Natural Resources committee  Correct. There are three roles that the board performs. There is the role of safety, looking at the safety of operations. The amendments would address the safety of the workplace, which is one of its primary roles and it is ultimately its most important role. The amendments proposed actually provide the chief safety officer the ability to shut down an operation.

Natural Resources committee  I'd like to say that we continue to look at recommendation 29 in the broader context of these amendments and other aspects of the offshore and in the context in which the recommendations are put forward. We continue to have those discussions with officials in the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador, and we will continue to do so.

Natural Resources committee  Thanks for the question and the pronunciation. I'll keep that in mind. Having grown up in central Canada, I'm always willing to learn about the new varieties in regional differences in how we pronounce things.

Natural Resources committee  Indeed. You would think we have an accent in central Canada, and I would think the same for Newfoundland and Labrador—Newfoundland, understand—and Labrador.

Natural Resources committee  We have worked and continue to work closely with Labour Canada at the officials level. The two ministers have to both agree on regulatory processes and amendments. Before moving forward on regulations or amending the regulations, or introducing new regulations with respect to labour, they have to pass through the Minister of Labour for reviewing and signing, as approval.

Natural Resources committee  Good. The chair of the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board will probably correct me on that in the next hour. The first comment I would make would be that the drafting of the legislation and the identification of the occupational health and safety issues long preceded Justice Wells' inquiry and the work that he had done.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you for the question. The work on the legislative package before Parliament got under way almost a dozen years ago. It was following an accident in Nova Scotia in which a worker in a workplace was killed. In that particular accident, the accord acts originally separated operational safety, the operations of the technical units and things that are happening in the offshore, which was embedded within the accord acts, and occupational health and safety as a separate area which fell under the provincial jurisdiction.

Natural Resources committee  It's a fairly detailed and involved process. What normally happens is the legislation is drafted by a committee that has provincial members, federal members, and justice members. We draft the federal legislation first. Then it goes back and forth between the provinces and the federal government.

Natural Resources committee  Mr. Chair, and members, thank you very much for the opportunity to present further information on Bill C-5, the offshore health and safety act, a package of offshore health and safety amendments. My name is Jeff Labonté, and I'm the director general for the energy sector of the Department of Natural Resources.

Natural Resources committee  That's accurate. So as these fields come on strength, there will be more supply, and as there's only so much demand in North America it will have to go elsewhere.

Natural Resources committee  We would be able to supply it to you. We don't have it with us.

Natural Resources committee  We are. Some of it actually just clarifies the flow between. Western Canada exports; eastern Canada imports. Some of it will remain that way. Net it might be zero, but it will actually have significant flows in both directions.

Natural Resources committee  I can say anecdotally that we have a lot of interaction with industry at conferences and fora, and certainly in our interactions we hear from a lot of companies that are pursuing business opportunities globally. It happens that given the way we develop our energy resources and the resources we have, they have great opportunities—the horizontal drilling and drilling technology companies, the engineering firms, the project management firms.

Natural Resources committee  I would first say it's incredible that there isn't a resource projection I see on an annual basis that doesn't go upward. There are tremendous opportunities coming, and a lot of that is innovation and technology, those firms we were talking about previously finding better ways and finding better resources and estimating those.

Natural Resources committee  The predominant bump in slide 7 is the coming-on-strength shale gas and unconventional gas development. Much of it is tight and shale gas, just to be accurate about it.