That's great. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon, honourable members, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Todd Winterhalt. I'm the senior vice-president and communications, marketing and corporate strategy officer at EDC. We're delighted to be here today to contribute to the committee's study of financial assistance for the natural resources sectors in Canada.
EDC is a Crown corporation and Canada's official credit agency. We're mandated to grow Canadian trade and develop global business opportunities. As a result, our focus is international. We have 21 offices around the world, including a full branch operating in Singapore. These offices, combined with an additional 21 locations across Canada, help to ensure that EDC meets its mandate of supporting Canadian companies seeking success in almost every market around the world, and that these companies come from every region across our country.
We also support Canadian companies of all sizes, from the very small to multi-billion dollar corporations, using financing, equity, credit insurance, contract bonding, trade knowledge, global connections, products and services. Last year, in 2021, EDC served nearly 30,000 Canadian companies doing business in over 180 countries around the world.
As committee members may be aware, like our sister Crown corporation BDC, EDC does its operating on commercial terms. The funds we use for our export financing are drawn from our revenues. Consistent with this model, EDC does not provide grants or subsidies. In fact, throughout our history, EDC has consistently been profitable, which is both a point of pride within the organization and a reality we embrace, driven by our commercial mandate and the need to move at the speed of business.
In our 78-plus years of operation, EDC has helped facilitate more than $1.5 trillion of Canadian exports and international investment. Since our founding in 1944, EDC's business has also tended to reflect the size and nature of the Canadian economy. For much of our history, as natural resources drove Canada's economy, they also made up the majority of our lending and insurance portfolios.
Today, though, as the economy grows and diversifies, so does EDC, such that our current portfolio and activity reflect sectors as wide-ranging as the economy itself. It's perhaps also useful to understand that EDC solutions are almost always provided in coordination and partnership with the many financial institutions that back Canada's exporters. They're banks, co-ops and credit unions.
Because so much of this work is complementary to what banks do, EDC's business activity has a tendency to be counter-cyclical. That is, during economic downturns, when private capital gets tight, the demand for EDC's risk mitigation and financing products increases. I can quickly touch on a few examples.
As part of the team Canada response to the COVID-19 pandemic, EDC augmented efforts to support Canadian companies in the oil and gas sector. This commercial support delivered liquidity to businesses in exploration and production, as well as midstream operations in oil field service companies, to help with the sudden and severe contraction in market conditions caused by lockdowns.
In addition, over the past six years alone, EDC has taken part in similar efforts that go beyond our core business offerings to provide support for industries in Canada's natural resources sectors when it's been needed. For example, we provided help for the Canadian canola industry in 2019 and for aluminum and steel producers in 2018. We also stepped in for softwood lumber producers in 2017 and provided support for oil and gas in 2016 and 2018.
Under more typical circumstances, EDC continues to play a role in supporting Canada's natural resources and related sectors. We are currently engaged with more than 1,000 Canadian exporters in the forestry, mining, agriculture and energy sectors.
It is noteworthy, though, to point out that of these sectors, oil and gas is one in which EDC's involvement has trended downward. This is particularly true in our financing of international companies and projects in the fossil fuel industry. More specifically, in 2018, for example, we provided approximately $2.7 billion in direct financing to foreign-based companies in the sector. However, by July of this year, that number had decreased by over 85% to $395 million.
As part of our commitment to the Government of Canada's carbon reduction plans and our own commitment to achieve net zero by 2050, effective January 1 next year, EDC will no longer finance new international oil and gas projects. That said, one area that we will continue to invest in is our support of Canadian companies that provide products, services or technologies that help reduce the GHG footprint of these international companies.
Domestically, EDC continues to work with hundreds of companies, large and small, across the energy sector. Their expectation is that Canada's transition to a lower-carbon economy must be orderly, and that companies engaged in the transition will require significant capital to make the green investments that are needed.
In the same way we are working with industries across the sector, EDC believes we can play a significant role in helping oil and gas to make the transition to a lower-carbon Canadian economy. Certainly, Canada's natural resource sector is complex and dynamic, and over the course of Canada's history, the sector has played a key role in the economic growth and global influence of Canada as a producer of precious raw materials, food and energy, all much in demand the world over. This certainly remains the case today and will continue to be the case for years to come.
Over this time, our goal at EDC has remained the same: to help Canadian resource companies find international opportunities to grow their businesses, diversify their markets and find success that meets the highest standard for sustainable business. EDC remains excited to support Canada's natural resource industries and to help them build towards a productive and sustainable future.
Thank you again for the invitation to appear today.
