Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I want to begin by addressing my initial comments to Mr. Archer, who had raised the importance of having some kind of cohesive energy strategy for Canada, which is not a position that we currently find ourselves in. Obviously, there's a tension between the very expansionary type of posture that Canada has had towards oil and gas development over the last number of decades and Canada's meeting its greenhouse gas reduction emission targets under the Paris accord.
As previous witnesses quite rightly pointed out, even if we're successful in reducing emissions in transportation; even if we're successful, to some extent, in reducing the emissions that are the result of extraction; and even if we're successful in reducing our emissions for power generation, for instance, there's still going to be a demand for oil and gas. The petrochemical industry is an obvious example of that. Electronics are everywhere, and every year it seems they get further and further integrated into our lifestyles. It's a product that there's going to continue to be a demand for.
The question is, how do we have a sustainable industry, both environmentally and from an economic point of view? The boom-bust cycle of the oil and gas industry in Canada has been hard on Canadian workers who plan their lives around a career and then find that the market goes into a different phase. Suddenly, the things they thought they could depend on aren't there for them anymore.
It seems to me that the obvious answer to that is some kind of strategy, but even earlier, what we heard [Technical difficulty—Editor] continuing to talk about simply needing to let the international oil and gas market do what it does, with no real indication of what I would call a meaningful strategy for how to have both an environmentally and economically sustainable future.
I wonder, Mr. Archer, if you want to speak a little bit more to that question of having a strategy, what that means in terms of government involvement in the industry and what that means in terms of expectations of private players within the industry to put what may well be a somewhat smaller industry on a sturdier footing for the kind of demand that may persist past when we're able to use renewable energy for heating and transportation.