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.