Evidence of meeting #17 for Industry, Science and Technology in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was sector.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Joël Godin Conservative Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC
I'm talking about a standard, harmonized program in Canada.
Director, Policy, Innovation and Productivity, Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters
The programs can be standardized in Canada, but there still need to be regional eligibility differences.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Dan Ruimy
Thank you very much.
I was going to talk to Mr. Masse in French.
Mr. Masse, you have seven minutes.
NDP
Brian Masse NDP Windsor West, ON
We used to have un accent aigu off the end of the e, but I think they sold it during the Depression; I'm not sure what happened to it, but it's gone.
At any rate, thank you very much to our witnesses.
I'll start with Mr. Roberts.
I apologize for being late. I don't know if I've missed some of this and, if I have, I apologize.
With regard to the efforts toward making a green economy, what opportunities do you think there are? I see a lot of public support when we have a national strategy—and I'll get to the automotive aspect of that later—and a national vision to move to a certain sector. For example, I don't receive complaints from citizens who, for example, are working to make cleaner engines for cars or cleaner energy in general when they believe they can participate in that.
I'll ask Mr. Roberts, Mr. Wilson, and Mr. Lavoie, about that. What opportunities are really out there to harness that? I just see that we're missing some patent developments to the manufacturing floor that are really obvious. I'll leave it at that. You can spend as much time as you need, because I'll get another round.
This is something that is very important. How do we turn the national consent of the public to go in this direction into an opportunity to create jobs here in Canada?
National Director, Social and Economic Policy, Canadian Labour Congress
Thank you for that excellent question.
We firmly believe that there's no way that we're going to meet Canada's greenhouse gas reduction targets unless we have a concerted and ambitious program of expanding green economy activity. Manufacturing is going to play an important part in that.
The CLC, with the Green Economy Network, has developed a program for creating a million green jobs in Canada in the short run. This would be done through things like home and building retrofits, shifting to renewable energy, and creating a whole panoply of green service jobs that are required. There's a manufacturing piece to this that is very important as well. I touched on it briefly with respect to the importance of public transit and having the kind of manufacturing capacity to support the needs around a massive expansion of public transit.
As Mathew Wilson just mentioned, there's an important place for machinery and equipment manufacturing as well to support the expansion of green energy, zero emission, energy sources, and the like. Of course, there's an important skills dimension to all of this too, a skills training and a workforce development aspect to this that we firmly believe will require considerable expanded investment if we're going to hit the targets, which are very ambitious targets, by mid-century.
Senior Vice-President, Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters
Maybe I can just add on to the last piece, specifically on the emissions from industrial sectors in Canada. We've taken a look at Canada's historical emissions output and the performance of the manufacturing and industrial sectors in Canada as a whole. What you actually find is that as the performance improves, emissions from the sector go down. The reason is simple. Companies actually have more money to invest in new technologies. The newer the technologies they have, the more efficient they are and the cleaner they are. From our perspective, these aren't mutually opposite objectives.
As part of the manufacturing strategy, looking at it overall, we'll be making recommendations around that area, and we already have made recommendations. We would be happy to forward the economic analysis we've done to the committee for their consideration in terms of that specific link between industrial emissions and manufacturing growth. The two can go together if things are structured right.
The challenge you get into is how to help companies invest in the technologies. We have heard from companies about how this is hard to do. In our early discussions around Industrie2030, we heard from a company in Midland, for example, an auto parts manufacturer that was supplying Mercedes-Benz and some of the high-end European auto manufacturers. It was company that we talked about in Windsor when we saw you down there. They were talking about how hard it is for them to convince themselves to invest in new technology that's 15 years old just because it's more environmentally efficient, when it's going to cost them a few million dollars to do it, and they're already making such small profit margins. We need to help them make that investment decision easier so that they are more productive and at the same time their emissions go down.
So there are some positive linkages there, for sure.
NDP
Brian Masse NDP Windsor West, ON
I'll pose a theoretical example of where we might find some low-hanging fruit—and feel free to embarrass me in front of my colleagues. I look, for example, at an auto plant in Windsor, which was CAW at the time. It was able to create half a million dollars in annual savings by lowering electricity and cooling costs. That saved the plant. Then they had the competitive advantage of not moving the plant to Mexico.
When you mention, Mr. Roberts, the issue of windows, and then you look at doors, and so forth, I think there's again broad public support for that, because there's lot of local manufacturing involved when it comes to doors, windows, and supply and the workforce. If it goes into a building, then you just can't pick up that building and move it to China very easily. So you have, actually, some investment that's also going to be beneficial for the local workforce.
To Mr. Wilson's expression with regard to lowering industrial emissions, you would have some significant cost reductions for that. I look at the home renovation program that we had before. Unfortunately, it was used for some fences and decks and things like that. But would an incentive like that for the manufacturing sector for their hard-building infrastructure, their low-hanging fruit, to get something off the ground, to increase their capital capacity, be a good way to kick start some local business development? I guarantee that the product, unless it's harvested and sent somewhere else later on, is pretty well going to stay in Canada.
National Director, Social and Economic Policy, Canadian Labour Congress
Yes, we would just like to see integrated and coordinated efforts in that regard. Instead of just leaving it to the market, which could risk a tidal wave of imports, have some targeted strategy to develop the manufacturing to support that kind of retrofit.
NDP
Liberal
Marc Serré Liberal Nickel Belt, ON
Thank you for your presentations. Obviously, we have the report here that you talked about. I'll be focusing more on the manufacturing equipment side and the three industries, the third and fourth, fabrication of metal products and machinery. When we look at the manufacturing equipment and the green economy and innovation, we sometimes overlook the link back to the mining industry.
We talk about aerospace and auto, but when we look at the mining industry—with some 380,000 employees in Ontario alone—and the clusters and hubs you've been looking at, the 2,500 companies, we see that they are leading the world. We talked about bragging rights earlier, that we don't do enough. I've had first-hand experience with companies and people from all around the world coming to my hometown of Sudbury in northern Ontario, visiting the innovation that is happening there right now and the exports.
You mentioned FedDev earlier, and we also had an announcement on FedNor, northern Ontario, spending $2 million to help small private sector companies export their products worldwide.
What can we do, what can you do, to look at some of these challenges that are faced worldwide? A lot of our manufacturing is going to the U.S., but we need to export worldwide. I'm hearing that companies are struggling with language issues and regulatory information. There doesn't seem to be a central company or area to help these small companies export their products worldwide. I want you to expand on this.
Senior Vice-President, Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters
First, I don't come from Sudbury, but from a little bit northeast of there, and so I'm from a mining and forestry background, and I have also spent a lot of time in Alberta in the oil and gas sector. We certainly are very cognizant of the importance of the natural resource sector. We see the two sectors maybe going hand in hand. There's always this false dichotomy in the world talking about resources versus manufacturing. Manufacturing sells into resources and buys from resources, and to us they're all the same. The challenge that I think we've had in the resource sector, to be perfectly blunt, has been that we've developed a lot of really neat technologies and then we keep them at home.
Let's talk about Sudbury and the technology supply chain that Vale has created in Sudbury, for example. They have a world-class technology innovation centre. They fostered and created a whole bunch of really neat local companies, and the companies supply Vale in Sudbury.
I see this in Alberta in the oil sands, and the oil and gas services supply sector, and the manufacturers that work there. About 40% of the value of the oil sands and the investment in oil sands is in manufacturing technologies. A whole pile of great technologies created in Alberta to support oil and gas extraction have been exported to other parts of Canada, but they have stayed primarily in northern Alberta. Those companies that are working with the Imperial Oils, Suncors, you name it, are primarily selling those technologies to one location and one project.
It's great to blame governments for stuff, and I'm a big fan of doing that myself, but in this case more of this has to be in the private sector. Why aren't these companies recognizing that if you're working with a Vale in Sudbury, you could also be working with a Vale in South America or in Eastern Europe or Asia? Why, if we're working in oil and gas in northern Alberta, aren't we working in the North Sea?
We extract resources in some of the harshest conditions in the world. We develop technologies to do that. There's no reason why those technologies can't be exported through those larger value chains that those multinationals have. To me that's the starting point. How do we get those companies to use the supply chains that they are already a part of and export, whether it's to Vale or other mining companies in the case of Sudbury? What supports do they need? What access do they need to those markets? The opportunity is there. I think that the companies often don't think they should be doing those things. They think they should only be supplying locally.
Liberal
Marc Serré Liberal Nickel Belt, ON
On that point, I've had the opportunity to talk to several companies. There was the PDAC conference, the mining conference in Toronto. A lot of them are saying that they're trying to get their products worldwide, because the companies are coming over here, but they're feeling that they don't have the support. Small companies can't hire; they have to hire someone in that country for the regulatory issues, the language. How can we help those companies do that? What can Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters do to help them?
Senior Vice-President, Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters
We do a number of things. One, we provide direct business matching services through something inside CME, the Enterprise Canada Network, or ECN, which connects Canadian technology companies and manufacturers to foreign buyers of that technology. That's been a great success. We also do a lot of direct education programs. On a regular basis we will run technology or market opportunity reports where we'll bring in people from the trade commissioner service, for example, at EDC to talk about what companies need to know so that we can educate them a little bit more before they get there. Often for the small companies, it's not that the resources aren't there. Often the companies actually don't know where to go for the resources.
Maybe to your earlier point, we make things very complicated in Canada. We create, especially the federal government and the provincial governments, a whole bunch of unique silos, because everyone needs to have their piece of the pie. We need to make it a lot easier for companies to access those services and understand what they are. Instead of having to go to five or six government departments, there should be one central spot for some of that. I hope some of that's coming.
Liberal
Marc Serré Liberal Nickel Belt, ON
As a last question, you mentioned post-secondary and world-leading in terms of the universities and colleges we have here. What can we do to encourage our graduates from our universities or colleges to be working more to get the skill development needed to compete worldwide, to change the manufacturing? How we manufactured 20 years ago is not how we're manufacturing today.
I know I probably don't have much time.
National Director, Social and Economic Policy, Canadian Labour Congress
Well, the CLC and its affiliate unions, especially in the building trades, have a long-running initiative to encourage interest in the trades, which are very important for a lot of the manufacturing industries. We have especially identified groups that have historically been disadvantaged in the labour market—I'm thinking of first nations, indigenous groups, and women especially—as candidates for apprenticeship opportunities and career paths that lead them in that direction. But there also has to be support from industry, from employers, to sponsor these apprenticeships and ensure that they can continue to completion.
Conservative
Earl Dreeshen Conservative Red Deer—Mountain View, AB
Mr. Serré was speaking just a few minutes ago about the mining industry. Our natural resource extraction industry is so important, and we do have a worldwide reputation. I think sometimes we're too concerned about saying we're sorry for everything and not recognizing the fact that we're really centres of excellence in so many different areas.
Mr. Wilson, you were speaking about a fourth industrial revolution. Again, you also spoke about how important natural resources will be to that. Coming from Alberta, one of the issues I am thinking of right now is the 100,000 job losses that we have in our resource industry. However, there are some opportunities and some things that can be done.
One of your members, PSAC—the Petroleum Services Association of Canada, not the organization we normally associate with that acronym—has been looking towards getting well decommissioning done. Opportunities exist there. It is part of their commitment to make sure that they look after the wells they have that are no longer in service. I think one of the important things is to take a look at what that reclamation looks like. All you have to do is go up to Fort McMurray and you'll see what takes place there and how you have these lush forests that used to be pits. I think people would recognize how it can be done if it is done properly. I believe they made a submission to the finance department to ask for some assistance in this regard, because there are no extra dollars for the cash flow to be able to make some of these things take place. That's one issue in terms of a way in which we could perhaps help that industry.
If we look at the other side, it has to do with pipelines. You have the steel industry that is tied in, and all of these different groups. Whether it's the iron ore that is coming out of Quebec or it's the steel industry in southern Ontario or all of the jobs that are associated with the rest of the country, it's critical that we are able to make these types of moves in the future. We have a lot of people throwing sand in the gears in order to help themselves in certain issues. We do have OPEC oil that of course is coming into eastern Canada, and we're having difficulty selling western oil in the other direction. There is a lot of frustration. How do you expect companies to be able to invest when they don't see any future in that area?
My question, basically, is to ask if you could give me just a little bit more information on what you see and what you know from the Petroleum Services Association, what their plans are, and what they would like to see.
As well, perhaps, since it looks like I'm running out of time because I talk too much—
Conservative
Earl Dreeshen Conservative Red Deer—Mountain View, AB
Thanks.
I know they did make a budget submission. We could have an opportunity to look at that, if you could send it through the clerk, including the detailed decommissioning projects they're looking at, as well as an estimate of jobs that typical decommissioning projects would involve and the costs.
The other thing is that there was a discussion about industrial emissions versus industrial growth, and that was something that was asked earlier. I wonder if you could make a few comments on that in the minute or so that I have left you, and supply that to the clerk.