Thank you very much.
My name is Joyce Carter and I am chair of the Halifax Gateway Council. As well, I am chief financial officer and chief strategy officer with Halifax International Airport Authority.
With me today is my colleague Nancy Phillips. She'll probably introduce herself more appropriately, but she is executive director with the Halifax Gateway Council.
Thank you so much for the opportunity to appear before you today.
You may be wondering what the Halifax Gateway Council is, so I will give you a little bit of background on who we are, what we do, and why we're here.
The Halifax Gateway Council was created in 2004. It comprises private sector stakeholders and government. We work very collaboratively in the market and we market the Halifax gateway with the objective of improving competitiveness in the region.
The vision of the Halifax gateway is to be the preferred eastern gateway for North America for the economic and social benefit of all of Canada. Our members are from all four modes of transportation, rail, road, air, and sea. We currently have members from three of the four provinces in Atlantic Canada. The current members include the Halifax Port Authority, the Halifax Stanfield International Airport, CN Rail, Oceanex, Armour Transportation Systems, and others.
Also included in the Halifax Gateway Council are all three levels of government, so there is municipal, provincial, and federal representation.
The total direct and indirect economic impact of the gateway to the province of Nova Scotia is $3.7 billion annually. We employ over 23,000 full-time employees, and on an annual basis we contribute $1 billion in salaries and wages.
The Halifax Gateway Council supports Canada's national trade policy, and that's why we're here today. Trade and transportation are very closely linked, and international trade involves the cross-border movement of both goods and services, which is very important to our members.
As you know well, transportation makes trade possible and is in itself a major component of trade and services. Trade liberalization and the reduction or elimination of barriers to trade are priorities for Canada and its major trading partners and are also priorities for the Halifax Gateway Council.
You may ask why the work of the Halifax Gateway Council is so important to our community. We speak with one voice. We set priorities together as a community. Having our council makes it very easy for government to interact with us and to interact with each other, and for companies that are looking to do business in our region, we're really one-stop shopping.
You may ask why I volunteer my time—because it is a volunteer position—and why the Halifax Stanfield International Airport volunteers its contributions to the Halifax Gateway Council. We see the investment of time and dollars as being of commercial value to us. It's a way for us to increase business in the region, and it means we get a return on the significant infrastructure investment we have at the airport.
You wouldn't be aware, but your visit here in Halifax is quite timely. The Halifax Gateway Council recently completed a trade mission to Europe. The collective group of Gateway Council members visited Brussels, Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Dusseldorf just a few weeks ago. We highlighted to the audiences in those cities the early benefits of CETA and as well of the $115 billion megaproject activity that's happening in Atlantic Canada.
It's very important to us, and we realize that the next two to three years, as the agreement is being finalized, will allow time to put a collective action plan together to market the benefits together for the benefit of Canada's trade policy. We heard that loud and clear when we were in Europe.
The Halifax Gateway Council members have invested significantly in our infrastructure over the past several years, and in many cases we currently have the capacity to deal with increased trade from both the megaprojects and CETA.
However, again as we heard when we were in Europe, it is imperative that the Government of Canada create some sort of marketing fund such that organizations like the Halifax Gateway Council can support collective messaging on CETA in Europe. We're really a non-profit organization, so it's very difficult for us other than through the support of our own pockets to market this message, which we were able to do just recently.
I would now like to ask Nancy Phillips, who is the executive director as I mentioned earlier, to speak a little bit more about some of the priorities of the gateway.