Chairman, thank you very much for that. I simply wanted to point out collusion between the energy sectors here--not that it could ever be proven under Canada's current Competition Act, which is really written by the people it's meant to police, but, Mr. Chairman, thank you for that.
I want to thank and welcome all of our guests. Dane, you and I go back quite some way.
I don't have many questions for you. I only wanted to ask some simple questions more along the lines of what we've seen lately.
Mr. Cleland, you pointed out the sudden and dramatic drop in the price of natural gas, which comes as a welcome relief I think to consumers and to businesses alike across this country, though perhaps it's not good news for the gas sector.
I am concerned about how we get from the $4 to $5 to $6 when we know that inventories have been sort of static over the past few years in terms of demand--maybe up a little bit. The overall international capacity for a lot of these products, especially natural gas, has more or less remained static in the five-year bandwidth.
I'm wondering if you could tell this committee if the drop in those prices has anything to do--more than simply substitution and arbitrage between the various types of energy that are out there--with the wild speculation that we saw. Last week The Globe and Mail and many other papers wrote about the collapse of Amaranth, again another hedge fund, an organization that had spent a considerable amount of time leveraging money to drive up the price and speculating, thereby damaging the economy and obviously taking away some confidence from consumers.
In your view, what is really driving the question of price for natural gas? If it could drop fourfold in such a short period of time, one would have to conclude that it probably went up fourfold for fairly spurious reasons.