Finance committee  Good morning, committee members, and thank you very much for the opportunity to address the standing committee this morning. My name is Robin Silvester. I'm the president and chief executive officer of Port Metro Vancouver. The Vancouver Fraser Port Authority, operating as Port

Finance committee  The two specific items we've raised as fundamental to the development of the Vancouver gateway, the New Westminster rail bridge and the river training infrastructure, are $100 million to $150 million each. But we've had some dialogue with Transport Canada in a lot more detail abo

Finance committee  Thank you. Certainly, as you rightly say, labour is a critical stakeholder in, and a component of, success in the gateway. One of the critical points—and I should emphasize it—is that at the port we're not directly involved in negotiations with labour. That takes place between t

Finance committee  Certainly. As you're probably aware, the port doesn't receive funding for operational activities. It's mandated under the Canada Marine Act to be a self-sustaining entity to operate the port for trade. Through our financing ability we typically operate and ensure the activity of

Finance committee  No. The money is not directly linked to volume, because a lot of our rents tend to be fixed. But generally, as volume increases, the revenues of the port increase. On the importance of these specific infrastructure projects, as with the rest of the Asia-Pacific gateway projects

Finance committee  I don't believe there has been a specific calculation that x volume gets y dollars. But I know that Transport Canada has had significant discussions with stakeholders about where benefit accrues from the investments and how investments should best be funded. So typically the priv

International Trade committee  Thank you. Honourable members, it's a pleasure to be here. Welcome to Vancouver. At Port Metro Vancouver, free and open trade is crucial to the delivery of our mission and to our ability to provide value to the community in which we operate—and, for that matter, to the nation a

International Trade committee  Sure. The numbers I was giving in terms of employment for the forestry industry are for the industry as a whole as it stands today, so I haven't tried to extrapolate what might happen under TPP, other than to observe clearly that an increase in the trade in lumber would correlate

International Trade committee  Fundamentally, we support TPP because we see the economic benefit trade brings locally, regionally, and nationally. We would really follow the same logical inference line that you follow such that if trade barriers are reduced within appropriate parameters and trade is increased,

International Trade committee  Thank you. Clearly, I think the question of whether or not China is brought into the process is a complex one, but again, going back to the base that I'm qualified to observe on, trade with China through the port in 2012 was 28 million tonnes of cargo, ranging across metallurgi

International Trade committee  Yes, I might very quickly follow on here and shamelessly plug our Facebook page. I'd encourage you to have a look at it. We addressed this question from the point of view of community engagement, and we went out to look for port stories about small businesses that depend on the p

International Trade committee  Yes, absolutely.

International Trade committee  We have a huge investment program on the way that's been supported very strongly by the government, and in fact has had previous support from Liberal governments as well.

International Trade committee  Yes, it's the Pacific gateway strategy. It's been extremely successful. Under the current government, there's been $750 million invested in connecting corridors alone. That in turn has resulted in or stimulated more private sector investment, probably to the tune of more than $1

International Trade committee  We would expect to.