Thank you, Chair.
First of all, in terms of relevance, we think this is highly relevant. I don't know if it was a preamble to your question, but you raised the issue of what this bill deals with. Bill C-30 deals with energy production and consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in this country.
Government has available to it a number of tools that it uses to direct private investment. It uses public investment and policy to guide some of the things that occur within our borders.
One of the things that was brought forward in the mid to late 1990s under a former Liberal government, with a Conservative government in Alberta, was an incentive program, essentially, to spur on development of the Athabasca tar sands, which at the time had been deemed not commercially viable for a number of years. The incentive was to help direct investment into those tar sands, which, as Mr. Jean will attest, has met with extraordinary success. The pace of development has been encouraged by this.
The reason this is deeply relevant is that this is one of the policy signals that government has sent to industry, particularly the private sector in energy production. We have talked all the way through the Clean Air Act about various policy signals that get sent through this bill, whether they're a limitation to certain activities or an encouragement of other ones, on motor vehicles. We've talked about targets as a country, about large final emitters, the largest polluters in the country, as being essentially limited in the amount of greenhouse gas pollution they can produce.
What this government policy has done is encouraged the investment in a very energy-intensive form of energy production, also a very carbon-intensive form of production. The estimates vary, but it takes more than a barrel of oil in energy equivalents to produce a barrel out of the tar sands, and the greenhouse gases that are produced through that barrel of energy, once all is said and done, are extraordinarily high when compared, obviously, to some of the other forms available.
We think there's a certain amount of fairness in what we proposed, simply on the basis of the profitability of this sector right now. We were talking about this in question period today, I think with reference to some industries in Quebec. The Prime Minister talked about encouraging investment in a faltering industry in Quebec by allowing such an accelerated capital cost allowance to encourage a sector that is in some trouble. That certainly cannot be said of the upstream oil and gas sector in northern Alberta. Trouble is not what they're in, in terms of economic viability. They're doing quite well, as well as any company or any set of companies has ever done in Canadian private industry history. They're doing, by all accounts, extremely well, with $20 billion-plus profit this past year.
That's all well and good, and that's not the concern we have. The concern is over why we would continue to offer incentives to do more for an industry that's so clearly profitable in and of itself, with the price of a barrel of oil being, on any given day, between $55 and $70, and as high as $80, while the cost of production--Mr. Jean will probably have the exact figures--is in the low twenties. Why would a government policy continue to exist beyond the point where investment needed to be encouraged? There have been three extremely large major oil sands projects announced within the last 10 days. The enthusiasm for the sector is overheated, to say the least.
There's something about a market failure in this when we've had the community of Fort McMurray, through their town council--Wood Buffalo would be the appropriate jurisdiction for the town--ask for an actual moratorium on further projects. We've asked the provincial and federal governments to respond to this. Its infrastructure is hurting and all the rest.
But what this motion does--and the reason it's relevant--is it speaks directly to the national targets we just previously set. It speaks directly to where you want to put Canadian tax policy and incentives and why you would want to put them towards the most energy-intense and greenhouse gas emissions-intense form of production possible. We've heard from industry at the natural resources committee that they have an expectation that things will continue to rise, and that even on an intensity basis--which we don't agree with--things will get worse in the coming years and not better.
All these factors play in, and the relevance to the bill, we believe, is inherent and somewhat self-evident.
In terms of the additional charge to the taxpayer, this is not an additional charge; this is a removal of what essentially works out to be a subsidy. There's no taxpayer in the country who is going to feel the burden of this change. In fact--and we have encouraged this government, as we did the previous one--if they wish to give incentives to energy production, there are lots of willing players at the table who can produce high-quality energy, with many jobs available in sectors that are not clearly as profitable as the upstream oil and gas sector is in northern Alberta.
We absolutely think it's in order. We think it's relevant, and we're very curious to hear from other members of the committee as to their opinions on this. And of course if they're not in favour, we'd like them to justify the reason for this tax policy to be there, because why it needs to continue is simply beyond us and any sound economic analysis.