Chair, thank you.
First let's look at the term “subsidy”. There are no production subsidies for our industry, but in terms of investment in emissions-reducing technologies, that's a necessary requirement to move the technology forward in a commercial way that will generate the investment. What we see is a joint collaborative investment with industry and government to achieve the governmental and societal objectives of reducing emissions.
That's the founding rationale for it, and in the absence of joint government investment, the private sector simply doesn't have the means to make those levels of investments. And it's also a function of the dynamics with global energy demand, which will continue to increase in the future. There has been substantial under-investment in the last couple of years, which has created the crisis we see today.
From a public policy perspective, we need to think long term, very similar to what we saw with the federal government's emissions reduction plan today, where there are incremental measures to focus on achieving reductions over time. This is one mechanism to do that, to share the investment in a way that's competitive and comparable with other jurisdictions.