Foreign Affairs committee  The crude oil market is a world market, but the refined product market is largely a North American one. It is extremely expensive to have inactive capacity that you can just turn up. It's not like electricity; you don't have to meet peak demands at times. So you have a lot of exc

Foreign Affairs committee  I think you mean energy sustainability in Canada in the sense of continuous supplies being available.

Foreign Affairs committee  First of all, it's very different for electricity, natural gas, and oil. As we found out in August 2003, the grid is very much interconnected. When things go wrong, things go wrong. It's very hard to fix. It could easily be systemic and create a lot of problems. The natural ga

Foreign Affairs committee  In terms of simply energy, I'm going to talk about Canada-U.S. energy relations, not about environment aspects, which I'll come to later on. In terms of Canada-U.S. energy relations, we've done a lot of market liberation over the last 25 years, and in some sense, it has resulte

Foreign Affairs committee  It's clear that a problem Canadian utilities or Canadian owners of transmission facilities have shared with U.S. owners of transmission facilities has been an under-investment in transmission for quite some time in both countries. Some of this is for regulatory reasons; the shift

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you. Whether we use a cap and trade system or any other type of economic instrument—either putting in a charge, a levy, a tax, or a cap and trade, or whatever you want to do—basically what it does is distribute the risk differently. So with a cap and trade system, if you d

Foreign Affairs committee  Since my ancestors were originally from Rivière-Ouelle, it is possible that my namesake is related to me. As regards lost ground, we can take an optimistic view of the next few years. U.S. policy will evolve differently and Canadian reaction to the potential outcome of the clima

Foreign Affairs committee  I believe it is possible that Canadians may be overtaken by energy and environmental policy developments in the United States. That's clearly a danger that has been around for some time. We're seeing a different rhetoric and approach to these aspects of relations between Canada a

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much. Maybe the fact that I'm from New Brunswick will balance the presentation. Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen members of the committee, I want to thank you for your invitation to speak to you today. President Obama's arrival in the White House marks a change