Human Resources committee  The issue you're referencing is a report we did on housing in the Greater Golden Horseshoe area. We were looking at the value of permitting, the cost to get a building permit, after going through things like rezoning, getting a building permit, waiting a certain amount of time to

Human Resources committee  All of this raises the cost of building new housing units and suppresses the supply. We know that when you have a suppressed supply and you have a high demand, prices go up even higher than they would if you had enough housing to meet demand. We've argued that communities need

Human Resources committee  We don't have a metric of that exactly, in terms of how the wealth was transferred from group A to group B. The auditor general has documented the extra costs paid by Ontarians for electric power compared with what they would have paid at normal market rates for, say, hydro and n

Human Resources committee  I will, yes. How could we reduce energy poverty? One thing we need to do is reconsider our current approach to energy and climate policy. We've settled on an immediate transition to renewable fuels, which are more expensive than conventional fuels such as gas, which is highly ab

Human Resources committee  Good morning. Thank you for inviting me and giving me this opportunity to testify on what I consider to be one of the most important topics in public policy in our time, which is poverty, and particularly for me, energy poverty. We've done some research into this, the first don

Natural Resources committee  I will offer one quick comment. As I spoke earlier, the projections for U.S. energy independence are for 2020 to 2035. If that leads to saturation of the U.S. refining markets, again, that will itself close a window for Canadian product imports to the United States. If we wait

Natural Resources committee  There's a group derived from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce called the Institute for 21st Century Energy, which publishes an international index of energy security. They conclude that the more players that are in global trade in energy, particularly large players like Canada, the m

Natural Resources committee  I could speak to the regulatory portion to a certain extent. The Fraser Institute does several annual surveys—one on mining and one on upstream oil and gas production—of executives with companies that engage in that kind of production. One of the things we've learned from the yea

Natural Resources committee  Absolutely. We've already seen very long regulatory delays. Look at Keystone XL. We're missing opportunities every day.

Natural Resources committee  It is a risk. I didn't mean to strike fear into people's hearts, but it is a risk because of the historically unprecedented transition we've seen in U.S. energy production. Normally speaking, you think of energy systems as evolving remarkably slowly. They take decades to unfold.

Natural Resources committee  That's a challenging question. I could go on at length, and I have—I give student seminars in which I do go on at length explaining to people the unbelievable myriad ways that access to affordable and abundant energy benefits them, whether it's their cellphone and their ability

Natural Resources committee  As I mentioned in my comments, currently oil and gas producers are contributing between $17 billion and $20 billion to provincial and territorial governments in lease payments and royalties and licences. If we increase the output, as we discussed, or as is expected, doubling oil

Natural Resources committee  If we had to pick one, if we had an either/or situation, it strikes me that the growth in the future over the next several decades is expected to be overwhelmingly in Asia, and therefore a Pacific export pathway would be preferable to an eastern one. As you said, with the amount

Natural Resources committee  Thank you. Well, again, here's the pessimistic side of me: I don't believe there's any pathway from western Canada's oil resources to the Pacific coast that will be acceptable to environmentalists at all. We have four to five major environmental groups on record as saying that t

Natural Resources committee  If we do nothing, essentially we strand the resource. We lose the profits, the revenues, the byproducts, and the labour that are all associated with that activity. As we lose that economic activity in the country, our GDP, of course, moves backwards. When you're talking about som