Energy and Mines Minister Stephen Lecce addressed a gathering in Thunder Bay on Thursday during the Central Canada Resource Expo at the Projects in the Pipeline conference, minutes after a provincial cabinet shuffle.
“I feel like I won the lottery because I’m remaining the minister of energy and mines in this province,” Lecce said. “And we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
When the minister last visited Thunder Bay last year, he said he came with a bias of action and a sense of urgency in his voice.
“Today it is quite obvious that we are up against the threat of our lives,” he said, adding that within the last generation, there has never been a more real existential challenge to the world order and to the prosperity of Canadians.
“At this moment, when the country is under vigorous attack, the only solution, the greatest defence against (U.S. President Donald Trump’s) tariffs and insanity, is an offensive play when it comes to our resource sector, to unleash the bounty of wealth sustainably, doing it ethically, maintaining rigour in the environmental and labour protections and ensuring, of course, Indigenous participation, consultation, and collaboration.
“When I became minister of mines, I committed to you that we would upend that norm. We would be a challenge function to the status quo. We would simply make the case that we are not going to allow ourselves to be among the slowest on Earth.”
With Trump launching unprecedented attacks against the province, Lecce says it is totally unacceptable to suggest the only pathway forward is not a radical upending of the regulatory systems that we can get to faster.
“So we brought forth a bill that allowed us to change the way we interface with investors, with communities, with mining companies, with First Nations, with local communities, because we knew the system wasn’t working well for Canada,” he said, during his talk at the Elks Lodge.
“We cut the overall red tape or time to permit a mine by roughly half. We introduced a new authority called One Project One Process, which became the inspiration for the national governments to emulate it, and for virtually every other Western resource economy to take that as the case study to scale.”
He said what it did was bring forth a centralized system where companies work with one permit lead in the government of Ontario.
“No longer are you expected to speak to seven ministries, 15 public servants, and 13 ministers,” he said.
“We’re actually bringing forth some sense of synergization to the Ministry of Energy and Mines, where we take leadership on behalf of your permit, ushering it through the province, through the ministry, through the enterprise of government to get it done.”
Lecce says that gives Ontario a competitive advantage over the Americans and over other competitors.
