That's great. I knew we would get it working sooner or later, so I will continue.
Our members work in production. They maintain a significant portion of the more than 750,000 kilometres of pipelines in Canada. They run oil and gas refineries, biofuel facilities, midstream transportation, downstream distribution, industrial and commercial use and heating and cooling infrastructure. They build and refurbish nuclear reactors for Candu Energy, so yes, you can take from this that we also bargain collective agreements with some of the biggest and most profitable companies on the planet.
Our members are operating engineers, skilled trades, technicians, heavy-duty truck drivers, control room operators, marine tank operators, nuclear engineers and scientists, and railway workers. As a union that represents the workers who stop energy infrastructure from blowing up or leaking out and who ensure the safe and efficient transport of oil, gas and energy products across this country and around the world, we support the diversity of safe methods of moving product, including but not limited to legal, commercially viable, properly regulated and well-maintained pipelines.
As Canada's largest private sector union, we support reducing export monopoly and dependency with the United States wherever we can. While this means expanding capacity to diversify exports and ensure a fair price for our natural resources, it also means that we must maintain and expand industrial capacity here at home.
Our domestic oil and gas sector is described as a money-printing machine for shareholders. Record profits in the industry were expected before Trump's war with Iran. The reason these companies are printing money is that companies in the production and export side of the industry are doubling down on what we call capital discipline. This means that they are spending as little as possible on workers and maintenance in order to maximize profits. As such, they have significantly reduced investment in new capacity and are simply running the capacity as hard as they can.
Obviously, royalties, corporate taxes and income taxes generate revenue for the government. Most recently, fuel taxes have been reduced for consumers. Energy workers, wages and jobs, though, are one of the only other ways we can keep some of that revenue in this country. I hear a lot across the spectrum that we support energy workers, but this must also translate to the shop floor. We do not see or have not seen a maintaining of the number of energy workers, even as output volumes and profits continue to increase. We are outsourcing, subcontracting to non-union work, and we have seen a lot of automation while infrastructure is pushed to its limit.
The goal of your committee is to examine how to support Canada's being an energy superpower. I want to be clear that, without domestic capacity for refining chemical and plastic production, Canada simply subsidizes the energy superpower to the south or helps economies around the world before securing our own.
Unifor has become increasingly concerned with domestic chemical production capacity. The current economy, economics, trade war with the United States and shifting regulatory environment have not supported continued investment in our downstream and chemical sectors, and that's a problem. Instead, we're losing important capacity, including with the closures of Ineos in Sarnia and Biox in Hamilton, coupled with delayed investment from Shell and Dow Chemical.
We continue to see not energy resiliency but offshoring production capacity and increased dependency on imported energy products. Meanwhile, downstream energy infrastructure is left to deteriorate, including pipelines. Both undermine our energy security and our energy superpower status.
In response, our union has launched a campaign called “Keep it in the Pipe” to call out run-to-fail strategies while highlighting the need for investment to reduce methane and other chemical leaks in midstream and distribution infrastructure. We do this by hiring and investing in energy workers, who are essential to maintaining energy infrastructure.
I will conclude by also saying that, with a renewed focus on industrial strategies in our country, which we're very glad to see, including in the area of defence, we must account for the energy inputs of these industrial strategies in order for them to be successful. This means understanding that building a stronger, more resilient Canadian economy starts with building more energy and, above all, investing in energy infrastructure and the workers who maintain it and keep it safe.
Thank you very much.
