Exactly. I think it's very important to recognize that over the last decade or so, the subsidization of industries—particularly in energy—with a reduced tax rate has resulted in a stranded amount of capital, and it hasn't been re-injected back into the economy at its maximum potential.
If we actually recognize that Canada is the only major country that does not have an energy policy to support its economy in enhancing value added, we need to figure out how to develop a value-added policy that will actually deliver the maximization of our vast wealth.
Most countries have national oil companies. They deliver public goals. Most countries have policies to support the value added. If you look at the U.S., you see that they have the 1975 energy policy and export act, which restricts crude oil exports until that crude oil is turned into valuable products like petroleum, gasoline, jet fuel, diesel, etc. They have the Jones Act in the United States, which restricts the shipping industry, and somehow, at a cost of around four times what it would cost without the legislation, that industry is profitable.
Really, we need to take a look at redirecting the policy to ensure that the energy sector delivers industry that will diversify our economy to its potential and strengthen our economy, so that when the inevitable booms and busts happen, we are so strong that we can weather those storms. If, for example, all we delivered was what Mr. Harper promised, which would be that bitumen would not be exported to Asia, upgrading and refining in Canada would become profitable pretty quickly.
That would get industry doing what they should be doing for the Canadian economy, because they're already doing it for their bottom lines, and four national oil companies are already doing it for their countries. All we need is a policy in place to provide them with the incentive to take that money and reinvest it in value added. That would slow down the pace of development of production, and that would allow sustainable solutions to be determined so that in the next 30 or 40 years we actually would remove the kind of dependency we have today and the kinds of problems we're dealing with today.