Industry Committee on May 16th, 2006

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

Fortunately, there is a great deal of interest in these issues. We could go on for another two hours, I am sure, but we're restricted by time. I know some of the witnesses have to go to catch flights, so could you respond to those questions as specifically and briefly as possible, and then provide any wrap-up comments you want to provide?

And if there is any further information you want to provide to the committee, please do so to myself or to the clerk, and we'll be happy to distribute it to the members.

[David Stewart-Patterson]

Let me try to deal briefly with Mr. Carrie's question with respect to labour mobility and what we can do to help people who may lose their jobs in one part of the country move to another part.

I think there are two paths to it. One is the enabling part, and that tends to be the interprovincial thing: is the tradesperson qualified, are their credentials recognized, do they have the ability to move to where the jobs are from where they happen to be right now? Second, is public policy doing anything to persuade people not to move? That gets us into the question of how income support programs, such as employment insurance, are designed. Are there disincentives built into things like employment insurance that should be looked at?

I don't want to take all of the time, but if I could just deal with the question Monsieur Crête asked me.... Again, I come back to our general approach, which is to say that when you've got a situation where large industries that are important to Canada are facing competition that is subsidized internationally, our first line of defence is the multilateral trading system and to try to do away with those subsidies in other countries. Given that that takes time, we also have to look in the short term at what does it take for Canada to stay in that business if we believe the business is competitive, all other things being equal, and makes a valuable contribution to our growth?

[Dr. Jayson Myers]

Let me do a quick round.

There is one program that you might want to consider, which is what could be done to offset some of the costs for people who are moving from central Canada to Alberta, and perhaps going back and forth, as people are doing right now, between Fort McMurray and Edmonton, on one hand, and St. John's on the other. It's pretty costly. It's a cost that people pay out of their own pocket, and it is not necessarily picked up by business. There may be some form of tax relief that you might consider there.

On the issue of the pharmaceutical industry, I think that's one area where speedier regulatory approvals could really have a major impact on the type of business that's being done here. I think the work Garth has mentioned, the user fee act that we worked on together with members of Parliament to pass.... The average time for pharmaceutical product approval over the past five years is something like 480 days. The regulating body committed at one point to make it 180 days, but it has been off that target for ages. The average in the United States is about 200 days.

I think the most egregious example of this was Singulair, a product where all of the R and D and clinical testing was done in Montreal. It's an anti-asthma therapeutic product. Though we did all the research, by the time it got to the market here, Canada was the 28th country in the world to approve it for use in our own market. The U.S. was number two; Sweden was number one. Why do we have to go through a separate regulatory approval system if we have 27 other countries that have approved it for their own market? Couldn't we have sped up the process? Over half of the time for product approval of that drug was not product approval time, but was waiting time in a queue for a regulator to look at it. So I think one thing we can do is to speed up that regulatory product approval process.

On the energy and the dollar side, I think the best thing associations like ours can do for our members, apart from advising you about some of the policy approaches you might take to offset some of the costs of the dollar, is to assist our members in managing it, either in hedging or investment strategies and product sourcing strategies, or in simply encouraging them to do business better, and to provide them with some of the services and support that enables them to get those productivity improvements we're seeing.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

Mr. Whyte.

[Garth Whyte]

We could talk about labour all day, but the shortage of tradespeople is a big issue in Ontario as well. We've talked about that.

I want to address what we are doing on the energy policy issue.

One, we use our economies of scale. We have 105,000 members. We've tried to leverage that to get lower prices for our members. We've looked at different ideas. We've done that in Alberta, of all places.

The other thing is we're trying to push the provinces to come up with a better long-term strategy for energy. How do we speed up the environmental approval process? It could take five to ten years. If we don't have enough capacity now, how are we going to make sure we have capacity five to ten years from now?

We're pushing that, and we're trying to understand it more. We're trying to call on experts to get in on this file, because we've got to get a better handle on it. Hopefully, we can come back and give you more information.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

Thank you very much to all of you for appearing before us to give your presentations and answer questions. We look forward to working with you on this study and seeing where it goes.

Thank you very much for coming.

The meeting is adjourned.