If you look at the Obama administration in the United States, one of the avenues they're choosing, with this infrastructure money, is to start to develop a new, more environmentally friendly and more technologically modern infrastructure. Canada needs to do somewhat the same thing. It needs to be able to produce more of its own products out of its own resources. This line has been going on for fifty years, people saying this, and it's still true.
If we do that, we will develop an economy that deals with and produces our own resources for our own country first. We should then begin to trade what we have to spare. In that way we'll find we're employing more and more people. However, if we continue on the way we're going, there will only be work when somebody can finance something.
It was hard enough during the oil shock to try to have a contract with somebody that would cover your oil costs, or to try to do anything with a long-term projection, because everything was so up and down. There was no economic stability. The economy didn't make any sense. Even in terms of capitalism itself, it makes no sense when you cannot control energy prices because you can't have a contract and make a stable prediction of how much money you can make.
Because of so-called “globalization”, we are at the whim of all sorts of forces that we can no longer control. We go along and say this is all right. It is not all right. We need to control this economy and we need to build this nation. That's the direction we have to take. That's the opportunity. The opportunity is to build a nation that produces products in an environmentally friendly and technologically advanced way.
There are other countries we can look at to help give us some ideas. We can look at Germany. They are quite far advanced in developing new technologies that are environmentally friendly. We can look at Denmark. Denmark is eliminating most of their hydro poles and overhead wires, because a lot of their institutions and apartment buildings have their power generated right inside the building through natural gas. Instead of wasting natural gas on the oil sands, we should be doing a lot more with it that would be more constructive.
There are many ways to do it. You only have to think about it, instead of going the same old way that the Conservatives, the Liberals, and the NDP have been providing for us all this time. You know, it's their economic policies that have put us in this situation.
Let's try to think outside the box, is all I can say.