If I may, I would like to provide a little information on TMX, because there's been a lot more discussion on that than I expected. It is quite germane to the question by the member.
I checked in with Trans Mountain management last week—they're based out west—and asked them what's going on with the project. As of October 31, there were 15,800 individuals actively employed in the project. It's going to be four-fifths, or 80%, complete by the end of this calendar year. Over 3,000 Canadian hires came from outside of B.C. and Alberta, which is not a surprise. We also knew that TMX jobs would be distributed all across the country, even in Quebec and Ontario. Over the life of the project, more than 28,000 individuals have worked on Trans Mountain, including 3,059 indigenous persons, I'm told.
Here's a little note from the research I've viewed. The Urban Futures Institute showed that jobs in natural resources create five or six times the impact on GDP, because they create resource commodity exports and contribute directly to them. There's a five or six times greater impact than the average job. These 15,000 individuals have an impact on the economy of 75,000 average workers. When you think about it, that's not a bad return on investment.
In terms of the international focus, why was TMX not able keep a large foreign company as its driver? Why did Ottawa acquire the project? Well, obviously it was a project in the national interest. At the time the decision was made, Canada had begun to see a mass exodus, particularly from the Alberta oil patch. Many international companies had invested in what they thought were the economic strategies being employed in that province, but they realized that those were not going to come about because of policy. Many studies and reports have tried to measure the impact, but I won't attempt to relate those.
Anecdotally, for what it's worth, I think there's a sense that there was a punishing regime for investment. It has maybe passed a bit now. It was stronger in 2017, 2018 and 2019. There was almost a class of workers, young men in particular in Alberta, whose future expectations were crushed. It was hundreds of thousands of workers.
I know that people are puzzled about things like the trucker convoy and where that came from. Well, when you take whole generations of people and suddenly end the things they were aspiring to become, then you have side effects. It's not as surprising for those who observe things closely in Alberta perhaps—not to wade into that issue.
The investment outlook continues to be dampened. I recently travelled to India and Turkey. When people talk about investing in energy in Canada, it doesn't have the level of excitement that it used to. Whether that should be the case is a matter of judgment. I think all you have to do is go to Bay Street. They will tell you what their numbers show far better than I can.
The overall sense in Alberta continues to be that the great wealth and positive impact on environmental performance that can be supplied by the Canadian oil and gas sector have been deliberately forsaken.