The transition is under way, and it's having profound effects on Alberta communities and the Alberta labour market. As I said in my opening remarks, we have already lost about 40,000 jobs in oil and gas, just in one province, and those jobs are not coming back.
It started out as a response to the collapse in oil prices and the resulting drop in oil and gas-related investment, but oil companies are responding to the lower price environment by automating and reducing their costs. As you said, money is being piled back into the industry, partly by government and, more recently, by profits. Most of our big oil sands companies are recording record profits as a result of the recent spikes in the price of oil, but they are not plowing it back into investment. They are using it to buy stock options, pad their profits and pay down their debts.
It's clear to us in the Alberta labour movement that the oil and gas sector in our province will never be the engine for job creation that it once was, and it's irresponsible for our leaders to wave their hands and suggest that we can go back to the way things were. We're used to a boom-and-bust cycle, but the boom and bust is over. This is a structural transformation, so instead of talking about maintaining the status quo, we should be planning for a future that's going to look very different from our past.