It was clever, but it actually missed the mark, because we missed many periods of $12 and $16 gigajoule gas that would have created apprenticeships for aboriginal people, that would have built a vital economy, and that would have built a self-sufficient northern Canada.
Ultimately, the environmental assessment—the moratorium that came out of the Berger commission was counterproductive, anti-scientific, and it essentially just served to strengthen the bargaining position of the aboriginal people for a big ownership stake in the Mackenzie Valley pipeline, which was what the whole debate was really about anyway. It wasn't about finding an environmentally sustainable way to build a pipeline, because they did, and that could have been done very quickly. Instead, we destroyed a northern economy and took ourselves out of the game, maybe for the next 50 years, and we used environmental assessment as a tool for other agendas.
I think that's what we don't want to do. In the end we deprived the government of billions of dollars of revenue that could have been used to protect the environment and build the lives and futures of the people of the north. It was a tremendous mistake, and a costly one for taxpayers.