Natural Resources committee  I think I'm being asked for an opinion, and I'm just wondering whether.... It's such a tempting question to respond to, but I think you are asking me for an opinion, and prudence dictates that I pass on it.

Natural Resources committee  Merci, Madame. If you would permit me an anecdote, I have a son who was working in construction in B.C., and he thought for a time about going to work in the oil sands. The advice from his friends who had worked there was “If you go to Fort McMurray, get religion and keep to yo

Natural Resources committee  It's almost 90%, so the drop from the Athabasca River is very limited. Nonetheless, you will inevitably reach a point at which you're taking all the water from the river that you can, and then the only way you can expand beyond that is to improve that rate of recycling, or develo

Natural Resources committee  The answer to that is both of the above. As I mentioned, there are a large number of proposals currently on the table, because business is able to see that there is going to be a capacity constraint. I would say that this will be within the next four or five years, and I think it

Natural Resources committee  That's correct, and the network is, of course, much larger than that. These are the major backbone pieces. There is a proposal to significantly increase the capacity of what's called the Trans Mountain Pipeline, which runs from Alberta through to Vancouver. That would allow gre

Natural Resources committee  Ultimately, it is the consumer of the product. The person who fills up her gas tank at the service station is paying the cost of it. This is all privately developed, so it would be private pipeline companies. And the economics of it is that typically, a pipeline company, before i

Natural Resources committee  Mr. Chairman, if the committee is planning to visit the oil sands, I'm sure Dr. Hamza would be delighted to take members on a tour of Devon. It's well worth seeing. It really is very impressive.

Natural Resources committee  With respect to the question about water, I think there's no question but that the availability of water is potentially a constraint on oil sands development, because not only is oil sands production energy-intensive but it's also water-intensive. You'd asked whether we were tak

Natural Resources committee  Thanks very much, Mr. Chairman. It's a pleasure to be back here in front of the committee. The oil sands is an area that has obviously attracted a huge amount of interest recently, and that's not surprising, given the scale of the investment that's being talked about there, giv

Natural Resources committee  Excellent. Starting on page 2, we note that this natural resource is not only important in economic terms but indeed is strategic, given its position in a politically stable part of the world. Established reserves are estimated at 174.5 billion barrels, but in fact the ultimate

Industry committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I just want to offer a brief comment in response to something that I thought I heard Ms. Stronach say, something to the effect that it was unfortunate we were losing high-tech jobs and falling back on natural resources. I just wanted to offer

Industry committee  There are two things. I'll just make a general comment about the data series and what we're actually measuring here. These are compilations by the International Energy Agency of data from national statistical sources. All those data series will have measurement errors around th

Industry committee  I think there is information in the data. All I'm suggesting is, you have to treat it, as you do with any economic time series, with a little bit of caution. The second point is that these data of course include taxes. So you may see differences between countries as a result of

Industry committee  I have to confess that I don't know the answer to that. I'm looking at my technical experts, and they're busy looking at the floor, so I suspect they don't know either.

Industry committee  There was a banking crisis in Scandinavia, I think, in the early nineties. There may have been a precipitous exchange rate move or something at the time, but that's speculation on my part.