International Trade committee  Yes, actually, I do fundamentally. I know that this committee and members of Parliament have been provided with reassurances from people like the chief negotiator. In fact, the technical summary on negotiated outcomes, which was distributed through Global Affairs Canada, explicitly says that the concerns I've raised will not come to pass.

International Trade committee  If the TPP is ratified, the TFW program will be the least of our worries. That's because the labour mobility sections of TPP are like the TFW program on steroids. The TPP will take the worst aspects of the TFW program, magnify them, and make them effectively irreversible, because they will be entrenched in a complex and binding international treaty.

International Trade committee  Good morning. My name is Gil McGowan. I am president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, which is Alberta's largest worker organization. I don't have to tell you this committee has been getting an earful from Canadians. You have been hearing about how the Trans-Pacific Partnership will affect important Canadian industries.

International Trade committee  I'll quote from the legal brief. The effect is essentially “to prohibit Canada from imposing any limit on the number of foreign workers entitled to enter the country so long as they fall under one of the broadly defined categories of workers Canada has agreed to admit”. What are the categories of workers that would fall under the TPP labour mobility provisions?

Finance committee  Let me respond to that in two ways. First, when it comes to job creation, the kinds of projects you're building matters. Certainly, if you're building pipelines, jobs will be created, but in much smaller numbers and for a much shorter period of time than if you were building a big industrial plant such as a refinery or an upgrader.

Finance committee  I think the federal government, the provincial government, and industry should look at this low price environment as an opportunity to do what they should have been doing for the past 10 or 20 years, which is to move up the value ladder. Almost all of the current development in the oil sands is what I would describe as “rip it and ship it“ development, designed for raw export.

Finance committee  Of the current generation of oil sands projects, only a handful are what I would describe as value-added. We have the North West upgrader that's just started construction, the latest phase of the Canadian Natural Resources upgrader. Almost everything else is raw export oriented.

Finance committee  Yes. The essential point is that this should be seen as an opportunity to build value-added projects because costs are lower, feedstock is cheaper, and by building these projects, we create the kinds of jobs that we need to sustain us through this period of volatility that your other speakers have talked about.

Finance committee  It was forty years.

Finance committee  Forty years when you adjust for inflation.

Finance committee  Okay. Number one, don't panic. Number two, abandon the fixation on pipelines. It simply doesn't make sense to pump more oil into glutted markets. Number three, repair our social safety net. Our unemployed workers are going to need it. Number four is tax reform. You can ask me about that later.

Finance committee  Mr. Chair, I've done this before so I know how quickly the time goes. I'll dive right in. I have six observations and seven recommendations. Observation number one is that the fall in oil prices has been precipitous. There's no doubt about that, but no one should be surprised.

Natural Resources committee  Well, the Alberta government made a political decision in the mid-nineties that we're still paying for. At the time, Premier Ralph Klein and his cabinet decided that in order to develop the oil sands, which at that time was considered somewhat of a marginal resource, we had to sweeten the pot, and so he introduced the famous penny-on-the-dollar royalty, called the generic royalty at the time.

Natural Resources committee  Yes, for those who don't know, the numbers in Alberta are shocking. Peter Lougheed introduced what we call the heritage savings trust fund back in the seventies and he put in an initial influx of money, and it's shocking to imagine that despite all the vast increases in production of oil from the oil sands and from other energy resources, our sovereign wealth fund, the heritage fund, is actually worth less now when you adjust for inflation than it was when Lougheed established it back in the seventies.

Natural Resources committee  This is yet another reason why we prefer value-added production over what I described as rip-and-ship production. If you build an upgrader or a refinery, it's an existing piece of industrial infrastructure. The jobs that are created in those kinds of plants are much more stable through the economic cycle.