Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It's a great opportunity to be able to have two sets of questions to ask you. I certainly am impressed with the choice by the government.
But I would like to talk a bit about what's near and dear to my heart, which is the regionalization of Canada's economy based upon pockets of high employment and other pockets of low employment. I speak specifically about our export market, oil sands. I'm from Fort McMurray, so I'm very passionate about that particular issue.
I see this morning, for instance, that oil sands are discounting between $30 million and $50 million per day because of a constrained pipeline. I looked at the market this morning and I saw that LNG is about $4.16 per billion cubic feet here in North America. In Asia it is $14, almost $10 more, three times the price. And in Europe it is $11.50 per billion cubic feet per day.
We know that the low price here in North America is primarily as a result of our having the constraint of delivery mechanisms to other countries, even though there's high demand from the United States. So we have one market. How great is that risk to the Canadian economy, first of all? And how do we continue to explore ways to eliminate that risk? What can we do to take advantage of the pockets of high employment areas vis-à-vis other parts of the country?