Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for being here today.
I'll start with Mr. Stanford. I'm an avid reader of The Progressive Economics Forum. I'm very intrigued by one of your papers that came out less than a year ago, called “Energy McCarthyism”. Some of your paper is very interesting. It reads:
Opposing a bitumen-exporting pipeline in Canada these days makes you a foreign-financed subversive. And it seems that questioning the economic effects of the bitumen export strategy makes you equally seditious. I call this “energy McCarthyism,” and it should be rejected forcefully not just by those concerned with Canada’s deindustrialization and staples dependency, but by those worried about the quality of our democracy.
I think that's very important, and it leads to a very important graph that we should get your feedback on. The graph shows that in the last decade, Canadian petroleum exports grew by close to two percentage points of GDP, which is fairly impressive. But Canada's exports of everything else—manufacturing, services, tourism, the things that we're talking about, value-added—declined by several times as much. As you outline here, the two offsetting trends are not unrelated. You say:
No wonder Canada is mired in a large, chronic international payments deficit, even as we scrape the stuff out of the ground faster than ever.
Can you elaborate a little more on the decline by several times as much by the manufacturing, services, and tourism sectors, and would you be able to provide this graph and more information on that to this committee?