Thank you for the question.
Sitting as I am on a panel with a CEO from an aluminum company and with colleagues from the trade union movement for the aluminum company, you will understand if I will not comment on the aluminum industry and maybe let them do so, since they know their business.
Maybe I can offer you a few thoughts to begin with by talking about a sector I got to know fairly well recently, which is the Canadian energy sector. Just to underline my point, bearing in mind that energy is our largest export, you would really have to work hard to be more dangerously dependent on one market than we are in the Canadian energy sector on the United States.
The province got to live this when it was dealing with the consequences of carrying capacity shortages and had to go through a round of curtailment a year ago to deal with a grotesque discounting of Canadian energy in the United States market, because basically they could. They had a monopoly control over our supply and could basically state the price. Canada had to turn down its exports to tighten up the market and try to deal with a brutal price shock.
Just quickly to wrap up, what we saw in these negotiations was, with that kind of monopoly control over that big chunk of our export markets, the Americans don't care about it anymore. The reason they don't care enough about it to have a finger on it in these trade agreements is that they are now net exporters and are our principal competitors.
Our commodity exports, like energy, which is what the economy is built on, are obviously where we begin this discussion of trade diversification. Right now we are hard-wired to export even raw commodities to only one market with the consequences we can see, including the price shock in our largest commodity. We have to address that and, of course the Government of Canada is doing that with the Trans Mountain pipeline and taking other measures—