Certainly there's a strong argument to be made that the rapid rise of oil prices, allowing the dollar to be driven up that way, creates a huge risk to the rest of the economy. Anybody who's watched markets over the long term knows that what goes up comes down. It feels as though it's never going to stop; when the dollar was rushing up to $1.10, people thought, gee, this is a trend.
You want to diversify the basis of your wealth. To look at job numbers that are based upon a petro economy without understanding how that's undermining the diversified infrastructure of the economy is a fundamental error.
I want to reinforce what Ms. Nash said: that we haven't seen the impact yet. Investments in the forest industry are being made today for tomorrow's jobs, and people are looking south. The AbitibiBowater decisions reflect Canadian business policy—and we have a choice: we can pull the investment dollars here or we can let them go elsewhere.
But we haven't seen the impact of the high dollar on our business climate yet. People just don't shut their factory as quickly as they can; they keep it going as long as they can. But if the investment isn't coming here, we really feel the pain later on, and the time to start reversing the flow of investment back into Canada is...you know, 5:15 would be good.