I will repeat something that I said in response to an earlier question about the very capital-intensive nature of natural resource industries. When you have high amounts of capital per worker, you pay very high wages. You alluded to this already, so I'll say that the knock-on effects from investment in natural resource projects, including oil and gas extraction, are considerable. One of the reasons that machinery and equipment investment has been weaker in Canada than in the United States is the amount of machinery and equipment that is used in the fossil fuel sector and in the energy sector generally.
I would like to see us do a more thorough revamp. Bill C-5, as we call it, is sort of addressing in a piecemeal fashion some of the obstacles that face individual projects, but there's no question in my mind from talking to industry executives, as you do, and you will know this, that they see that Canada has been a very difficult environment to operate in.
For those who are interested in the details, the structure of the industry is different. One of the reasons the United States was able to rebound faster from the oil price collapse is that there's more fracking there, and there's more quick turnaround stuff, whereas we have the oil sands, which are, by their nature, more like baseload, if you like that comparison. The United States has moved ahead quickly on LNG, and we have not. I think we can see some comparisons with our performance versus that of the Americans. The world wants our fossil fuels. We will need them for a long time to come. It makes sense for us to develop those resources more fulsomely than we've done over the past decade.