Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Allow me to put in another Atlantic vote for an Energy East. Good morning, Mr. Chairman. Good morning, all. Thank you for inviting me today. This is my first visit to this session. I've testified often before this committee and others under prior foru

Finance committee  Mr. Chairman, that is a very great question. Some of the measures apply everywhere. Some of them are more particularly helpful in the Atlantic region. Key is education at the primary and secondary levels and building a foundation through education for the long haul, which is whe

Finance committee  Thank you, and thank you, Mr. Chairman. I agree entirely with the premise of the question. Innovation is very important. The question is, who is good at choosing where we invest in innovative processes, in technologies, in industries or sectors? It's a mixed bag, looking histor

Finance committee  Thank you. Mr. Chairman, I just spent a little over 17 years working in downtown Toronto, so I am a fan of things that improve urban congestion. I think my point was that it doesn't help everybody everywhere. We really do have to prioritize where scarce dollars are spent. I use

Finance committee  Yes, the support is bipartisan. It's federal and provincial, in my experience, and perhaps what is more important is that it is not only at the political level but in general at the committee level.

Finance committee  Thank you for the question. I think the short answer is to contemplate investment in terms of private returns and public returns. We're used to private investments from which we look for a particular return on equity or a return on investment. In the case of public infrastructu

Finance committee  That's a tough one. It really depends. Yes, where you have denser areas, it's going to be easier to make a business case for Internet service. In rural areas, the business case is harder to make, but I don't jump to the assumption that publicly funded high-speed or high-bandwid

International Trade committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning. I'm delighted to be here in front of the members. I'm Finn Poschmann, president of the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, a charitable think tank with the wonderfully simple mandate of promoting the economic well-being of the Atlantic re

International Trade committee  I will. I think it's a good place to do so. The current game is in the U.S. political system. We have among the current presidential candidates no sincere champions of the deal post-January 2017. There is a narrow window between the election and January when the President of the

International Trade committee  Thank you for the question. The question is about the impact on Nova Scotia in the absence of TPP. It's a really interesting question. In dollar terms, our Atlantic exports from the region, Nova Scotia exports, are overwhelmingly dominated by energy products, by petroleum prod

International Trade committee  I'm not sure I would look for a lot. If we had our druthers and our preferences.... It's sort of difficult to picture, because you'd have to bring a lot of people around the table to do it again and give up things or provide access that they didn't before. The time period over

International Trade committee  There's a contradistinction there. If we're not in TPP, the losses have a dollar value but not a huge dollar value, which is the flip side of saying that within TPP there are gains but they're not huge dollar gains. As to the auto sector, I agree fully. If the TPP goes forward a

International Trade committee  If I may, I will address ISDS first. If you were Mr. Stanfield's family and you had bought a plant, invested, and expanded in facilities in the southeast U.S., and the state made a massive change in laws and regulations that seemed clearly to undermine your investment, you woul

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to members of the committee for the invitation, and welcome to Halifax. When appearing before previous iterations of this committee, I would have been ready to talk about the need for measures to ensure a stable and efficient housing financ

Finance committee  I agree with much of what Mr. Sullivan said, especially with respect to increases in allowable immigration or immigration targets into Canada. We have a regional, geographic, and demographic mismatch with skills, and this is especially striking in the Atlantic region. Different t