Natural Resources committee  Could you repeat the question?

Natural Resources committee  The refining industry globally is set up so products are refined locally. Crude oil is imported or comes from local sources and it's refined locally. It's just the way the industry is set up. It seems to be the best way to do it. Partly it's because we think of gasoline as a comm

Natural Resources committee  So it's around basically if businesses are able to make money doing that. Right now they say they can't. I'm not an engineer, I can't tell you the ins and outs of the price differential and how much they need to make money at it, but that's why you're not seeing investments in up

Natural Resources committee  I can't say we've done that exercise. I mean, it would be a difficult thing to do because it would have profound implications across the economy in terms of what we're doing, where, and how we're doing it. As I said in my opening remarks, for Canada-wide it's more than 5% of our

Natural Resources committee  Jobs-wise, as I said, directly it's about 100,00 jobs, so it's not that big. You compare that to, for example, manufacturing: directly it's about 1.7 million jobs. For construction, I forget the number off the top of my head, I think it's about 2 million jobs. Jobs-wise there are

Natural Resources committee  Yes.

Natural Resources committee  Are you asking what the probability of that happening is?

Natural Resources committee  Well, to a certain extent the gas industry has already experienced that. Natural gas prices in North America are actually reasonably good right now just because we've had a very cold winter. For years they've been very low, and investment activity in natural gas has been quite we

Natural Resources committee  Well, it varies from day to day, to be honest. Basically with the price gap, what we usually look at is, first of all, the difference between Brent, which is an international benchmark for light oil, and West Texas Intermediate or Canadian Par. It's been averaging $10 to $20 a

Natural Resources committee  I guess I'll try and address the question around what share is spent on environmental. I don't know off the top of my head. How we did our assessment is....Basically, we know the oil and gas businesses spend their money in a certain way right now and we assume they will continue

Natural Resources committee  I could go back to the statistics and find out what the actual spending categories were.

Natural Resources committee  From our perspective, spending money is good, economically speaking. If you spend money on pollution control, there are still benefits as there would be if you spent it on something else. I'm not sure who is benefiting. There are definitely benefits associated with spending mone

Natural Resources committee  Obviously it's a very capital-intensive industry. We're talking about billions of dollars being invested. That money comes from a variety of sources. Roughly half of the ownership in the oil and gas sector is foreign. The other half is domestic. It comes from different sources. A

Natural Resources committee  I wasn't aware of the fact.

Natural Resources committee  It's fair enough to say that given that energy's a large component of the Toronto Stock Exchange, anyone who owns mutual funds, pension funds, these sorts of things, would indirectly be invested in the oil sands, yes.