Thank you for that very important question. It calls for a brutally frank answer.
Ms. Joseph spoke of the importance of the Canadian oil and gas and coal industry—coal less so, but oil and gas more so. That's the reason. Canada is a petro state. Canada exports fossil fuels. Fossil fuels generate an enormous amount of economic activity.
As a result, Canada's climate policy has had, in effect, in reality, as a main objective, the protection of Canada's oil and gas industry. It has not been truly designed to protect the climate. The proof of that is that after all of these years of climate policy, emissions keep going up. Emissions from oil and gas in particular keep going up.
We talk about carbon capture and storage. We have a wonderful demonstration project in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. It is a world leader in this technology. As the professor who spoke earlier said—I'm sorry, but his name escapes me—this technology is completely unreliable in effectively sequestering carbon at an acceptable cost, at scale, in order to meet the needs of the climate emergency. The professor was quite right. We need radical change.
That in a nutshell is why Canadian climate policy has failed. Its real objective was not to protect the climate, but to protect the oil and gas industry.