Thank you, Chair, and thank you to our witnesses for coming.
My riding is Medicine Hat. Many of you may have actually heard about Rudyard Kipling and what he said about Medicine Hat, that it has “all hell for a basement”, meaning plenty of natural gas, a lot of shallow gas. That has been an important aspect for the community and surrounding communities.
From that there were a number of facilities built such as Canadian Fertilizers, which produces obviously fertilizers, ammonia, and urea. There is a company called Methanex, which produces methanol, and another company, Cancarb, which produces carbon black. All of this is from natural gas. I actually worked for one of those companies so I've had a lot of information regarding them.
In terms of employment, it's huge. Canadian Fertilizers probably has somewhere in the neighbourhood of 250. Methanex has about 100, and carbon black about another 75. Then if you do the offshoot on those things—I'm not sure which numbers are out there these days, I've heard anywhere from two to five but—that's huge in terms of employment in a community of 60,000 people. It's a lot of major jobs.
That happens with the manufacturing equipment they buy from other provinces, steam vessels, and so on and so forth, columns, valves, and pipes, and so on, as well as a lot of local investment in terms of supplies for the operations of those facilities. That doesn't even touch on the oil and gas part of the business around Medicine Hat, so oil and gas is a really important piece not only to our community but obviously to the country.
I'm wondering if you have anything that would indicate what the impact of these offshoot organizations, which are not directly involved in the development of oil and gas but actually purchase those supplies, are across the country?