Industry committee  Thank you. Mr. Chair, members of Parliament, and Canadians who have access to this hearing, on behalf of the members of the Canadian Petroleum Products Institute, thank you for inviting me to better understand your preoccupations with our industry. I'll keep my comments brief s

Industry committee  I'll turn to the first graph, which marks 2007 wholesale gasoline prices. In this particular case, we've tracked the price movements, from January through to June, at New York harbour, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver. What you can see, or at least what this graph attemp

Industry committee  In the black and white.

Industry committee  I'll send that this afternoon.

Industry committee  The first comment I'll make and underscore was made by Ms. Savage from the independents the other day. She said that in fact, while the administrative treatment of the product on either side of the border is different, the product is not actually essentially that different. It's

Industry committee  We don't control, as I said to you earlier, Mr. McTeague. The market is North American. It's not uniquely Canadian. The price movements are going to follow very closely what happens at the New York Mercantile Exchange. There are going to be variations from market to market. There

Industry committee  The first question, as I understand it, is what members are attempting to do to ensure that there is reliable access to quality product in Canada. I will say to you that they're doing everything they can to make the investments that are necessary to ensure that their operations a

Industry committee  Well, let's step back. At a principled level, in terms of a petroleum monitoring agency, the CPPI does actually support that concept. In the case identified by Ms. Savage a couple of days ago, where you can advertise inventory slowdowns in advance, my economics training tells me

Industry committee  I don't want to give you the impression that our companies are facing tough times. I do want to impress upon you that a number of public policy decisions are placing strains on the refining sector in this country. And let's make a distinction between upstream and downstream. We r

Industry committee  The first thing I would point out to you is that margin does not equal profit. When you see a refinery margin, whether it be 10¢ or 20¢, that is just a simple calculation of the difference between the wholesale price and the crude inputs. What I'm telling you is that our profit

Industry committee  Under ordinary circumstances I would suggest actually that the Canadian marketplace is a more stable, friendly marketplace, from a pro-competition point of view, but there have been some bizarre things happening. There has not been a refinery built in North America—period—for ma

Industry committee  I was here for Ms. Savage's testimony, and what I understood her to say was that the specs themselves.... For example, sulphur is uniform. In fact, one of the truly Canadian success stories is that the implementation of the desulphurization plan was done in a way that we could st

Industry committee  The medium-grade blend in Ontario right now is problematic. That is a function of the Government of Ontario's specifications on renewable fuels. As Ms. Savage explained, you cannot take regular, unleaded gasoline that has ethanol in it and mix it at the pump with high grade to

Industry committee  On an annualized basis we are net exporters. I'll get you the latest data from Statistics Canada. It works out to about 10% of the product that we make being exported.

Industry committee  It is because the border, simply put, is only useful in this industry for the calculation of Statistics Canada data. The reality is that it's a North American market for the product. In some respects you could also make the argument that not only do we take the prices, but Canadi