Transport committee  Our member companies are verified by a third party every three years. The third-party verification is not just the typical auditor, you also have community members who come in as well as members from environmental groups. It's a full-scale—we call it a verification, not an audit.

Transport committee  Yes, we have committees called leadership groups. We have something called a share committee, which looks at health and safety within the workplace. That's the whole point of those committees, to get around and have round table discussions of what companies have learned and what

Transport committee  There are a number of cases, particularly in Ontario at the moment, where we are trying to get municipalities to recognize the existing buffer zones, as we call them.

Transport committee  We would continue to do what we're doing at the moment, but obviously those efforts would be focused on where they'd be needed, depending on where those shipments were going. We already have the structure in place to deal with the communities and to make sure there's a first-resp

Transport committee  Again, coming back to one of the key tenets of responsible care, it's community awareness. Obviously at that time there were no systems in place to have advised the community of what to do in the event of an incident. We hope, perhaps, with the Lac-Mégantic tragedy as well, tha

Transport committee  It's the TransCAER program, which is referred to in some of the documentation.

Transport committee  We'd like to see it grow. We call ourselves an enabling industry. We feed into all different areas of the manufacturing sector in Canada—pulp and paper, mining, pharmaceuticals—so we are dependent on growth in those industries in Canada. But we also export a lot, about 80% of our

Transport committee  I talked about responsible care for the chemical industry, but I believe in the fertilizer industry you have your own program.

Transport committee  That's verified. I think to answer your question, we believe a strong regulatory framework is essential. So if changes are needed there, fine. Our companies go beyond regulation and that's what they're verified on as well.

Transport committee  Mr. McGuinty, I can say yes. I think we need to differentiate between sectors. You're talking about the petroleum sector. We're chemical manufacturers. A lot of our products are quite uniform and need to satisfy customer requirements as well. Regular testing is going on, and we e

Transport committee  I want to say that's why we call responsible care an ethic. To not report a safety incident would be the wrong thing to do. That's taken years. Sometimes with new companies that come in, it can take years to get up to that level of performance and that trust within the organizati

Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee, for the invitation to speak to you today on behalf of the Chemistry Industry Association of Canada. CIAC is the voice of Canada’s chemistry industry, which a $50 billion a year industry for this country. Our membe

Finance committee  That's assuming that the current accelerated capital cost allowance—which has been renewed on a two-year basis since 2007 and has been affected—is not renewed. Assuming that it is not renewed, we're recommending this 50% declining balance, but on a permanent basis. We say so beca

Finance committee  No, we don't have a position on that. We would look more at the tax credit system for R and D. In terms of the patents, that's more suitable for pharmaceuticals and different products.

Finance committee  I don't think you can address them. As you point out, it is a provincial jurisdiction. The reason I mention that is because it's important that when the federal government looks at what it needs to do to stimulate investment that it takes account of what is going on in the U.S.