Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to start by looking at the concept of a world market, and it actually is a business model that's a free capitalist market. I just heard from Mr. Van Kesteren on this. You have, in this market here, a number of different state companies that set public policy that affect how much they extract. You have OPEC, which is a political body, essentially, that a number of American presidents have either made explicit requests to or rattled the sword, so to speak, to have them contribute more volumes onto the market, sometimes even fewer volumes. As well, the United States has a strategic petroleum reserve, which they've already drawn on, I believe, two times to try to influence the sale of gasoline to be lower. There's debate as to whether that has been successful or not, but they also have increased their capacity now to a billion barrels of refined capacity.
My question to start off is, given all these factors that are out there, where is the accountability that eventually consumers can go back to if there isn't a public policy related to this? I really believe that different governments can set target zones and so forth. Is that happening out there with other countries, and is it affecting the overall world market by government policies related to extraction and refinement?