In terms of simply energy, I'm going to talk about Canada-U.S. energy relations, not about environment aspects, which I'll come to later on.
In terms of Canada-U.S. energy relations, we've done a lot of market liberation over the last 25 years, and in some sense, it has resulted in exactly the kinds of things we should have expected: huge increases in Canadian energy production, huge increases in exports of energy from Canada to the United States. What has emerged over the last while, however, is that there are clearly regulatory issues both within Canada across jurisdictions and between Canada and the U.S. Building transmission capacity, building pipelines, building energy-related infrastructure of those kinds becomes much more difficult, in part because of the regulatory approaches that have been taken in Canada, within the provinces, and in the U.S. as well.
That, I think, would be a really important part of a policy agenda, to ensure better regulatory cooperation within Canada and across the international border to address those kinds of issues in the future. It is complicated, because it includes first nations issues and all those kinds of things, but the federal government has a duty, a responsibility, to take a leadership role in this area.
On the environmental side, I think it is not possible to solve or address this problem in an effective and meaningful way without government intervention. The government is the agent in the economy that can set the rules to make the behaviour. Whether it's technological development and adoption, or whether it is how energy producers behave or consume energy, or how energy consumers behave, government is the agent in the economy that must set the context. The responsibility, I would argue, of a government is to set the context in a way that allows us to deal with the problem in the cheapest way possible, and in that sense, that has been the struggle of Canadian environmental and energy policy for the last many, many decades. We've not been able to find the right coalition to bring together an effective and credible policy approach that will deliver real progress on the agenda, but also in a way that delivers results at the cheapest cost.