Thank you.
I wanted to thank the committee for appearing here. I wish you had more time. I wish you had time to see around the city. I'm sorry that it's snowing out there. You might get the notion that the streets really aren't paved with gold, that it's very much of a free enterprise society that we live in here. I know that comes as a very strange thing to some on the committee.
One of the things I think it's important to know is how it all works together somewhat differently from perhaps other parts of the country. I think of Ms. van Kooy's volunteer organizations, the amount of support they get, for example, from our leading industries, the oil industry. I think we probably have the highest per capita of volunteer cooperation and charitable donations of any jurisdiction in Canada.
I look, too, at the numbers of our employees who are employed in the oil industry and spin-off industries, for example. I look at the benefits out of all our organizations as a result of this, like the sports centre, like CODA, like the zoo. And it's simply a different way of looking at things that we like to leave some of this in the hands of the people who create the wealth so that they can decide where they want it spent as well as to funnel it through bureaucracies.
I had a question here, but it's dragged out. I just want to get that on the record. We don't always do things the same way out here, but we manage to have a pretty good quality of life as a result of it.
Who might want to comment further on that sort of thing and how we develop that? There are those of us who sometimes take offence at the shots at our industries here and how we work and the contributions they make to the rest of the country. We don't have an accelerated capital cost allowance any longer, for example.
I would like to ask Mr. Alvarez what the impact of that has been and what he expects it to be. I personally didn't think it was a very good idea to lose it.