Thank you very much, Chair, and thank you very much for your warm welcome.
I want to thank everybody who made presentations this morning. I have questions for just about all of you in the long seven minutes that I have to do so.
Let me start with Ms. Allan. Thank you so much for focusing us on the lost opportunities, if you will, in terms of having adopted a rip-and-ship policy when there's so much more that we could be doing if we wanted to be serious about maximizing the benefits out of the oil sands.
As you're an economist, I have a specific question for you in that regard. You'll recall that the International Monetary Fund, which is hardly an NDP think tank, for any of you who are wondering, suggested that there's a lot of dead cash in the economy right now. They in fact chided Canada for having the most dead cash in the G-7. That amount now actually exceeds our national debt, so we're talking about a significant amount of money. I think that right now it's in the neighbourhood of $626 billion, and 60% of that, the IMF suggests, is actually in the mining and energy sector.
Given your position that we could do so much more, I wonder if you could comment on how we could best use some of the dead cash and how much of it, frankly, would be reasonable to think about reinvesting, and on what we could do with that to move towards sustainable development and really maximize the oil sands in the way that you talked about in your presentation.