Natural Resources Committee on Nov. 17th, 2022

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Again, I know you're taking it very seriously. I'm curious, though, for my education. When you do those partnerships, where is the taxpayer in regard to security afterwards if something does go sideways or goes bad? Where do we rank in the security in recovering the funds that you've invested in those organizations?

[Marie-Claude Petit]

I won't go into all of the details, but we have different mitigation measures to see how we can recover those funds, and the success that we've had so far, as I mentioned, over the last few years shows that this works. Also, it's important that we do follow up closely on those projects to make sure that some adjustments can be made to ensure that we do safe management of those funds.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Again, it probably varies project to project, and in the amount of risk that you take, where you'd sit on a priority scale, then. I think that's fair. That's reasonable.

When you are going through the process of looking at new products or new projects, who sets the priorities for your region? Who says that next year your priority is going to be green energy, or next year it's going to be electric vehicles? Do you set that yourselves, or does that come down from the PMO, the minister's office, or something like that?

[Marie-Claude Petit]

Do you want me to continue?

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

You're doing well. If somebody else wants to hop in, too, that would be great.

[Marie-Claude Petit]

I can talk about CED. For sure, we have general, overall priorities that are given by our minister, but it's important to remember that I have 11 regional offices in various regions and there are different priorities. For Natural Resources, mining will be the priority of the Abitibi-Témiscamingue office. In Côte‑Nord and Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, it will be aluminum. It varies from one sector to the other in terms of sectors that it will support.

Greening our industry is an important aspect that we're looking at supporting. The indigenous community is another key aspect that we always look—

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

You mentioned green aluminum. I want to credit Mr. Martel, the Conservative MP in the region, for coining that phrase with the Americans, and for taking a commodity and making it a niche item in talking about what a great job Quebec and green aluminum do in the world marketplace. It's something we should all be proud of.

[The Chair, Liberal, John Aldag]

We're out of time there.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Do I have a minute?

[The Chair, Liberal, John Aldag]

No. We're a minute over.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Do I have 30 seconds? I complimented your tie.

[The Chair, Liberal, John Aldag]

You're at six minutes. I'm sorry. It's in the interests of keeping things going.

Now we're going to jump to Mr. Sorbara.

You have five minutes.

[Francesco Sorbara, Liberal, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses today for coming and providing your thoughts and presentations.

I wanted to make a general comment to the development agencies. I've dealt with FedDev, as I refer to it. It's the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario. They have invested in a number of projects in my riding, as well as in the region of southern Ontario and the GTA, where the investments have been critical for the projects to be undertaken, for catalysts for jobs, for innovation and for the creation of good economic standards of living for our residents, so I wish to say thank you.

My first question is for the Canada Energy Regulator. Thank you for your appearance. As an economist myself, I was interested in hearing, just out of curiosity....

When you are building your investments or cases, you're obviously taking an impartial look at each project. How do the sensitivities change over time?

When you're doing a base case, are you also doing sensitivity on your base case to see where the outcomes are?

[Jean-Denis Charlebois]

I assume your question relates to our energy information function that develops scenarios for the future. Is that correct?

[Francesco Sorbara, Liberal, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

Yes.

[Jean-Denis Charlebois]

In the past, those scenarios essentially stood by themselves, whereby we were making a series of assumptions and then we were running our models to see where the model would land us in terms of supply and demand of different commodities through time. We were not making any kind of formal sensitivity analyses that were included in our report, although we had that data in the background.

That said, we recognized that the path to net zero for Canada is uncertain. There are different ways to reach that ambitious outcome, and in our next “Canada's Energy Future” report that I spoke about briefly—to be published in the spring of 2023—we will have a number of sensitivity analyses around those scenarios to explore. For example, what if the cost of carbon capture and storage is higher than expected? What would the implications be for the supply and demand of energy and the ability of Canada to meet its climate target?

In short, we didn't have it in a formal manner in the past, although we had it in the background. We'll have it in a formal manner in the future.

[Francesco Sorbara, Liberal, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

Reading the organizational structure of the CER....

For full disclosure, in a past life, I met with individuals from the NEB when I served in the global financial markets covering Canadian dollar debt issuers, many of which are customers or clients of the Canada Energy Regulator.

In terms of the consultation and the role of the indigenous advisory committee to the CER, can you provide some information on that, because indigenous consultation in this country is obviously very important? It's a nation-to-nation relationship, so any colour there would be great.

[Jean-Denis Charlebois]

It is definitely a strategic priority of the CER to invest in reconciliation.

I will pass it over to my colleague Mr. Dunford, who will be able to provide you with the colour I think you are seeking.

[Jess Dunford, Director, Major Projects Oversight, Canada Energy Regulator]

Certainly. I'll try to be brief.

I'll offer that the indigenous advisory monitoring committees were set in place for both the Trans Mountain expansion project and the Enbridge line. There were three projects when they were first announced in 2016. There are multiple objectives that are in place for those advisory committees. At the heart of it, though, it's intended to support indigenous nations' effective and meaningful participation in the monitoring of the environmental safety and socio-economic aspects related to those projects.

We've learned much from our partners and colleagues on the IAMCs, but one of the hallmarks that I'll point to is our indigenous monitoring program, which has expanded beyond those projects. We've now had over 100 field inspections that have benefited from the expertise that's been provided from our indigenous monitors on the ground in inspecting those projects and ensuring compliance with the regulatory requirements in place.

[Francesco Sorbara, Liberal, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

Thank you.

I have one brief question. Obviously the robustness of the CER and its processes is very important to the people working in the energy sector, people working in the clean sector. There's obviously a linkage between the two. The timeliness, the ability to get the analysis completed, is also important, especially in today's world, where things are changing quickly and energy security and energy affordability are of paramount importance.

Can you speak to the timeliness and the ability of the CER to work under tight time constraints?

[Jean-Denis Charlebois]

There are a couple of points here. The first one is that the CER act prescribes, essentially, legislated time limits for the commission to make decisions and also recommendations on certain types of projects. It's embedded in the act. It's also stipulated that any given application needs to be processed as expeditiously as possible, given constraints and principles of natural justice and procedural fairness.

On top of this, the CER also has service standards that have been complied with over the past five years in terms of producing decisions over and above the legislated time limit that I spoke about earlier.

Then the last point is the strategic priority that we also have related to enhancing Canada's global competitiveness, as stipulated in the CER act. There are a number of components to this. One thing I'll mention is that we have a clear eye to making our processes as predictable as possible—not necessarily the outcome of them, but rather the processes we go through to assess an application—so that industry knows what the expectations are in terms of filing requirements, timeliness, as well as the different review steps that it will have to go through.

[The Chair, Liberal, John Aldag]

We're out of time on that round.

Colleagues, we have 20 minutes left. The next round should take 15 minutes, with five, five, two-and-a-half, and two-and-a-half minute questions. I do have an item that I circulated. I think everybody should have seen it. There are four quick items we can package into one motion. We could either do that right now, put it away, and get back to the final 15 minutes of questions, or carry through and leave five minutes to the end. Is there any preference on how we do that?

[An hon. member]

Finish the questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, John Aldag]

We'll finish the questions. Okay, we'll then continue by going back to the Conservatives. Who do you have for your first five minutes?

Okay, Mr. Hoback, it's over to you for five minutes.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Thanks, Chair. I just have a few questions, so I'll maybe take two or three minutes; then we can speed things up, if that's okay with you.

I'm just going to go back to the same round when I was finishing off my statement. We had a comment about New Flyer buses, out of Winnipeg, going to Toronto. It's nice to hear those stories. That's a good story.

There's a disappointing part to it. I had a great meeting with Unifor this morning. It's amazing how they want to get rid of gatekeepers. They were talking to us about how gatekeepers are holding things up, like affordable housing and in things like that. One comment they made in regard to the facility in Winnipeg was that of those buses going to Toronto, 60% of them are made in the U.S. Because of U.S. regulations that forced New Flyer to move part of their manufacturing out of Winnipeg and into the U.S. to meet the U.S. requirements, 60% of those buses are still being made in the U.S.

I do compliment Toronto for doing that. Regina bought buses from China—that's ridiculous. I do think we should have more Canadian content in the products that are shipped and made here in Canada and bought here in Canada, just like other countries do around the world.

I'll go to my witnesses here. I'm just curious how you are working in regard to Canadian content when you're looking at, for example, electric vehicles and the supply chain for electric vehicles. How are you looking at the scenarios? Are you asking if there is enough Canadian content in the research and in the componentry going into these electric vehicles? Does that come into your formula as you look at that supply chain?

That would probably be a question for the southern Ontario agency.

Is there nothing on Canadian content, then, in regard to how you go to assess projects on whether they should be funded or not?