BCBusiness

22 B C B U S I N E S S . C A J U LY/A U G U S T 2 0 24 B.C. obviously has regulations here that are tight, but it also has so many companies that mine overseas and you sometimes hear about negative things that are happening there. Is that part of what is influencing people? I think one of the things for any industry or endeavour is that once something hap- pens that might be far removed, or mis- characterized, it paints everything with that whole brush. That's a wrong way to look at things. The overwhelming majority of our members, especially the junior min- ers and the prospectors, are doing it right and they've been doing it right for a long time. They don't have huge budgets. When I talk to them and they say, "I'm doing this right, but people are saying I'm dirty or doing it wrong," that's unfortunate. We in B.C. and Canada should be proud that we have an amazing mining and mineral exploration industry. How much does the climate transition play into this? The industry doesn't necessarily lend itself to climate change. What is it doing to move forward in that area? Well, sustainable practices are essential in mineral exploration and mining. The key thing we've seen here is a respect and desire to look at it and encompass, for example, Indigenous knowledge and tradi- tions with respect to environmental, water and stewardship and also looking at how that works with moving a project forward— how do you balance both? If we want a low- carbon future and want things like lithium batteries, where are we going to get them? It's wonderful that the federal government invested a bunch of money into a battery plant, and that the provincial government invested money into critical mineral strat- egy. Now the question is: are we good to go explore for those things? We have the best practices, we can get those minerals into those plants. Solar panels, EV batteries, gold needed for the proper conductors— we have all of that here and the amazing environmental regulatory and consultation judicial principles or administrative law principles or constitutional law principles, investors look at that. And I think the hard conversations we've been having with gov- ernment are intended to say, look, there's a clear desire to have these different types of code development or consensus-based structures. But we have to do it right. No matter how self-righteous your cause may be, it doesn't justify circumventing key legal and governance principles; it's the ends and means type of thing. We can and should be a critical mineral and energy leader, and AME has developed strong partnerships with Western allies who are looking to Canada to be that. Many might consider mining to be an old boys' network. Before you, for instance, AME has only ever had white presidents and CEOs, most of them men. Have you experienced any racism or discrimination in the industry? I personally have not. The only questions I've been asked have been, "Okay, we've seen you have done work for the govern- ment and First Nations. Are you here to pro- mote the well-being of the industry?" And my clear response has been that I want to advance our natural resource economy and do it in a way that encompasses competi- tiveness and economic advantages and that takes into account reconciliation and envi- ronmentally sustainable paths. We're all in this together. I feel so proud to be the first visible minority CEO of AME and being here on my merits, and I think the membership sees that and sees me putting in the work. I'm truly seeing in a positive way what that amazing fabric of B.C. and Canada is. You have so many people who are from Punjabi backgrounds, Asian backgrounds, LGBTQ communities, women in mining—the min- ing family isn't just if you've gone up on a site for two weeks, it's all of us who have been around this industry. And that diver- sity of faces doesn't mean "different"—it's collaborative. This interview has been edited and condensed. " I feel so proud to be the first visible minority CEO of AME and being here on my merits, and I think the membership sees that and sees me putting in the work." regime and using the DRIPA [Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act] principles to inform some of those items. There's absolutely a strong focus on envi- ronmental sustainability, and investors around the world see that. We have to do a better job of championing that, but also we can't reinvent the wheel in terms of us already being one of the top places to do it. Do you think we're the global capital of mining? We can be, absolutely. But the more we oversaturate our regulatory regime with ambiguous, not well-defined law that tries to substitute already amazing law, inves- tors look at it like, "What's going on there? Is there a method to all of this?" When you see laws coming out that circumvent

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