I will do my best. Thank you for having me.
My name is Jamie Kirkpatrick. I'm with Blue Green Canada, and I'm joining you from Saskatoon and Treaty No. 6 territory.
My organization, Blue Green Canada, was founded in 2008, when Canada's prominent environmental and union organizations agreed that we can create good jobs, maintain good jobs and have a healthy environment across the country. We can be making and building renewable energy, using energy more efficiently, decarbonizing manufacturing and electrifying transportation. We can do that while protecting communities and involving workers in developing these technologies.
We're going to talk a lot about clean technologies and hear about the shiny details of those things. I've heard the previous witnesses speak about ways to reduce the CO2 per barrel of oil and improvements in nuclear technology, but I haven't seen anyone from workers' organizations, or anyone related to the actual doing of these things, present to this committee.
I would encourage the committee in future rounds, if possible, to make an effort to hear from workers who are in those sectors today, and those who will be making the transitions to using the clean technologies we're talking about.
The workers who are in the oil and gas sector now always hear about how important the sector is, but they see the job decline per barrel of oil. They see profits increasing, but not jobs increasing in their sector. Automation takes away those jobs, and that's clean technology in some cases.
Important considerations are needed for the workers of today, and the communities that they're in, through just transition programming and planning—