Natural Resources Committee on May 22nd, 2018

[Prof. Pierre-Olivier Pineau]

Yes, we should collect. It is sometimes collected by the firms. They will know what they're using and what they're leaving, but we don't collect that. If you want to start a new product, for instance, if you want to produce wood pellets, what would be your resource you can access and the transportation costs? With biomass and wood products, the big problem is cost because it's produced somewhere and you need to relocate the resource where it's useful. There are costs.

If we had access to more trains, transportation would be easier. It's all the data to—basically, we need to know the system and, at this point, we don't know the whole system. It's incomplete. There are holes in what we know and what we don't know. That's for the first part.

Regarding incoherence, I just think that it's that too few people pay attention to these issues. They don't call Statistics Canada and complain. I did complain. I will send you the three or four pages of problems I listed to Greg Peterson, who you actually received as a witness a few weeks ago. Greg Peterson is a great person. He thanked me for providing him with the list of issues.

We may have been the only ones who have really complained about this. We need more users to complain and I'm glad you have this committee and you are raising this issue because I think it's key for the future of Canada to have a better energy dataset. If it's incoherent, it's because someone didn't double-check things and didn't connect the dots. If you have two numbers that don't match, you need someone to work it out and find a solution as to why the data isn't the same. Someone has to scratch his head and find ways to have coherent data.

[Mary Ng, Liberal, Markham—Thornhill, ON]

Thank you.

I think my time is up.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

You have two minutes.

[Mary Ng, Liberal, Markham—Thornhill, ON]

That's good.

I think that there is an opportunity for the committee to look at best practices and where this actually might be done well elsewhere. You certainly talked about Sweden and Switzerland. We did hear from the EIA a couple of weeks ago. That's great.

This is your field of research. You spend a lot of time on this and your students do as well. What advice would you give the committee, as we're looking at what a national data strategy would be, around looking at those systems that are good already? What could we do because we may have an opportunity, at this juncture, to have a data system that could be world leading?

[Prof. Pierre-Olivier Pineau]

I think the key issue is to have a long-term commitment. It cannot be just a two-year fix where the government says, “Okay, we'll give you $10 million or $15 million to fix the problem”, and it will be fixed. It has to be a long-term commitment in energy data structure, so that when the investment's made we know it's for good and it's not political. It's not because it's the Liberals or the Conservatives or the NDP that want the data. We need to make sure it's there for good and we have strong institutions and independent statistics. It is there for everyone and is rigorous about the way it collects data.

You need users. You need the data, and you need the users. Again, we need to make sure that the government is actually funding research, and not only technical research, because there's a lot of data for innovation in new techniques for energy. There is very little funding for energy research in terms of how we use it, energy economics, and that's a funding priority. I think there should be users everywhere across Canada, and again, with a strong commitment from the government to fund that research not on a yearly basis but on a long-term basis. Of course, it's required by the government to use the output of the research, to be informed, and to inform its policies with the research. Otherwise, if governments make decisions that are not based on research and evidence, then of course.... Sometimes it may be good for political reasons, because you have a good pitch to make, but for the confidence in the system, confidence in the data, confidence in government, trust in government, we need to have a population that actually trusts the government to make the best decision based on the best analysis of the best data.

It's a whole stream of issues. It's not the energy data. It's also the users. We need an energy data user community that is strong, and as I said, I'm one of the few in business schools who are doing this, looking at energy economies. You received David Layzell from Calgary, but there aren't many professors doing energy economics and looking at how we manage energy issues across Canada, and that's a shame when we are such a big energy superpower.

[Mary Ng, Liberal, Markham—Thornhill, ON]

Thank you, Professor.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thanks, Ms. Ng.

Mr. Falk tells me they don't have any more questions, so that would take us back over here if anybody has questions. We have 10 minutes left.

Nick, you can have five minutes.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

Earlier in your remarks, Professor, you mentioned that the amount of natural gas that was available to be sold was less than the amount that was declared to have been purchased. I'm wondering if you could speak a bit about how this works. Is this like pump fraud, or...? What types of efficiencies can be gained by having an independent data analysis to reconcile these types of poor-quality data?

[Prof. Pierre-Olivier Pineau]

When I mentioned the problem to Statistics Canada, they said, “Yes, of course there are these discrepancies in data. It's because we have two surveys: one on production and deliveries, and one on consumption, and these two surveys don't match.” That was the answer. Basically, there's a survey looking at how much is used, and it shows a higher number than the survey that says how much natural gas is delivered into the system. Nobody seemed to care or to say, “This cannot be the case. There must be a problem somewhere, so someone should do an investigation and look into what is wrong in our survey.” There are two surveys, so that one survey, the consumption survey, shows a higher number than the production survey and the delivery survey.

Obviously nobody—well, maybe someone is now, but the problem is still there in the latest statistics because before bringing this issue to you I checked last week to see if it was still the case. It is still the case for the last year, 2016, that Quebec and other provinces are using more natural gas than they receive. It's not a question of storage or stocks. That's all taken into account. It's really that what's available to consumers is lower than what is claimed to be used. It's just that Statistics Canada accepts having these inconsistencies in their data, and they don't push further. Maybe they don't have the resources. Maybe the staff don't care. Maybe users don't complain. Maybe it's a mixture of all that, but the data is not serious. It's not serious in terms of data.

How can we solve the problem? I'm not a statistician. I'm not collecting data myself. I did collect data a few times in my research, but if you still have time, you should probably invite some people not from the EIA but from the IEA—the International Energy Agency.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

They've been here as well.

[Prof. Pierre-Olivier Pineau]

They have strong energy statisticians who ask how data should be collected, how you reconcile that, because it's complex. It is a lot of data, lots of sources, and you need to make sense of all that.

Obviously, there's not enough work put into the data in the Canadian energy statistics. I don't know exactly where we should put resources, but we definitely should have.

[Nick Whalen, Liberal, St. John's East, NL]

If I have time for one more short question, I have a presentation that I believe is yours in front of me. It is “Certainty: A National Energy Data Resource”. Is this the name? It's dated May 8.

[Prof. Pierre-Olivier Pineau]

No, it's not mine.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Okay, I'm sorry. There's some material in front of me that I thought might have been the presentation that we're about to receive—I had some questions on it—but it's not.

I look forward to receiving your presentation in due course, and maybe I'll provide written questions at that time.

Thank you very much.

[Prof. Pierre-Olivier Pineau]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thanks, Mr. Whalen.

Mr. Cannings, if you have nothing to follow up with, I think we're probably done.

Professor, thank you very much for joining us this morning. It was very helpful, very interesting. We're grateful for your taking the time.

[Prof. Pierre-Olivier Pineau]

Thank you for the invitation.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

That's all for today.

We will see everybody on Thursday. The meeting is adjourned.