I could wax on for quite a long time on this issue. I am excited about the opportunities here. I confront those who treat this as a source of anxiety and I resent those who politically stoke those anxieties. I come from an oil-producing province. I realized a long time ago that there were far too many politicians, frankly, who were stoking anxiety in an area where I see tremendous growth.
The reason I see tremendous growth is that we need workers to lower emissions in the oil industry. The oil industry in this country is not going anywhere. We are the fourth-biggest producers of oil and fifth-biggest producers of natural gas in the world. I take great pride in the workers who have built those industries, but I look at them now and I'm working with them to say, “We urgently need you to lower emissions. We need you to show the same ingenuity and hard work that you did in building this industry to change it so we lower emissions within that industry and we build up renewables.” We can and we will do both. We are one of the very few countries in the world with the wealth of natural resources that we have and the technical know-how. I regret the fact that over the years we have made workers feel excluded when they are absolutely central—central—to getting this important work done.
When we went through COVID, one of my biggest concerns was that COVID and an oil price war happened at the same time. Everybody forgets this. I remember looking at the price of oil hitting negative $35, and for Canada that was a big moment. How do we work together to make sure we retain people in the industry? I need more people in the energy industry, in the oil and gas industry, in order to lower those emissions. I think using things like orphan wells, for instance.... It's not a perfect system, but we managed to keep workers in the industry doing good work.
We have lots of challenges ahead. I went to Edmonton about a week ago to meet with the Alberta Federation of Labour. These are people I keep in very close contact with on both the employer and employee side. It is our national mission. It is our national mission right now, and we have a chance to shine. The world is watching Canada on this. I'm very proud of the work that's being done and I'm ambitious about the work that we can do.