Thank you, Chair, and thank you for the opportunity to ask some more questions.
You mentioned, Mr. Carney, in relation to oil prices, just in passing, the difference between the Brent North Sea oil price and the Western Canadian Select. I know we've had this discussion generally before, but I don't think many Canadians realize, first of all, that we had the largest infrastructure investment in our history in Canada over the last five or six years by this particular government, some $33 billion in infrastructure investment over a five-year period. This was somewhere in the neighbourhood of about $3 billion or $4 billion per year. And it's amazing that as a result of the spread last year there was somewhere in the neighbourhood of $30 billion left on the table that wasn't captured by oil companies in Canada, because of the lack of transportation, the lack of infrastructure for pipelines, the inability for the rail to be able to be competitive on moving this oil. Ultimately, it has cost a lot of Canadian jobs, it's cost a lot of Canadian shareholders profits, and the reality is it has cost the federal government and the provincial governments a lot of money in tax revenues, etc. The federal government—many people don't know this—collects somewhere around 52% of the tax revenues from the oil sands.
How important is it for us to have new pipelines? It seems that even if we started today and all of them were approved, nothing would happen before 2015, and we're going to have this continual loss of $30 billion per year to the shareholders and companies of Canada.