Finance committee  The discount is because we only have one customer. We are selling to the U.S. The U.S. can ship their products offshore and can get world market prices for it. If we had energy east.... In fact, maybe I shouldn't say this, but I think Keystone is just perpetuating the discount.

Finance committee  Thank you for the question. From the oil and natural gas industry's perspective it seems that we haven't had a proper national dialogue on the direction in which we want to go in this country. As I have said, and as Mr. Liepert has said, this has been the economic engine of the

Finance committee  Yes, thank you for the question. I think it's hard to predict exactly what the impacts will be. Clearly, commodity prices have an impact. However, I think we are finding that Canada is overall less competitive these days. We have such a number of policies that are impacting our

Finance committee  I think that the benefit of having the exploration credit, the CEE and the CDE, is the fact that this goes to an industry. Private companies are spending money in order to claim this, as you say. They are putting people to work and creating economic benefits. Those benefits go fa

Finance committee  Thank you, and good afternoon, committee members. I am Elizabeth Aquin, senior vice-president of the Petroleum Services Association of Canada, or PSAC. Thank you for the opportunity to be here today to provide you with some comments. I understood that you wanted comments on the

Finance committee  Both. Even Canadian workers, or abroad, probably just got a basic education and learned on the job because colleges and universities don't teach pumping services, for example. They are considered low-skilled or unskilled, and so it's even more difficult to bring those types of p

Finance committee  We agree. When you are bringing in foreign workers, you want to be sure that they are the right people, they have the skills, and they are trained. In most cases, we would like to see them become permanent residents.

Finance committee  Yes, that's exactly it, because if a company hires someone from, say, Ontario to work in northern Alberta, the plane ticket could be considered a taxable benefit. I don't think the employee leaving home considers they're enriched by that, so if they were not taxed on that and if

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  We use some, but not very many. The reason is that the nature of the work is responsive to customer demand from the oil and gas companies, so they don't get a lot of notice, and the process, traditionally, has been very time-consuming. A lot of service companies reach a considera

Finance committee  How much more, did you say?

Finance committee  Well, for quite a period of time, I think, because of the previous experiences of parents in the oil and gas industry and its boom-and-bust nature, I think a lot of parents discouraged their kids from taking geosciences in general, so a lot of the engineers are not always attract

Finance committee  I would totally agree. I think the employment system needs to be looked at to encourage people to work and not to not work.

Finance committee  Certainly one is the taxable benefits. Many of our member companies are looking to other provinces to encourage Canadians to come and work in the oil patch. If their travel and accommodation are going to be taxed, it impacts their paycheque. They'd just as soon stay home and coll

Finance committee  Those are the two that first come to mind.