Natural Resources Committee on April 13th, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for coming out. It's good to see so many people wearing pink today.

I see that we're joined by a special guest, Mr. Albas, today. Thank you for substituting.

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, BC]

My mother calls me special all the time.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Well, she called me and told me you were coming.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Truly, we have some special guests today. We're joined today by two groups, four individuals whom I want to thank for being here. Everybody should have in front of them two decks of material, one on behalf of CSA and one on behalf of CAPP. If you don't, we can get you copies.

I want to take a quick moment to introduce the individuals and thank them for coming. Mr. Ferguson is the vice-president, policy and performance, from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, which we know as CAPP. I'm sure Mr. Ferguson will go into more detail, but CAPP is a large industry organization that represents the upstream Canadian oil and natural gas industry. Their members produce 90% of Canada's natural gas and crude oil, with revenues of about $100 billion a year, if I have that correct.

After Mr. Ferguson, we will be pleased to hear from Kevin MacDougall, who is the director of energy and utilities; Mr. Michael Leering, who is the program manager, environment and climate change; and Jeffrey Walker, the program manager of natural resources, from the Canadian Standards Association. Gentlemen, thank you for coming.

The CSA group is traditionally known.... Certainly I associate you with things like hockey helmets and stoves, but we're going to learn today—most people should already know this—that the organization is much bigger and far reaching than that. Thank you very much for coming out today.

It's up to you who wants to go first, but I'm looking to my left, so maybe Mr. Ferguson would prefer to start.

[Alex Ferguson, Vice-President, Policy and Performance, Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers]

First of all, thank you very much for the opportunity to be here today. I have gone through a lot of the previous materials and presentations that you've had here, so I'm hoping not to rehash some of the good information that I saw in some of the materials that you've seen already, but hopefully to add a little bit of value to that and maybe additional insights from the upstream producer's perspective.

I do want to highlight that although we focus on the upstream as the sector that we represent, it's not just large producers, it's also very small producers, down to some of our member companies that would be in the order of drilling two or three wells in a year. It's quite a diverse perspective on what the industry is, where it wants to go, and where it thinks it can go. It does provide a good integrated view.

I thought I would start with some really new information. I sent some information in some slides previously. I don't know if they translated that perfectly, but I thought I would start with a few opening remarks about some of the late-breaking news this week that would add some perspective on the current situation and highlight some of the direction that we think our sector could be and should be going into the future.

This first highlight of note that I wish to bring up is the recent media release late last week on the capital investment plans for our sector for the coming year 2016. We do this on a regular basis. It's not a forecast. It is a compilation of all our members, their capital programs and budgets, and how collectively that impacts activities.

In that context, over the last seven or eight years, every dollar of income that our member companies have made has been directly put back into the ground in activities in Canada. On top of that, we have had over the last several years, a pretty significant inflow of capital from foreign sources into Canada to support the activity levels up to date.

It is a pretty significant number. It's hard to put into context for average Canadians, but it is a sector that permeates a lot of our other industries, a lot of our alliances, associations, and supplier networks. It's a pretty far-reaching integrated network based on the capital investment that our sector brings into Canada and puts into Canada. Unfortunately, we had to announce this week that we've seen a 62% drop in capital investment in our sector from 2014 levels. To tell you what that number looks like, it is approximately $50 billion of investment that has been lost out of the Canadian economy since 2014, projected to 2016. That is a pretty significant drop.

Another way to translate that is in terms of actual well-drilling activity, which is a good indicator outside of the oil sands of the kinds of activities that drive local employment, local opportunities, and government revenues. We're projecting right now for 2016, a total number of 3,500 wells drilled primarily in western Canada. To give you a perspective, in 2014, that number was a little over 10,000. There has been a pretty significant impact, not just on sources of government revenues, sources of community employment, but also on the service sector that's related and relies on the investments that we bring in.

Although we've seen this week a slight recovery in the price of oil, it's important to note that we haven't seen the lasting effects of some of the decline that we have seen in terms of impacts on the service sector. Our industry relies heavily on that service sector. By service sector, I mean broadly. It's not just the companies that contract drilling for us but it's individual companies, one-truck type of operations hauling water for a facility.

It could be completion crews, but also if you go more broadly into the supply network, there are—for example in Prince Edward Island—three companies that supply goods and services to the oil sands, and they are impacted today by that decline and that impact. Once we lose the service sector and we start seeing drilling crews go south to the U.S., it becomes very difficult to bring them back. We are at the point now where I think our anxiety level for the sector has translated into a concern for the integrity of that value chain in the service sector and what we can do today to support that the best we can, so when there is a recovery we are able to get Canadians back to work.

The other thing I would point out is that this week we have our annual joint CAPP and Scotiabank investment symposium for our sector. It's held in Toronto every year. It's very well attended. Among the highlights you will see from that is, if I can quote the headline from one of the more notable things coming out of that symposium, that “The era of megaprojects in Canada’s oil sands is probably over ”. What that means—and we've seen this for a while—is that the value opportunity for us for our sector, and for our resources in Canada, is going to shift and we're going to be looking at more of the unconventional resource-play type of opportunities. The investors are looking for more confidence and shorter return periods. They don't want to wait 15 years to see what kind of return they're going to get from their investment. We've seen this phenomenon in the U.S. as well, in terms of the shift to investment into resource plays where you can shut and turn off a well program a lot quicker than a $2-billion oil sands project.

Now the converse of that is also true. We haven't seen a decline in oil production at the same time as the decline in oil price simply because it's also hard to turn off those megaprojects. You know the capital has been invested, and it's two-thirds or three-quarters of its way through, so that project will continue. We are still going to see growth in oil production in Canada for some time; however, new megaprojects are probably going to be a lot more challenged going forward than they have been in the past.

Another point I would highlight is that tomorrow the Alberta government announces its budget. I'm aware we're going into the lock-up in Edmonton tomorrow. We are expecting to see some manifestation of the recent climate policy statements and commitments made in Alberta. Certainly it's not the only province that has made significant commitments to the climate agenda, but we think Alberta should be particularly proud about the leadership position it has stated. We're hoping to see some evidence around the carbon levy piece that it has announced, the oil sands emissions limit, and the performance standards, as well as the methane reduction commitments that we have made as a province, and provinces, as well as federally.

Certainly in my last points before I turn it over to my colleagues, I think one thing I do want to mention, certainly, is the recent activity around the federal government leadership on market access and pipelines for our sector. We have seen some growing and certainly this week some more activity in that area, more intent stated in that area, which I would say from our sector's perspective we welcome dearly. It is really the underpinning piece for our aspirations on the climate policy; for indigenous peoples and their role in going forward, which is a key trigger in the market access issues from our perspective; for the regulatory confidence that we're hoping to see continue to emerge and grow in this country; and of course for the political commitment to get Canada's natural resources to the right markets, at the right time, all the time.

I'll stop there, and there are plenty of answers that I hopefully can provide to questions that come up from any of the detailed materials we've provided, as well as previous presentations.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you, Mr. Ferguson.

I'll turn it over to you, gentlemen.

I see, Mr. MacDougall, your light is on. I assume that means you're going to be the spokesperson.

[Kevin MacDougall, Director, Energy and Utilities, Canadian Standards Association]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members, for inviting CSA here. As indicated, I'm a director with CSA and I have two of my colleagues here with me today.

We sent 70 slides in with the submission so we're not going to do that to you this afternoon. This is about discussion, and I'm not trying to put you to sleep with a PowerPoint presentation, but there are some key slides, and I'll go through them relatively quickly. Then I want to turn it over to Jeff and to Mike. They have some key messages they want to deliver as well.

The key points I want to focus on here in the information that was sent is what CSA is and how CSA standards support society and industry for the better good. Of course, if there are questions afterwards, we can respond.

We heard the hockey helmet and the refrigerator reference. We do much more than that when it comes to supporting industry and other initiatives. As I said, the information was sent through, and I'll focus on what CSA is and the standards development.

Here are some key facts about CSA. CSA was established in 1919, so we're coming up on our 100th birthday here. We're going to have a big cake and a celebration. The other key thing is that we have a presence in 14 countries. Saturday I returned from Taiwan. We had met with the Taiwanese government and industry officials, and they are adopting our standards for pipeline operations, so it's huge with regard to the recognition that we're seeing around the world and the adoption of the standards that have been developed by CSA.

Moving on to CSA standards, basically, we're a not-for-profit organization. We serve business, industry, government, and the consumer society. Our whole goal here and our vision is to make the world a better, safer, more sustainable place to be. We build our standards to that end to enhance public safety and health, quality of life, and to facilitate trade.

If I was to pick out one part of that to add on to Mr. Ferguson's information that he shared, it's that recently, and because we are not-for-profit, we have seen a vast decline in many areas of our operations in CSA. We produce training manuals and training classes on the standards. That has declined. The purchase of the publications have declined. Participation in our technical steering committees that come from industry, which I'll speak to in a minute, has declined, as has funding, which historically comes from industry and government sectors.

We're seeing a risk here to what CSA does. If the government wants to do right by Canada and it wants to fund the development of standards and programs to support industry, that's a key place that they could focus on. One of the organizations that is funded by the federal government is the NEB, the National Energy Board, which is key to many of the standards that CSA produces for the oil and gas industry.

Moving on, the slides show the breadth of where we operate and where we produce standards across the various programs: the electrical, the energy, the environment, and technical safety. It's not just focused strictly on the energy industry.

As for the standards development process, basically, CSA is a facilitator of an accredited process. We bring the experts to the table to develop the standards to put controls in place and run the industry safely and sufficiently. Those committees are composed of volunteers. They all volunteer their time and efforts and, of course, are funded by the companies they work for or by the programs that are funded by the government.

Slide nine shows a brief overview of the workload for standards development. The key thing to notice here is that there are three points in the process where standards in development are put out for public review. We have an opportunity for the public or for interested parties to actually submit a request for information or to provide any additions they want for the standards.

I want to touch on the part of the process that affects the energy industry in oil and gas. We also have a nuclear program, but I won't get into that today. I'll talk about the oil and gas program. It has been in existence for about 45 years. There are actually 20 committees that support the standards development process in the oil and gas industry, and about 400 members in 11 different areas are covered in the work that those committees do. That's found on slide 12, and those are all the green balloons, if you see them there.

On our goal in CSA moving forward, we opened an office in Calgary in 2014, and our goal there is to advance the development of standards in additional areas of the oil and gas industry. Currently, we deal with LPG—liquid petroleum gas—storage and handling and pipelines. We also want to get into the upstream industry on the refining side, into the gas processing side, and into the oil and well drilling and servicing piece as well. That's an area where we want to work with industry and the regulators to move forward and have more standards in place to support that side of the industry, sustain it going forward, and make it successful in Canada.

We see the technical committee and the formation of that now, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that. But on slide 14 you'll see that the two main standards in the oil and gas industry are supported by about 11 other standards. As we develop a standard, we start to develop more standards to support those various aspects of the industry to make sure the industry is safe and that we have regulatory and public confidence as we go forward.

We have a couple of slides there on security management and emergency management. Those are global. They aren't adopted just by the oil and gas industry. Many of our municipalities and cities have adopted these same standards for their emergency management processes and security processes.

Next, there are examples of some standards that are in development. The one on “fugitive emissions and venting” is a work in progress right now, as is the one on “well design”.

Moving into the piece away from standards development, CSA supports our standards with web applications and access. We have over 100 learning products that support the standards and about 10,000 customers who access our information annually.

On stakeholder engagement, we have about 9,000 members currently, and well over 40,000 people have actually come to our website in what we call our “community of interest”, which provides information to the public about what's going on within CSA, the various programs, and the status of those.

At that point, I'm going to stop. There is a ton of information that was sent to you. If you have any questions on it, of course we're prepared to answer.

I want to turn to Jeff first and let him give you a quick briefing on what he has going on.

[Jeffrey Walker, Program Manager, Natural Resources, Canadian Standards Association]

Thanks, Kevin.

In the near future I think we'll get to slides that are related to the natural resources program. In my group we're looking more on the unconventional oil and gas side. We also look at mining, which also relates to the oil sands, forestry, carbon capture and storage, and water resources.

I want to take a moment to talk about one of the standards we're working on. It's related to international standards. It's about innovation and how standards support innovation. It's on autonomous mining.

Autonomous mining is a new and emerging field. It's exciting. It's related to the application of information technology, advanced robotics, vehicles and equipment in the mining process. In relation to oil and gas we're talking about the oil sands mining side. It's a brand new initiative. In theory it's expected to have a significant impact on the oil sands because all this rapidly developing automation technology can improve the performance, the economics, and the safety of the operations.

With the standards, we're trying to help commercialize the field by providing for interoperability, common reference points, common interfaces, and fewer non-value-added differences that crop up whenever a new field is developing. All these different producers will develop their own things and they don't work together, so it can introduce inefficiencies and confusion.

We're trying to show that standards aren't just about mature areas. They're also about commercializing and mainstreaming new innovations. Often standards provide some of the building blocks that you need to commercialize and mainstream the new innovations.

When you see the slides in future you'll see a few more examples in carbon capture and storage, and offshore oil and gas, and northern, which is really the Arctic and offshore Newfoundland types of applications for oil and gas. Innovations are being made there, particularly where Canada is a leader, not only in international standards but also in these applications. It's a way of helping to give them a wider, more global market.

That's all I had to say. I'll hand it off to Mike now.

[Michael Leering, Program Manager, Environment and Climate Change, Canadian Standards Association]

Thank you. I just have about one more minute of context to add as the program manager for the environment and climate change group with CSA.

The information I want to bring forward today is that aside from standards development, we also have a large portfolio of programs and services that we offer that are supplemental to certification and testing.

I'd like to focus on climate change implementation and emissions within the province, present day and into the future. I think by and large the biggest program we do offer and manage is that, since 2007, we have operated the entire offset system within the province of Alberta. Under the specified gas emitters regulation, there are means by which the large emitters in Alberta can track and reduce their emissions under that regulation. CSA has been operating the entire offset registry system since 2007.

Obviously the federal government is now very actively engaged in the climate portfolio. As we move into the era of new regulations within Quebec, British Columbia, and Manitoba, I just want to bring to the table that CSA has a lot of experience and services that we've been working with the provinces on for about 10 years now.

You will be receiving further slides from the CSA group, I believe on Friday. In those slides, I have provided for you a pictorial representation of the Alberta offset system and what it looks like.

My key takeaway that I would like you to have is that public transparency, from a climate change reporting perspective, is of utmost importance. People in the public need to trust that offsets and the use of carbon market mechanisms are robust and secure.

Our registry and work with the Province of Alberta really speaks to that, in that all project documentation on any greenhouse gas initiatives are publicly available. If you're looking for the emissions savings or emission reductions and offset usage of any specific company, you can use our registry, and the public portals that are live and active today, to gain insights as to who's creating offsets, how they are creating them, who's verifying them, and what the verification reports say.

Public transparency is of utmost importance for us. I just wanted to bring that context to you today, aside from the standard development work that we do. We have a lot of robust programs that are very mature with all the provinces, and we're obviously very interested in supporting linkages, new regulations in Ontario, Quebec, B.C., Manitoba, and others.

I just wanted to provide that. There will be some supplemental information on Friday that you will be receiving from us. I appreciate the opportunity to provide that context for you today.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you very much all of you for your excellent presentations.

I am going to open the floor to questions now. The first person up is Mr. Denis Lemieux.

[Denis Lemieux, Liberal, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My thanks to the witnesses. I very much appreciated your testimony. I am very pleased that you are here today.

My questions are for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

Mr. Ferguson, according to the Canadian Fuels Association, Canada is an exporter of refined oil. Has the Canadian oil industry thought about increasing Canada's refining capacity to export refined oil outside North America, more specifically if a pipeline is built between western and eastern Canada?

[Alex Ferguson]

Thank you very much for the question.

The value-added piece for our product is pretty important for us. We don't represent the refineries and the upgraders necessarily. They are not really an upstream activity. However, we fully support any value-added employment opportunity in Canada.

It's a fact, for example, that all bitumen produced in Canada is upgraded somewhere, so the question for us collectively is where we would want that to occur. We would be happy, as the upstream producers, to see that happen here in Canada for the benefit of Canadians. I think of some of the activities we saw recently in Alberta, for example, where the government a little while ago announced a subsidy-type program or incentive program to promote more upgrading of that bitumen product in Alberta.

Also, when we've had conversations...for me personally, recently in Ontario, for example, around an oil product, an oil pipeline moving through a jurisdiction. If you look at it from a long-term perspective, that does create and should create opportunities for the petrochemical sector. Certainly, if you just take the refineries in eastern Canada, I think there's a pretty significant volume of oil that's brought in from outside of Canada from jurisdictions that, I'll be honest, have pretty significantly lower environmental and social standards than we have in Canada and that guide our activities here. We think there's an opportunity to replace this with a Canadian product.

That's just on the refineries in eastern Canada, but a longer-term vision might be to look at more oil flowing in and through a jurisdiction for the long term, with some stable supply pricing, which should trigger some thinking around what that might do to growth for a petrochemical sector. Sarnia row occurred for a specific reason. The oil was there. It didn't come after the petrochemical sector was there.

I think there's a lot of opportunity to do longer-range thinking on that and figure out if there's an optimal pathway to create the investment environment that would promote more value-added production on some of our core natural resources, oil and natural gas.

[Denis Lemieux, Liberal, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

Mr. Ferguson, in March, in response to a question from Senator McCoy on market access to Canadian oil, you said something before the Senate committee that really got my attention. For the sake of the members of the committee, allow me to quote you:

I make the comment several times that this is not just an oil issue. It is a natural gas issue. It is a lumber issue. Probably, if you talk to the mining people, it is a mining issue. If we believe that our natural resources in this country are and will continue to be an important part of our economy, we believe that there's a need to have a focused effort to find what it takes to get maximum flexibility for all of our natural resources to the right markets at the right time all the time.

In your view, how can the Canadian government help have a focused effort to find what it takes to get maximum flexibility for all of our natural resources to the right markets at the right time all the time?

[Alex Ferguson]

Thank you very much for a great comment and a great question.

For a long time—forever—our economy has been reliant on our natural resources. That is the strength we have in this country. You are right—it's not just oil or natural gas, but lumber, mining, etc. It's a foundation, and it always will be. If we honestly believe that, then I think the role of the federal government might be to focus on.... We have done a lot of work on the Canada energy strategy. I have been to several of those meetings, which are great, but what is our natural gas market access strategy? We have advocated for a very specific, focused effort on how to maximize the value of our natural resources. Having a focused strategy, having a federal government that will work with our provinces and, certainly, with our sectors, is an important part of that.

There are things we see that we can do, as an industry, as part of that. We can certainly facilitate and collaborate on the services with the value chain that we have. For example, I was just told today that building a couple of LNG plants in Canada would, just from that activity, require approximately half the production of the steel plant in Sault Ste. Marie. That's a pretty significant opportunity for the Canadian steel industry as a result of looking at market access for a natural gas product.

I think those kinds of alliances, as we build those out and come forward to our governments to explain the integrated nature of the value opportunity, are something we can do. I do believe we have a strong role to play in supporting governments, federal and provincial, and addressing the indigenous peoples' opportunities that we have in this country. We have a long history of doing that in our sector. I know other sectors have as well. We believe that's a fundamental aspect of the issues that are stopping us from getting on with the market access opportunities that we have for our natural resources, and we are committed to be quite supportive of governments as we seek to address those.

Those are two that I think we can fundamentally help change the dial on moving forward, and there are probably many others.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Barlow, go ahead.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank all of you for coming. You are giving us some phenomenal information, and I appreciate your taking the time to be here.

Alex, good to see you here as well. You talked about your report that came out last week regarding the decrease in investment in Alberta's oil sands. We are talking $60 billion over the last two years, a 62% decrease from 2014. Just to put that in perspective, that would be like losing half of our automotive industry. I don't think people understand that. If this were happening in southern Ontario, we might have a much different reaction Canada-wide.

We have seen oil go up past $40 here in the last couple of weeks, but that hasn't stemmed the loss of investment. Our job here in this study is to.... What can we do as parliamentarians to try to stem that tide? What would be your advice, as CAPP, for us? What can you see us do, and ask the minister to do, to start to rebuild that confidence and have these producers start investing in Alberta again?

[Alex Ferguson]

I think the first thing we talk about at our boardroom table with all the companies is that there is no one simple answer to this. There are probably hundreds and hundreds of things we collectively need to do, and I can give you some examples.

We're pleased to see some of the instruments in the federal budget that came out, and we're quite supportive of many of the elements in there. One of the things, a granular example I can give you, is that we've looked at this industry. I come from the forest sector, so I know the forestry world quite well. This industry has a fiscal treatment of the capital it expends that is different from many other sectors, certainly different than forestry.

You saw the shift I just suggested that some of our members are seeing around the shift from big projects to these resource-play unconventional opportunities they are supporting in terms of the standards, development, and processes. Yet our understanding...our tax rules, for example, on the way we treat capital expenses in this industry were developed long before the existing technologies led to the growth and the opportunities in the unconventional resource sector.

We have suggested to the Minister of Finance that we're not supposing we have the magic answer, but we believe—given the fundamental, dramatic changes in the technology that have unlocked this resource opportunity—that we should probably modernize and give a view to our tax treatment rules around that as a result of those changes. That's a granular thing, but if thought through carefully would have amazing impacts on the amount of investment that goes into the ground to employ people in Canada.

That's one and that's a very small, very granular, but a very profound way of looking at the changing world we're in, and there are many others.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

We can talk more on that. I only have a limited amount of time and I appreciate that, but I wanted to speak to Kevin and Jeffrey.

I was happy to see that you talked about Canada as a leader in the standards in terms of innovation and technology. I had an opportunity a couple of times last year to meet with representatives from the Chinese Petroleum Corporation and talk about the Canadians that are going over to Taiwan. I think, Kevin, you might have touched on it as well, to talk to them about how to build pipelines.

We are a global leader in terms of our standards, and we've heard the government talking about how we want to have a new review process and new ways of talking about standards and evaluating energies. We're talking about a new review process there—I'm not saying we can't always be better—but if we're already a global leader, and our standards are among the best in the world, what are we missing? What are we having to add in terms of another layer? Is this unnecessary, or are we to be the best? Why are we adding additional layers of review and consultation when we already seem to be the best in the world at this?

[Kevin MacDougall]

I'll provide some insight into that. Our standards are the best in the world in our mind. Yes, I was in Taiwan to meet with the officials from CPC, the Chinese Petroleum Corporation. We're going back in July. They do want to adopt the standards for their oil and gas operations. It starts with the pipeline, and it'll carry on from there.

What else do we have to do? Why do we have to go through all of these review processes to advance projects for pipelines? A month ago, I sat on—

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

Sorry, Kevin, I'll word this better. What can we do differently, I guess, than we're doing now that may help us get that confidence of Canadians in government that we can be building these pipelines or should be building these pipelines? Does that give you—

[Kevin MacDougall]

Yes.

I participated in the hearing in Quebec recently as part of their review process. I took away from that public hearing in Quebec the obvious lack of understanding and information in the public and outside of the industry sectors.

Members of the public, and especially the first nations indigenous peoples, don't understand what scrutiny is applied to these types of projects and to these pipelines. It takes a lot of effort to move forward and advance these projects. Our focus at CSA is to try to engage these people on our technical committees, make them part of the technical steering committees, and bring them to the table. As well we're trying to bring the public to the table so they get some information early on in the game so they understand what it is we're trying to do as an industry and what we're trying to do as a country. That will make our life a whole lot easier from my perspective.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

That's right on the seven minutes, so thank you. You guys work well together.

Mr. Cannings, it's over to you.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Thank you, and again, thank you, all, for coming here this afternoon.

I'd like to ask Mr. Ferguson a couple of questions.

In November 2015, you were quoted in a Vice News story about Canada's ability to market its oil internationally, and this is the quote, “I think it should add impetus for our governments—plural—to get on with our reputational piece”.

I just wanted you to comment on what you feel about the oil and gas sector. We've heard from COSIA and the wonderful things they're doing in making our oil and gas sector cleaner and all that. I just wondered if you could comment on how important you thought that was for marketing our oil, and perhaps on other ways or issues that we could tackle, other than what COSIA is doing, to get there.