Thank you very much.
It's wonderful to be here with you this afternoon. I'm sorry that I couldn't be there in person, but it's a pleasure to appear before you and share some of the views of the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association on your diversification study.
The pipeline industry, which CEPA represents, serves Canadians by safely transporting about 97% of all of our oil and natural gas produced and used in Canada. These members are essentially like energy highways that are moving across the country. We currently operate over 100,000 kilometres of transmission pipelines, which involves transporting 3.2 million barrels of oil and 14.6 billion cubic feet of gas every day.
We employ over 8,000 full-time employees among our companies, but of course that is a very trivial number compared to the many hundreds of thousands of jobs that are enabled by having energy move across the country.
We are an integral part of a reliable energy system that enables the quality of life Canadians enjoy and ties our country together. It provides services on a daily basis from heating our homes, fuelling our vehicles, and powering our manufacturing, etc.
Obviously, we make an important contribution that is very much central to the question of diversification of supply and enabling the Canadian economy to grow and meet its needs. We have investment plans, over $20 billion worth of projects of national significance, which enable other much larger investments affiliated with the energy value chain.
All told, today you've already heard a little bit about the tension between internal and export markets. We don't see it at all as an either-or proposition. Fully one-quarter of Canada's mercantile trade value today moves by pipeline, so that's $1 in $4 new dollars in our jeans, if you will, coming from that energy trade enabled by pipelines.
At the same time, of course, this has become an industry that's very much in the public eye. There are very high profile, very helpful, and important energy-environment-economy debates under way. We've been out of sight, out of mind, for over 60 years and are happy to be able to step up and communicate more fully.
But our first accountability, of course, is our own safety performance. That is our number one duty to Canadians. We welcome the scrutiny and are moving forward on a number of safety measures that go well beyond compliance with regulation, and we are increasing our transparency. I invite anyone to look at our about pipelines.com website for more information.
But let me move now more specifically to the question at hand with respect to market diversification. Pipelines today are the backbone of energy transport across the country. Over 60 years of practice and growth have us touching virtually every kind of terrain you can imagine across this great country.
The developments have been both market-led and in the public interest in every case, beginning in the late forties with a connection from Edmonton to the Lower Mainland in the Trans Mountain pipeline, providing citizens in that important region of Canada with the fuel they needed to get around every day. The Westcoast pipeline connection for natural gas was around the same time.
Of course, the Enbridge system developed in a way that went south of the Great Lakes, and then back up into Sarnia, taking advantage of a variety of other interconnects, enhancing our energy supply in Canada through those interconnects.
The original mainland TransCanada pipeline of course created the pipeline debate of the 1950s, which led to some profound and important Canadian decisions. Indeed, we look to major pipeline and infrastructure development by using private capital in a well and thoroughly regulated manner. In the case of that natural gas connection, it was preferred to see that on Canadian territory.
One other example of Canadian public policy that led to pipelines is the one that's already been mentioned today, that being Line 9. Let us not forget the history of that line being built in the 1970s at the behest of the federal government, in the wake of oil embargos and very legitimate concerns about energy security. The federal government approached a major pipeline company—in that day, Interprovincial, and now Enbridge—to say, could you please build a connection to Montreal. It operated as such for 20 years, then was later reversed when it was recognized at that time that energy security on a global active trading market was really not as much of an issue as more flexible interconnects was.
Those flexible interconnects and a market-based approach have again led to the very logical conclusion that when you have increasing oil supply in Canada and lower pricing, a very effective and smart choice would be to go back to the original intention for Line 9, which was to have it flow from west to east.
There are a couple other examples of regional interconnects. The Norman Wells Pipeline, halfway up the Mackenzie Valley, has been there since the mid-eighties. The Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline has been approved. Unfortunately market conditions right now are making that a soft proposal, but the future could see that occur. Of course, there are also the Sable Island connections through the Maritimes and the northeast.
In conclusion, I just want to point out that the pipeline industry has been, is, and will continue to be able to connect any region in Canada safely using world-class standards, evidence-based assessments, and full life-cycle regulation, which has been very tried and true over decades in meeting Canadian needs. We can change service; we can expand existing systems; we can build new linkages. We are a metre under the ground, running 24/7, and are clearly an important part of the fabric of Canada. We continue to be here to meet evolving needs as energy supply and diversification continue to be hallmarks of this country's nation-building.
Thank you.