Certainly, sir. Thank you for your flexibility.
I just want to add one point to the comments my colleague Mr. Wilson made about the economic impacts, direct and indirect, of Canada's exports of unprocessed or barely processed natural resources, or what's known in the literature as staple products.
There's long been a concern in Canadian economics about the structural relationships between export-oriented resource industries and the rest of the economy, including manufacturing, including other tradeable industries like services, and including the non-tradeable sector.
Both of our unions have important numbers of members whose jobs depend on resource industries, so of course resource industries are going to be a continued pillar of our prosperity. At the same time, our interest is in preserving the longevity of those jobs and extracting as much value-added opportunity in Canada as we can from them.
The goal of our research should be to better understand the interactions, the positive and negative implications, of staples exports. The goal of policy should be to enhance the net benefits of those.
I want to refer you to a study called The Bitumen Cliff, published earlier this year by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and available on their website. I'm one of the co-authors. It contains a detailed discussion in a modern context of some of the risks of staples dependence.
This is not a new problem for Canada. In fact, it shaped our economic history, the successive waves of staples development, export-oriented, each of which eventually petered out and left costs in its wake. The latest of those waves, obviously, is the bitumen industry.
We think there are vulnerabilities associated with an undue dependence on staples export and production. The environmental costs, of course, have been well debated. I'm more interested in the economic costs and the risks that we face resulting from changes in foreign demand, changes in technology that use the staple export, changes in the technology that produces the staple or substitutes to the staple, and the unintended consequences of a boom in staples exports on other sectors of the economy, or what I've called resource-driven deindustrialization.
The handout that's been given to the committee in both languages is an extract from this longer report about the economic evidence regarding resource-driven deindustrialization in Canada.
On the question before this committee about diversifying exports, more pipelines—I'm in concurrence with Mr. Wilson on that—will actually reinforce our dependence on unprocessed staple exports, with the resulting negative side effects, including the deindustrialization.
If we do want to diversify our economy using the resources as a successful stage for that, we should focus on adding more value upstream and downstream to the resources we extract and making our economy less reliant on volatile changes in global demand for staples.
That's where I think the second and third dimensions of your question, that is, how do we diversify the products that we're producing, and how do we diversify the energy supply base for our own industries, are more promising and where we would be in concurrence with Mr. Wilson's views about Line 9 and other options for extracting Canadian value from those resources.
Thank you for the extra time.