I don't know where to begin, Chair.
Thank you, witnesses.
I'm going to start with you, Mr. Labonté. I have a document that you didn't bother to offer, but I did introduce it to one of the previous witnesses. It's from NRCan. It's from your oil division annual survey of refiners. It's on your website. It says:
Refinery utilization rates close to 100 per cent, along with growth in demand for petroleum products, have created a need for significant additions to refinery capacity in Canada. Without investment in new refining capacity, supply interruptions could become more frequent and increasingly difficult to manage.
Due to the high demand for petroleum products in the Northeastern United States, refiners in Atlantic Canada export considerable volumes of petroleum products to that region.
You also seem to minimize, whether you've discounted this or not—I think it's rather significant for this committee—that it was written following the shutdown of the Bronte Petro-Canada refinery. You've also shown in your matrix here that the refinery in Montreal is regionally intensive and significant. Cast against the rest of the country, yes, when you have two million barrels being produced a day, that makes it, what, 6% or 7%? But when you put it in terms of the actual market, it turns out to be much higher than that, somewhere close to between 12% and 15%.
You also didn't take time to consider the fact that North Atlantic Refining sells zero gas throughout eastern Canada, except for its gas stations in Labrador and Newfoundland.
You failed to mention, although you know, that most of Irving's capacity of 300,000 barrels per day goes to the United States, thereby limiting and exposing Canada to a much wider prospect of competition or of product coming at a premium price from elsewhere.
Given that you don't have a weekly petroleum monitoring report, you have no idea of the inventory on a week-to-week basis. Given that NRCan provides some of that information to our American friends as to what the picture is here in Canada, how can you possibly conclude that there isn't a problem here?
To use your terms: “While rationalization has resulted in fewer refineries, domestic capacity has grown significantly--this is a worldwide trend that is expected to continue”.
It seems to me, sir, that what you've written in one and what you've written in the other are contradictory. Is it a lack of resources or just oversight?