Industry committee  We believe so, but the committees will have their say sometime soon.

Industry committee  No, that's specific to Ontario. We were talking about the—

Industry committee  On working in tandem, again I can't identify in our sector anything other than the risks and the climate change issue. We don't identify a lot of areas of overlap and duplication, and where they exist on occasion, it's been when provinces have decided to undertake activities that were already being well delivered by the federal government, so that hasn't been a major concern.

Industry committee  Our main competition is the U.S. for investment, and there's no question that Canada is a more complex place to invest in. Yes, there is uncertainly on energy development. Again, if you were going to build a new chemical facility to last 40 years, you'd better make sure you've got feedstock there for 40 years, and again, if we can't approve infrastructure that will move energy resources to market, we're not going to have the resource to add value to.

Industry committee  I would just say again what I said earlier. If the choice is to add a cost for something we don't want, we have to be willing to practise the other side of ecological fiscal reform. Price the things we don't want and reduce the prices on the things we do want so that we can have less of the thing we don't want and more of the thing we do want.

Industry committee  I'm not sure I said that exactly.

Industry committee  For the strategic sectors it has identified, Ontario is working on strategies to enable growth in those sectors, chemistry being one of them. Again, one thing that is looked at is the total footprint of regulatory activity. They've indicated that they don't wish to change policies, but are there administrative processes that could be made more efficient or replaced with something that works better?

Industry committee  I wouldn't say problems with environmental clearance, but there is no question that Canada, and Ontario in particular, is a very complex and difficult place to do business. In fact, one of the recommendations from the Barton report is to create a sort of concierge service to help walk very large investments through this morass of complex and overlapping regulatory and approval processes.

Industry committee  The area that concerns us the most with overlap—I wouldn't say “overlap”, but integration—would be how the proposed carbon pricing is going to work between the provinces and the federal government. We've spent years working with the federal government on an approach that we thought was going to work.

Industry committee  We're very comfortable with where both the Canadian Environmental Protection Act and the chemicals management plan is, and our testimony to the environment and sustainable development committee was clear. The main message is that it's working, so leave it as it is and look for opportunities for some continual improvement, if you will.

Industry committee  Well, you have to make smart and strategic investments, and, again, we think we're one of those. Why would that be? First of all, if you're making, say, a $2-billion investment in a chemical facility, you're looking at investment that's going to be around for 35 to 40 years; it's not five years plus.

Industry committee  Yes, and it's important to remember that we are funding development in the gulf and in China and Asia and the United States right now. Those companies that made it through the last two great recessions are lean and mean and belong here. They make profits every year. Those profits are not being reinvested in Canada because the shareholders can decide where they wish to invest.

Industry committee  I couldn't do it justice. I can have someone come back to you with some suggestions on that.

Industry committee  I don't have a report on patents per se. I could spend maybe 30 seconds to say that we felt the changes made to the SR and ED tax credit program were disadvantageous to Canadian manufacturers, including those in our industry, many of whom are existing manufacturers. What they do is at the R and D and the deployment stages, they're taking research that may have been done elsewhere, but it's the final step to get it to production scale that they could do here in Canada.

Industry committee  You mean the CCPA.