Certainly.
Starting with the subsidies question, over the last several years I think there has been a lot of good work done on it, and there's been a lot of very questionable work done as well. We have seen a large aggregation of related and unrelated costs grouped together, which is called a “subsidy”. I think there are very legitimate fossil fuel subsidies in countries where they're subsidizing consumption. In Venezuela, for example, gasoline is subsidized by the government for its citizens.
In Canada, traditionally, we have contributed about $16 billion to $20 billion dollars a year to all levels of government, and the arguments in Canada have ranged from the taxation policy to the royalty policy. I've even seen studies that calculate the cost of road building and maintenance as a subsidy for the energy industry.
Historically, we have a very strong track record. That said, some of the policies that are currently being put forward would position all industries very differently from what we're seeing in competitive jurisdictions. We've seen in some of our climate policies, energy-intensive, trade-exposed protections, but if we look at this most recent budget, there is some very deliberate funding in there and tax credits for carbon capture and storage. That is something that isn't going to happen in Venezuela, Nigeria or Saudi Arabia. It's only going to happen in Canada.
To put the Canadian industry on a level playing field with the other eight—I'm not going to include the U.S., because they're an evolving jurisdiction—there needs to be either an acknowledgement that we're going to import our oil and natural gas from jurisdictions like Nigeria and Saudi Arabia or that we're going to level the playing field through federal stimulus and innovation dollars.
I guess there are really two sides to that coin. We are large contributors to the national economy and to the governments. On the subsidy question, we're contributors, not takers. That said, where government policy now positions Canada very differently than the global market, we are seeing and will need to see substantial federal balancing.
On the investment side, yes, we are usually, traditionally, the largest investor in the Canadian economy. From $80 billion a year to $27 billion this year has largely been the range over the last several decades. That amount, we think, should be ramping up dramatically as global demand is rising fairly substantially, but whether that investment comes to Canada or goes somewhere else is what I think we need to be focused on as a nation.