No, it's just an acknowledgement of fact.
Long before I was born, it was something that became synonymous with the frustration many Albertans face with our national government here in Ottawa. It still elicits a strong emotional response. In fact, if you go to a coffee shop in Battle River—Crowfoot—the area I am so proud to represent, with 110,000 people over about 53,000 square kilometres of beautiful east-central Alberta countryside—and mention the national energy program, Mr. Chair, there will be a strong response. People will have strong opinions. I'd like to get into the reason for that.
At the time, there was acknowledgement that Alberta was starting to see a tremendous amount of prosperity. Largely, this came about because of the discovery of conventional oil reserves. I would encourage the Liberal and NDP members specifically to take note of my talking about “conventional oil reserves”, because I'm going to make a differentiation that is absolutely key to the discussion of both the amendment at hand and the motion that is meant to divide. The discovery of conventional oil reserves meant we could find, drill for and produce oil that could be sold on the global market in a very economical way. The result was the beginning of the unprecedented prosperity brought about as a result of this. What's very interesting....
I will take a small detour here. My late grandfather Kurek, who was very proud to be one of.... This speaks to another issue I'll get to at some point, which is LNG. LNG is simply liquefied—