I would suggest to you, Madam Commissioner, that it's not sustainable. I guess it depends how you define sustainable. But if you look at the increase in the greenhouse gases, at the carbon dioxide, at the way the water is being dealt with, and at the impact on local communities, I'm not sure that the way it's progressing today is sustainable.
Another aspect of this would be.... There are many propositions that come up from time to time. Today we hear that EnCana Corporation and the U.S. giant ConocoPhillips are talking about a joint venture, so that oil sands production would go into refinery capacity in the United States. That raises a number of political questions and other public policy issues that I have a certain perspective on. Is that the kind of thing you would look at, in terms of whether or not this is a sustainable approach?
The second part is this. We hear a lot about carbon capture and sequestration and a lot about recycling water, but those technologies are not in play yet. How long will it take to get them into play?
Could the federal government, for example, redeploy some of the tax expenditures that go to the oil and gas industry now? I have some research on that, which tells me there is about $1.2 billion to $1.4 billion a year in tax expenditures to the oil and gas sector. Why not redeploy those resources to accelerate the development and deployment of technologies that are going to capture and sequester carbon and deal with the recycling of water?