It's agreed that I'm going to start.
Good afternoon, everybody. I'm very pleased to be here with my colleague, Jim Stanford. I should say at the outset that our joint presence here is part of something new in the Canadian labour movement because our two unions, the CAW and the CEP, by Labour Day of this year will be a new Canadian union. It will be the largest private sector union in Canada when we come together. It will be a new union with a new name, and it will bring a lot that's new, hopefully to your tables as well, because we intend to be a stronger voice on Canadian industrial policy than either of us has been until now.
For those of you who don't know much about CEP, we are Canada's largest energy union. We represent over 35,000 workers in Canada's energy sector, in the upstream, in Fort McMurray, and in the Newfoundland offshore, on the platforms, and in the downstream in most Canadian refineries, gas plants, petrochemicals, and natural gas distribution.
I'm just going to make a few brief points about the subject at hand today, diversification. We are strongly for diversification, diversification of production and markets. The takeaway point that we have for the committee is we want to make the case that the current development model we're pursuing in Canada, we believe, is antithetical to those goals. In fact, our current development model is producing the opposite, increasing focus on a single product to a single market. The more export pipelines that we build, the worse that problem becomes.
I'm going to make three brief points before my colleague Jim takes over.
First of all, with regard to increasing dependence on a single product, bitumen, just as Mr. Cross said, we do import more crude oil, but we are not exporting refined products; we're exporting bitumen, fundamentally.
The basic facts are this. Since 2002 until today, oil sands production has increased by two and a half times, but the percentage that was upgraded or refined has declined from 60% to 47%.
Looking forward, most studies show, over 2025 to 2030, a further threefold increase in oil sands production, but the projection is for the percentage of that production to be upgraded in Canada to decline from our current 47% down to 35%.
The second point is that this focus on export pipelines to export various forms of bitumen blends, fundamentally to American markets, comes at the expense of diversified markets, and in the first place, our own Canadian marketplace. I'm sure there will be discussions about Line 9. We support Line 9 and can answer questions about that.
At this point I'd like the committee to take a reality check on diversification of markets even within Canada. The reality check is this. If Keystone XL is built, export pipeline capacity will exceed all new Canadian production until 2025.
Throw on Kinder Morgan or Gateway and we are going to be seriously overbuilt in terms of projected growth. I'm talking about caps figures...the most optimistic figures of increasing production to three million barrels and above.
This is at the expense of Canadian production. We've already lost two refineries in eastern Canada, most recently in 2010, in Montreal. Even more important, we're really missing the boat on jobs in Alberta itself.
I want to draw to the committee's attention the new study by Alberta's Industrial Heartland Association and Alberta Plus on the advantages of upgrading and diversification in Alberta. I've given you links to that. It's a very important study.
It's important for another reason. It uses the figure of 18,000 jobs that could be created in Alberta by upgrading and value-added processing of our resources.That, by no coincidence, is the same figure which CEP, our union, gave to the National Energy Board in 2006 when we opposed Keystone I. We put forward information by Informetrica that if that product were upgraded and refined in Canada, it would amount to 18,000 jobs.
My last point is with regard to our marketplace in the United States. The development model we have is utterly unsustainable. There is no way Canada will ever meet any climate target if we go to five million barrels a day from the oil sands. Our obsession with unsustainable growth and raw material exports is undermining our very market in the United States.
I'd ask the committee to reflect on this. Why is it that four years after our board approved Keystone XL in 2009, four years later, we still have an army of lobbyists in Washington trying to get this through? What is this about? Is this about dysfunctional American politics? Is this about our diplomatic failures? Or is it about our own deeply flawed regulatory process, which doesn't even take into account the very core issues that the Americans are dealing with, namely, the downstream greenhouse gas impacts in the United States and elsewhere?
We think there is a problem preventing diversification of markets. It's our problem, not others' problem, and it has to do with our regulatory process and with our policy framework.
With that, I'll turn it over to Jim.