Natural Resources committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, for the opportunity to speak to you here today. My name is Gerry Salembier, and I am the assistant deputy minister for Western Economic Diversification in the province of British Columbia. In French, it's called Diversification de l'économie de l

Finance committee  On the specific question of the increase in the borrowing limits for the Port of Vancouver, I'm sorry but I don't have that off the top of my head. There were some changes made to the Canada Transportation Act some time ago to expand the financing capabilities of organizations li

Finance committee  I think that would be the responsibility of my colleagues and me. They're at Treasury Board and the Department of Finance.

Finance committee  It used to be my job many years ago, by the way.

Finance committee  They haven't asked us for WD money for this particular project. The T2 expansion is of a scale that's far beyond WD's resources, frankly, so they probably wouldn't come to us for the project. I have some information on it, but it's a huge expansion and well beyond our resources.

Finance committee  All of our trade agreements, and I think particularly the TPP, would open up opportunities in the Asia-Pacific region that are not necessarily there now. The free trade agreement with South Korea that was concluded recently has had exactly that effect. B.C. is located on the Paci

Finance committee  As you correctly identified, we are heavily oversubscribed, so more money would definitely make a big difference with the technology commercialization effort. We could probably do a better job of the coordination of some of our efforts with those of other agencies involved, fra

Finance committee  Thanks for the question. You're right. Everybody is positioning themselves to be a leader in this area, so you're going to hear from me very much what you've heard from others. I'm going to back it up with some really hard facts, not that some of my colleagues necessarily haven'

Finance committee  Let me give you another hard statistical piece of evidence in support of that, and, yes, you're absolutely right; that is an area where we would see a great deal of potential given additional resources. Under our WINN program, we are able to fund about one in 12 of the projects t

Finance committee  I should start with one small point about softwood lumber. My experience on this goes back quite a way, and it's not entirely doom and gloom. The industry is a little better positioned in two important respects than it was, say, in 2001, the last time we faced countervailing and

Finance committee  I think you heard from my Alberta colleague Jim Saunderson on this question of potential oil price declines and oil price impact. Essentially, the biggest impact for the country as a whole would be a decline in the spread that oil exported from Alberta faces relative to a world

Finance committee  The actual providing of training opportunity is not within WD's mandate. That's Employment and Social Development Canada. We work quite closely with them and we're trying to get to a point where we can work even more closely with them, because their funding provides training spot

Finance committee  You are describing a problem that is very serious in British Columbia and in the rest of Canada. We are talking about the future of the forestry industry. If I may, I will answer in English. My softwood lumber vocabulary is somewhat limited. I'm a former trade negotiator, and

Finance committee  That is correct, sir.

Finance committee  No.