Thank you.
To the extent that our fiscal plans and our economic strategies were premised on the expectation that the oil price was high and going one way, and that we would be an energy superpower, and that this would drive our whole economy forward, then I think that was a mistake. Now, in reality, there were many other things, of course, that were being done, so we never, as a country, put all our eggs in the oil basket, nor should we have.
In at least our rhetoric, and to some extent in our policy, I think we emphasized too much that one sector and underestimated the importance of maintaining diversity in our economy and maximizing the value-added links to that natural resource sector. We wasted huge opportunities in using the growth in resources to leverage more demand for Canadian manufactured goods, for Canadian-made services and other inputs, to get more bang from the buck.
One good example of that has been how we've treated our petroleum refining industry. The graph in the handout shows you that real GDP in refining has actually declined since 2002 by over 10%. We should actually be focusing on getting more value-added out of our resource and less of a belief that pure extraction will save the day for us.