Wilkinson said the mining and processing of critical minerals was currently too dominated by China.
“(We’re) looking at how do we optimize the regulatory and permanent processes so you can take what is a 12 to 15-year process and bring it down to maybe five,” he said.
“There are ways you can just do things smarter … There’s no reason that you can’t do permitting of different things between federal and provincial governments at the same time, instead of doing them sequentially.”
Canada plans to reduce the time to approve mining permits by better funding the regulatory agency to get rid of paperwork backlogs and running permitting and environmental assessment processes at the same time.
The country will have to continue importing cobalt, Wilkinson said, due to its limited resources of the metal. China controls most of the world’s refined cobalt and rare earths supplies.
To cover costs, Canada is putting in place…
