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Economic Club of Toronto

Toronto Ontario
January 9, 2009

Check against delivery

Thank you very much (emcee), and thanks very much to the Economic Club of Canada for the opportunity to speak here today.

Let me begin by saying what an honour and a privilege it is to serve as Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources.

I guess more people in these parts know me from my time at the Toronto Port Authority and left wondering how that meshes with my new role.

But I am also the daughter of a Cape Breton coal miner. So I understand, in a very personal way, what it means to live in a household that depends on our resource industries.

And, if anything, my time in the boardroom only further hammered home the point that so much of Canada’s trading economy still depends, in large part, on our resource industries. Something we see most clearly in how the Canadian dollar often tracks closely to commodity prices.

So I came into this job with an understanding of the importance of our resource industries to the people who work in them- as well as the impact they have on our economy as a whole.

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