Natural Resources committee  I think there are more opportunities for market diversification than for product diversification. I noted, particularly with natural gas, that getting access to Asian markets presents a lot more opportunities to me than having more refining of oil in Canada.

Natural Resources committee  Very much so. I couldn't agree more. At most, one or two of these six or seven big ideas are going to go forward. There is not enough to fill all of these pipelines.

Natural Resources committee  I don't think it's just a matter of accessing the U.S. market. A lot of it is the geography within the U.S. market. If we were accessing the northeastern U.S. or the gulf coast or the U.S. west coast, that would be a different situation. The problem is that all that oil is being

Natural Resources committee  I think the answer is obvious. There isn't money to be made in it. If anything, we have excess capacity. Why would you build more refineries, especially in eastern Canada, when instead of building one brand new you could buy one that's for sale in Halifax. There was one for sale

Natural Resources committee  I think there's one thing, and I haven't heard it discussed much in today's committee meeting, and it's the opportunity for arbitrage in natural gas. We touched on it at the beginning that historically, prices have always been much higher in Europe and Asia, especially in Asia th

Natural Resources committee  Yes, and a lot of it has come though, but not many jobs. I'll agree with that. That's how firms have adapted among other things. They've boosted productivity. They're producing more and more. They're participating in the recovery. The auto sector, the housing sector, in particula

Natural Resources committee  I don't think there's any question of that if they're properly consulted and engaged. Honestly, I'm not the expert in this. Whatever I've learned is from talking with Ken and Brian, which has been one of the great joys since I left StatsCan. What they talk about is that we have a

Natural Resources committee  Certainly, I'd be more than happy to share it with you.

Natural Resources committee  I think the main conclusion of the paper, whether or not we did suffer from a mild case of Dutch disease, is not that interesting anymore. That was largely something that happened before the recession. The dollar has been at parity since 2007. If you were a business out there you

Natural Resources committee  I don't know how to answer that directly. What I will try to bring to the member's attention is there seems to be a lot of confusion between extracting maximum value, which you noted is what I want to do, with moving further down this stage of processing. Often, they're not the

Natural Resources committee  I don't know if market diversification per se would bring the maximum benefit. I wouldn't diversify just for the sake of diversification. I think the maximum benefit to aboriginals is the same as the maximum benefit to all Canadians, which is extracting the most value from this p

Natural Resources committee  Yes, certainly these estimates of the direct impact of output in the oil and gas industry don't include the benefits or the jobs created in the years of construction it takes to build these oil sands plants. It doesn't take into account the spinoff jobs in transportation and pipe

Natural Resources committee  Oh, yes. I've probably written more about multipliers than any other subject. They're one of the least understood things that Statistics Canada produces. The usual multiplier that people calculate is the ripple effect in other industries. What that rewards is industries that have

Natural Resources committee  Another matter with product is, it's not clear that product diversification is the best. There's always a lot of talk that we should be upgrading and refining more in this country. It's a very unusual situation now because of the price differential between what Canadian oil is ge

Natural Resources committee  Thank you. Before I joined the Macdonald-Laurier Institute I was chief economic analyst at StatsCan. We'd often be called to these types of committees to provide some background before people got into discussing the issues to get the basic facts right, so I thought I'd take a few