Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. It's my great pleasure to be in front of the committee today. I'll be talking to you about the state of the B.C. economy and some of the challenges and opportunities therein, as well as giving you a bit of a thumbnail sketch of what we do in W

Finance committee  Thanks very much for the question. As you correctly identified, it's one of the major issues facing B.C. right now. I should probably start by saying that I've lived in British Columbia for eight years, and you are looking at an eight-time loser in the British Columbia housing m

Finance committee  If I may comment on the latter, on the decline in coal production, it is palpable how it has affected the economy in B.C., and not only the direct extraction activities of companies like Teck resources. Teck is one of the biggest mining companies in Canada, and they have had to c

Finance committee  On the small business participation in exports, we have fairly recently re-engaged with the Province of British Columbia. With the Ministry of International Trade and with Global Affairs Canada's regional office in British Columbia, we have participated in a sort of regional trad

Finance committee  I may ask my colleague here if he can dig out from our rather impressive binder of information here—as you can see, I brought it with me—some of the targets we have in our report on plans and priorities for our trade and investment activity. Sorry, Martin, to put you on the spo

Finance committee  In fact, we have a project under way, which is jointly funded with WD, the Province of British Columbia, and the Business Council of B.C. It goes by the name of HQ Vancouver, headquarters Vancouver. It's aimed precisely at increasing the attraction to the Lower Mainland of headqu

Finance committee  I will ask my colleague to look through the vast amount of information he has to find the figures and results achieved thus far in defence procurement. Our role is to point out to SMEs where the major purchasing opportunities are in Canada's defence industry. We have played this

Finance committee  You are describing a problem that is very serious in British Columbia and in the rest of Canada. We are talking about the future of the forestry industry. If I may, I will answer in English. My softwood lumber vocabulary is somewhat limited. I'm a former trade negotiator, and

Finance committee  That is correct, sir.

Finance committee  No.

Finance committee  Thank you for that. One of the finest parts of my job is that I get the opportunity to visit places like Prince Rupert. I understand your attachment to the area. You're correct in saying that there's a lot of activity and there's a lot of hope in Prince Rupert surrounding thin

Finance committee  The actual providing of training opportunity is not within WD's mandate. That's Employment and Social Development Canada. We work quite closely with them and we're trying to get to a point where we can work even more closely with them, because their funding provides training spot

Finance committee  I should start with one small point about softwood lumber. My experience on this goes back quite a way, and it's not entirely doom and gloom. The industry is a little better positioned in two important respects than it was, say, in 2001, the last time we faced countervailing and

Finance committee  I think you heard from my Alberta colleague Jim Saunderson on this question of potential oil price declines and oil price impact. Essentially, the biggest impact for the country as a whole would be a decline in the spread that oil exported from Alberta faces relative to a world

Finance committee  Thanks for the question. You're right. Everybody is positioning themselves to be a leader in this area, so you're going to hear from me very much what you've heard from others. I'm going to back it up with some really hard facts, not that some of my colleagues necessarily haven'