What I would like to say is that in Manitoba we have benefited significantly from the Alberta energy sector. We are experiencing significant impacts right now from the Alberta energy sector. This is a sector that has driven a lot of inward investment. It has driven investment in facilities in every other province. We have manufacturers here. We have truckers here who have done enormous volumes of business, and that has dropped off dramatically.
I'll give you a statistic I picked up while reading The Globe and Mail. They were interviewing the Premier of New Brunswick, who said that either 12% or 14% of the declared personal income in his province in the previous year was attributable to incomes earned in the oil fields in Alberta. We know that happens in every province, and it's significant. When that sector suffers in Alberta, then the country suffers and every provincial jurisdiction suffers.
As a business council we have met with various industry groups and sectors from Alberta coming across the country. We are supportive of infrastructure investments, and those include roads, highways, airports, and pipelines. We do believe you have to get commodities to market. We have members who have colleagues on the west coast who say, “We don't want a pipeline crossing here, it's bad, but we'd like to have more rail expanded capacity. We'll haul your lumber. We'll haul your coal. We'll haul your grain. We'll run it through our ports, but we don't want a pipeline.” To us, national infrastructure is national infrastructure. We have to do it on an environmentally conscious basis and everything else, but we believe we have to work together to provide greater market access for our products. That's part of the answer.
In terms of piling on, I talked about the collective impact of CPP and EI. Some provinces, Manitoba in particular, have a provincial payroll tax on top. That all compromises our competitive ability and it just squeezes and squeezes. My opening comment was that we're a trading province. We really are a trading province. We wouldn't have some of the companies here, such as Richardson International, if we weren't. It's a massive grain-trading company headquartered here. If they weren't trading internationally, then we wouldn't have the thousand employees in their head office here, and we wouldn't have the thousands of employees across the west. That goes for every other agricultural outfit.
There's a large hog industry here that trades internationally. When they get level after level, and requirement after requirement, it just compromises the industry. All we ask is to have a conversation between governments and stakeholders. Let's have a conversation between levels of government to make sure you're not overdoing it. That's part of the problem.