The Honourable Lisa Raitt – Canadian Minister of Natural Resources – Economic Club of Toronto Speech

Economic Club of Toronto

Toronto Ontario
January 9, 2009

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Thank you very much (emcee), and thanks very much to the Economic Club of Canada for the opportunity to speak here today.

Let me begin by saying what an honour and a privilege it is to serve as Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources.

I guess more people in these parts know me from my time at the Toronto Port Authority and left wondering how that meshes with my new role.

But I am also the daughter of a Cape Breton coal miner. So I understand, in a very personal way, what it means to live in a household that depends on our resource industries.

And, if anything, my time in the boardroom only further hammered home the point that so much of Canada’s trading economy still depends, in large part, on our resource industries. Something we see most clearly in how the Canadian dollar often tracks closely to commodity prices.

So I came into this job with an understanding of the importance of our resource industries to the people who work in them- as well as the impact they have on our economy as a whole.

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