I appreciate that.

Thank you so much for the introduction and for being here with me.

You

know, some people have special days of the year. Well, this is better than Christmas

as far as I'm concerned to be amongst my friends here and people who are interested in LTA

or airships in general.

I've been looking at this for a very long time and it's partly

or mainly because we have a significant need in Canada for this technology.

So I'm going

to talk to you today about the idea of mining critical minerals.

We have this little emblem

of Canada and what you can see are 31 or 32 so-called critical minerals and these are

the critical minerals that are needed for our modern technology and things we're doing

and in particular some of our newer technologies

very high quality batteries and of course

magnets for use in electrical emissions and we need rare earths for those.

A little statistic

that came up just this past week or so

what do you think is Canada's number one export

last year?

You'll never guess it.

Gold.

Gold.

Well, at $3,800 US per ounce, it adds up pretty

quickly so suddenly this became one of our major exports.

I don't know if it's number

one but it's in the top three at least and much more than we had before so it's one of

those critical minerals.

This next slide gives you some idea.

I hope I've got this right.

Yes, it was changed.

These are sort of the values of minerals and this came from Bill

Mercer a few years ago.

He put this together and what you can see is that on the side at

gold

it has $100

000 in this diagram

it was $10

000 for 40% concentrate

now it's

So with those kind of dollars

you can certainly afford to spend more money on retrieving these

products from remote areas but certainly copper as well has more than tripled in price so

a lot of these critical minerals are going up and of course we have this great desire

in Canada to take advantage of that.

This is a map from our government pointing out

where we have deposits.

What you'll notice in this is that most of these dots are in

the southern part of Canada.

That's because that's where the infrastructure is.