Thank you for the opportunity.
You know that necessity is the mother of invention, and without pipelines, we've seen the upsurge of transportation by rail. There are challenges with that as we all know. There have been some substantial accidents, as well as the fact that economically there are some challenges.
The point is we often find a way around short-term problems. We're getting to the point where we have no more short-term fixes. If Canada really wants to be an energy superpower, if Canada really wants to recover from a very depressed gas market, if Canada really wants to harness the value of the oil sands, we need to act. It's very clear.
If you look at natural gas as an example, as one of the other speakers mentioned, we are competing with Australia and a variety of other countries. We are an attractive country to do business with for a bunch of reasons, but we're not that attractive that they are going to wait 10 to 20 years. The fact of the matter is we need to act now.
One of the earlier comments was talking about what price of gas we need. Do not underestimate the denominator in that calculation and the cost to construct plants in Canada. We can make a material impact when it comes to the fiscal regime, the tax royalty regime, to make us more cost competitive than other countries.
Right now we're setting ourselves up to be a little slower than other countries and not necessarily more economically viable so then the intangibles that come to Canada, being stable politically, stable economically, etc., are put in question.
I believe we have a very short window when it comes to natural gas. With oil I think that it's inevitable we need to export our product more to the U.S. and beyond the United States. We're going to have substantial financial challenges in our country if we don't.