Sure. That's two questions.
In terms of the economic transition, I would just say that the world is moving to a cleaner, more innovative economy whether Canada likes it or not. Our choice is whether we go with the leading peloton or fall behind. I think that in 20 years.... Much like the transition to free trade 30 years ago, falling behind is a bad long-term decision.
That said, we still live in a world that uses oil and gas. We'll continue to use oil and gas for decades. We should be able to compete in world markets to produce that oil and gas and we should strive to have the environmental footprint of our production be as low as possible and support our producers in doing that.
For example, if an oil company used the accelerated capital cost allowance for clean technology, it would count as a fossil fuel subsidy right now. We don't want to count that as a fossil fuel subsidy. That's actually a good incentive. My point was to encourage incentives that encourage our industry to reduce its footprint, while at the same time we keep pace with the rest of the world in moving to a de-carbonized economy because that train has left the station and we can either get on it or not.
In terms of the incentives, to make a long story short, there's this valley of death. It's well known in the investment world that when you're starting up a small firm and you're moving from R and D to scaling up, it's really hard to get investment. We've done a really good job of providing public support through BDC, EDC, SDTC and other vehicles to help leverage that private investment, but these tax incentives pull the private funding that you need. That's ultimately what's going to carry these companies through to market. We don't want permanent public funding. We want to use it as a nudge, basically, to pull private investors in.
Flow-through shares have been very successful in mining. They're good for a cyclical industry. They're targeted. A targeted tax incentive that targets those early-stage innovative firms.... You don't have to limit it to clean tech. You could look at digital, for example. I would say that you want to target the technologies of the future. B.C., Alberta and New Brunswick have all done it. They've had these 30% investor tax credits. There are a couple of good external reviews that show they've been good value for money. They've pulled new funding into the marketplace that wouldn't have been there with a significant return on public investment, so it kind of seems like a no-brainer.
It was the big resource companies of the country recommending this. This is the oil industry, the mining industry and the forestry industry saying that they depend on those small innovative firms to feed the innovation that they then adopt and that's going to position them to be at the leading edge.
People think of clean tech as electric cars and solar panels. Clean tech is also the mining industry, the oil and gas industry and the forestry industry. These are the adopters of the clean tech and they're the backbone of our economy. The two go hand in hand.