Natural Resources Committee on Nov. 25th, 2010

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

On a point of order, we just heard that there's bitumen along the actual shoreline, on the banks of the Athabasca River. I would like either our witnesses or our analysts to get a photograph of that. Just in case we do a report on this, I would like to see what they're talking about.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

That's not a point of order, but we will....

Mr. Collyer has volunteered to provide that.

Thank you very much, Mr. Collyer.

Again, thank you all for coming.

We will suspend for a couple of minutes and then have the other witnesses come to the table.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

We will resume our meeting, with our second panel of witnesses.

We have by video conference, from the University of Calgary, Professor David Keith, Institute of Sustainable Energy, Environment and the Economy. Also with us, from the Pembina Institute, is Simon Dyer, policy director. From the Canadian Association of Energy and Pipeline Landowner Association, we have David Core, chairman and chief executive officer, as well as John Goudy, policy adviser.

Welcome to all of you.

We will have the presentations first, and we will start with Professor Keith.

Go ahead, please.

[Dr. David Keith, Professor, Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy, University of Calgary]

Thank you very much for having me today.

I'll start by saying a few words about energy security and the extent to which this topic really is an energy security topic, and then talk a little bit about strategy and tactics around the climate and environmental concerns of the oil sands.

First, on energy security, there are very serious and real energy security concerns in this world. These range from the concentration of the remaining easy oil in the Middle East and the security concerns that come from that to the loose nuclear weapons around the world to the European dependence on natural gas from the Soviet Union. But I think in a Canadian context there really aren't that many energy security concerns that are interesting.

I think the ultimate reason we're having this hearing today, and the reason for the focus on oil sands, has very little to do with energy security. The oil sands and related things like the oil sands, which in some ways you would say includes coal to liquids, are things that produce in principle essentially unlimited supplies of hydrocarbon fuels for the transportation sector at relatively low operating costs but very high capital costs. And those are things that are very important for being able to provide hydrocarbon fuels in the long run but have little to do with energy security, because they can't swing their supply quantities very quickly.

I'll say a few words about strategy and tactics that I hope will help to separate out some of the conflicting claims that you hear about the oil sands or that you heard in the last session.

One frequently hears the industry state that the oil sands aren't particularly worse than conventional oil. Gord Lambert in the last session said that studies were increasingly showing that they were about the same as conventional oil, for example, on life-cycle greenhouse gas and for a variety of other topics. You hear very strong concerns on the other side from the environmental community.

I want to speak to what I think is going on underneath that. I think some of the things the industry says are quite correct. The oil sands are not the greatest environmental disaster on the planet. By many measures, they're only a little bit worse than conventional oil. On greenhouse gas emissions, they're clearly worse.

Just for the record, I have set up, from expertise at Carnegie Mellon University and elsewhere, one of the most serious academic efforts, working closely with industry, to examine the oil sands life-cycle emissions.

I do not believe the claim that they are about the same as conventional is a fair or correct claim, or supported by evidence. It is true, however, that they're not ten times worse. On a well-to-wheels basis, they're maybe 20% worse or something like that, and on a point-of-production basis, they are worse by a factor of maybe two or more.

I think it's also fair to say that some of the concerns--for example, about water contamination--are overstated. There may be some water contamination problems, but at this moment they don't appear to be all that serious.

The climate problems, though, are very serious. The reason that large environmental groups, including large environmental groups from outside the country, are targeting the oil sands has a strategic core that is completely sensible and justified, and, contrary to the comments we heard last, in my view is completely in the interests of Canadians.

In tapping into the oil sands, we are tapping into one of the world's largest carbon stocks. Tapping into it commits us technologically to enormous future carbon emissions. The principal carbon problem is not the carbon emissions from production, it's the carbon emissions from use, and those carbon emissions are very serious.

I'll give you one sense of it. Some of you have probably heard too much about climate models and may be doubtful, but climate models are not the only reason. Although they're a reason that goes back, actually, 100 years, that gives us a lot of confidence about the kind of climate problems we face, and the scientific basis for concern, but they're not the only basis.

Fifty-five million years ago we had a natural release of carbon at the Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum of about, in round numbers, 1,000 gigatonnes of carbon, similar to what humanity may release this century. The results were dramatic. It was one of the largest mass extinctions in the fossil record. The climate changes were simply stunning. We didn't have an advanced civilization at that point. We didn't have cities on the coastline. We didn't have an agricultural system acutely attuned up to the current climate. But if we had, I think it's fair to say that the results would have been pretty damaging.

The amount of carbon in the oil sands alone is a quarter of what it takes to do that, roughly. There is something like 250 gigatonnes of carbon. So it is completely sensible and legitimate and strategic for the large environmental groups to want to stop access to that resource.

In my view, their strategic concern is not to clean up local production, because that's not the underlying fundamental concern—although, in the tactical sense, that's what they say. There will be lawsuits about their ducks, which I don't think is really a very serious problem. Ducks are a serious problem, but the ducks dying in tailing ponds are much less important than the actual impact on wildlife from land use changes or the ultimate impact from climate change.

But the large-scale climate changes that are entailed in accessing that carbon resource are large. The strategic view of the large environmental groups—and I've worked with some of the larger groups in the U.S. and in the world—is that it makes sense not to access that resource. That means to shut them down, and that means that the real focus of those groups is not to clean up but to end. I think it's important to have that clearly in one's mind.

Now, we in Canada and we in Alberta have separate interests, and we have to think about balancing these interests. I'm perfectly aware that my salary comes ultimately from the oil wealth in this province, and I don't advocate an immediate shutdown. But we do have to be clear-eyed about the fact that we cannot keep producing this carbon forever and expect to have a stable climate.

I think the security concern, the economic security concern, comes from the risks we bear in committing ourselves substantially to an economy tied too tightly and too solely to oil sands extraction. At some point, whether Albertans like it or not, there will be serious regulation, and when that happens, people in my town of Calgary will be walking away from their homes unless we have done serious work to diversify beforehand.

I think we face both a climate threat, which is real, and an economic threat, which comes from an overly intense concentration of industrial wealth on this topic. We need to think hard about how to manage those twin threats.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Thank you very much, Professor.

We'll go now to the Pembina Institute and Simon Dyer, policy director.

Go ahead, please, for up to seven minutes.

[Simon Dyer, Policy Director, Pembina Institute]

Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, and good afternoon, committee.

My name is Simon Dyer. I'm the policy director for the Pembina Institute in Calgary. The Pembina Institute is a sustainable energy think tank, and my policy research focus is on oil sands development.

The topic of today's hearing is energy security as it relates to the oil sands. The term “energy security” is thrown around with increasing frequency, especially with regard to the oil sands. But it's rare for those using it to actually define what energy security means. It implies, I think, the idea of energy availability, but this is a superficial and inaccurate interpretation of energy security.

I draw your attention to the International Energy Agency, which defines energy security as the “uninterrupted physical availability” of energy “at a price which is affordable, while respecting environment concerns”. Clearly, then, we need to consider economic costs versus benefits of energy and we need to consider environmental impacts of its production and consumption in any definition of energy security.

With regard to the oil sands, then, of course they hold a very large amount of oil, so physical availability is not a problem, but there are both environmental and economic impacts that undermine the extent to which we can say the oil sands contribute to Canada's, North America's, or the world's energy security.

Given Canada's abundant energy resources and relatively small population, when we're talking about energy security I think we're thinking about not so much domestic supply as our security as a supplier of energy. So how do we supply energy in a way that meets global obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and at the same time protect Canadians from the environmental impacts at home?

The world is aggressively seeking cleaner sources of energy, and we should not take it for granted that our historic position as a supplier of fossil fuels will continue in the future, especially as it's increasingly evident that Canada is not doing its fair share to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and is failing to adequately enforce the law around oil sands development.

I'd like to draw the committee's attention to yesterday's editorial in this week's issue of the journal Nature, considered one of the most prestigious scientific publications in the world. It concerns the oil sands. I'll quote from it: It would be unrealistic to expect that we could harvest fossil fuels or minerals without an effect on the environment. No form of mining is clean. But the fast development of the tar sands, combined with weak regulation and a lack of effective watchdogs, have made them an environmentalist's nightmare.

This is not environmentalists saying this; this is the journal Nature. Canada's reputation as a responsible supplier of energy as related to oil sands is being damaged. It's being damaged not because the oil sands have a public relations problem; it's being damaged because development is not proceeding responsibly.

If Canada and Alberta continue to focus on public relations and neglect their responsibilities to enforce existing laws and regulations, the federal government will be exposed to continued legal challenges, the industry will be vulnerable to tougher environmental restrictions in the marketplace, and Canadians will be exposed to economic uncertainty and competitive challenges resulting from tying the value of our dollar to the price of oil.

In October, the Pembina Institute, along with the environmental organizations Environmental Defence and Équiterre, released Duty Calls: Federal responsibility in Canada's oil sands. I want to highlight some of the key findings of that report.

A key finding of the report is that government's math on carbon emissions in the oil sands simply doesn't add up. If expansion of the oil sands proceeds as planned, the oil sands industry will outspend its proportional share of Canada's carbon budget under the government's current target by a factor of 3.5 times by 2020 and by a factor of 40 times by 2050. That's even assuming a very optimist application of carbon capture and storage technology. The oil sands sector must do its fair share to reduce greenhouse gas emissions along with the federal government's commitments.

Our study also showed that we need to acknowledge and minimize negative economic impacts of oil sands development and address petro-currency impacts on Canada's manufacturing sector. We need to protect water quality by setting and enforcing environmental limits to meet the requirements of the Fisheries Act. We need to protect wildlife by enforcing the Species at Risk Act for woodland caribou and working with Alberta and Saskatchewan to create a regional network of protected areas. And we need to set binding caps on air pollution according to the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.

Until Canada acts in these areas, we cannot fulfill our role as a responsible, secure supplier of energy, and this will hinder Canada's ability to develop and market our resources. The governments of Alberta and Canada are over-promising and under-delivering environmental management in the oil sands.

I also want to talk a little bit about some of the predictions of how much oil the world needs. When discussing oil sands, Natural Resources Canada makes a habit of placing development of the oil sands in the context of future global energy demand as assessed by the International Energy Agency. We heard similar comments this morning from both Suncor and CAPP.

The department consistently misuses the IEA's analysis, including the recent testimony of Mr. Mark Corey before this committee. Mr. Corey noted that the IEA projected that global energy needs “will increase at about 1.5% per year until 2030, which would be an overall increase of about 40%”. But both NRCan and Mr. Corey based this premise on the “reference scenario” of the IEA's World Energy Outlook, which the IEA actually notes on its website is most definitely not a forecast of what will happen but a baseline picture of how global energy markets would evolve if governments made no changes to their existing policies and measures.

Furthermore, the IEA notes that the reference scenario is actually based on a scenario that takes us to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere of a concentration of 1,000 parts per million and a temperature rise of six degrees. This would almost certainly lead to massive climate change and irreparable damage to the planet. In other words, it seems that NRCan is hedging on a bleak, unlivable world that fails to deal with climate change as a place where we maximize bitumen production.

Not only is NRCan describing the reference scenario as a projection that somehow supports the case for oil sands development, but they also fail to acknowledge that the reference scenario is in direct contradiction to Canada's commitments under the Copenhagen accord, which Canada has endorsed, and which would set the objective of limiting the increase in global temperature to 2°C.

So I think it's fair to say we need to start being honest about the inconsistency between projected oil sands expansion and Canada's commitments to reduce greenhouse gases. As I've stated before, the math does not add up, and ignoring this fact does not address the looming problem. In a world where we need deep reductions in greenhouse gas pollution, there is no energy security without climate security.

I would say, though, that now I need to agree with Suncor: there's a growing consensus that there's a need for a national discussion on energy and the environment. The stakes are simply too high around oil sands development, both economically and environmentally, for development to proceed as it is in the current piecemeal fashion without a coherent vision and a plan that demonstrates how oil sands development can fit into a clean energy transition.

A U.S. journalist said to me last week--referring to the disconnect between Canada's Copenhagen target and its increasing oil sands emissions and the continued downplaying of evidence of pollution from the oil sands--that it seems like the oil sands are defying gravity up there in Fort McMurray.

I think that sums up what we need to do in terms of addressing the issues coherently.

Thanks very much for the opportunity to present today, and I look forward to your results. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Thank you very much, Mr. Dyer.

We go now to the Canadian Association of Energy and Pipeline Landowner Associations.

Who will make the presentation today?

Okay, Mr. Core, go ahead for up to seven minutes, please.

[David Core, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Association of Energy and Pipeline Landowner Associations]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

We'd like to thank the members of the committee for the opportunity to speak with each of you today. We are appearing on behalf of CAEPLA, the Canadian Association of Energy and Pipeline Landowner Associations.

My name is Dave Core, and I am CAEPLA's CEO. I am accompanied by John Goudy. John lives and works on his family's farm in southwestern Ontario. He is a practising lawyer and a member of CAEPLA's board of policy advisers.

Let me begin by saying that CAEPLA is a pro-development organization. We have several dozen regional and provincial affiliated associations, including four provincial pipeline landowner associations, which, to the best of our knowledge, are the only provincial pipeline landowner associations in Canada.

The individuals who gave birth to CAEPLA are landowners who'd come to understand that the NEB is not a public interest regulator in the sense that any normal person would understand a public interest regulator to be. For all practical purposes, the NEB has three mandates--as an energy industry facilitator, as a regulatory watchdog, and as a quasi-judicial body and sometimes ombudsman that is seemingly obligated to represent the interests of the people its policies affect.

As an industry facilitator, it is a success. As a regulatory watchdog, it is passive and theoretical. As a sometimes ombudsman giving due regard to the legitimate interests of landowners, it is a failure.

For many years, growing landowner resentment toward the NEB has bubbled beneath the surface. It didn't spill into the public arena because few landowners had been subject to its regulatory provisions. Alberta regulates about 400,000 kilometres of pipeline. By way of contrast, up until recently the NEB's pipeline portfolio was about one-tenth that size. Due to oil sands and other production factors, this is, and will be, dramatically changing.

The first significant public expression of landowner resentment toward the NEB and its policies spilled into the public arena some years ago when two farm couples from southwestern Ontario mortgaged their farms to launch a court action. Frustrated by all that was occurring at the time, these landowners believed it would be easier to address the issues by engaging in a legal action against the pipeline company that operated within the provisions of the NEB regulations rather than against the federal government as represented by the NEB.

The court battle addressed soil degradation and diminished property values. It resulted in a legal victory for landowners, but it didn't change NEB policy.

Since that court case, without consulting landowners the NEB amended its policies to shift financial and legal liability for abandoned pipelines from the pipeline companies to landowners. It established provisions, again apart from landowner consultation, that awarded jurisdictional control, of what today amounts to one million acres of land, to the pipeline companies that the NEB openly and unabashedly was calling its partners.

The NEB then established provisions, again apart from landowner consultation, that resulted in landowners holding liability every time they drove their farm equipment across a buried pipeline on their farms without first obtaining permission from either the NEB or the pipeline company.

The most recent episode of the NEB openly trampling landowner interests occurred in Alberta when it unilaterally stripped thousands of landowners of the legislative and regulatory protections they had enjoyed for decades when it transferred control of 24,000 kilometres of Alberta-regulated pipeline into its own portfolio. It did this even after landowners raised and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to appear before the NEB with professional witnesses to fully explain the far-reaching implications of such a policy.

Moving to the NEB's current LMCI process--land matters consultation initiative--CAEPLA and other affiliated provincial associations raised several hundred thousand dollars to participate in this undertaking. Our objective was to ensure that we could utilize the expertise of professional witnesses to fully and accurately present the NEB with a clear understanding of the impact its policies had upon landowners.

Let me pause here and parenthetically insert that these are after-tax dollars we must solicit from landowners affected by NEB processes--Canadians who have no financial interest in NEB processes, no financial interest in pipelines, yet whose lives are being imposed upon and whose property values are being diminished.

At the very beginning of the LMCI process, a condition of participation by CAEPLA and our affiliated associations was an assurance that the rules would be amended in such a way that landowners would not hold financial or legal liability for abandoned pipelines. After all, we don't own or hold a financial interest in these pipelines.

We were assured by the NEB that such would be the case. Then, after we appeared at the LMCI, we were told that landowners would have to hold some liability for abandoned pipelines.

The result was that CAEPLA and all our affiliates walked out, knowing we had been misled.

Today we recognize that no single agency of government, no matter how well intended and well funded it may be, can fulfill the mandates as contradictory as those held by the NEB. The NEB cannot be, all at the same time, an energy industry facilitator, a regulatory watchdog, and a type of ombudsman to the people its own policies trample. This is a matter of how you see this.

Regulatory capture at the NEB is very real and very alive. It is our considered opinion that this is not due to an inherent flaw in the character of its managers. Rather, it exists as a natural outworking of the contradictory and competing mandates that the NEB possesses.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Thank you very much, Mr. Core.

Mr. Cullen, is it still your intention to have your motion dealt with today?

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Yes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Okay.

We'll have to make this a five-minute round of questions so that we can get to Mr. Cullen's motion.

Mr. Tonks.

[Alan Tonks, Liberal, York South—Weston, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I do appreciate the issue with respect to time.

Thank you to our witnesses.

Professor Keith, I found it a little satirical, if you will. You gave your overview. You talked about whether the oil sands were dirty. You said, well, greenhouse gases are high, but relative to other emissions are probably not--maybe two times as bad as conventional, maybe 20 times as bad. You mused about that to some extent.

With respect to water issues, you talked about how it didn't appear that there was a huge problem. But then you came down to your bottom line: your job is implicated with respect to whether we go along with some of the suggestions to just shut the oil sands down. You said that you thought the sacrifice was too much, and that we then fall back on serious regulation.

I would take it that serious regulation would let you and the people who have their homes in the west...that they wouldn't be following the situation that is in the United States.

I guess my question is about the area of serious regulation. It would be similar to the question I would put to Mr. Dyer, because he comes down to that bottom line too. He talks about water quality, wildlife issues, and about caps on pollution.

So where do we go in terms of matching our ability to produce...but to produce in an environmentally sustainable way? Where are you in terms of that?

[Dr. David Keith]

First of all, let me give you a few numbers, and then let me answer your more strategic questions.

On a well-to-wheels basis--that is, counting both the emissions at the source and at the use phase, when people burn the oil in their tanks--the oil sands carbon emissions are perhaps 20% in round numbers. There's lots of uncertainty in conventional oil. Again, it depends which conventional oil you're talking about.

I think I would answer the strategic question as follows. We cannot keep taking carbon out of the ground and putting it into the atmosphere for this century without really dramatic climate change that will be truly dangerous. We have to have a clear-eyed policy to stop doing that.

There is nothing you can do in the long run about cleaning up the oil sands production that solves that problem, because the product is the problem. Even if there were no emissions at all from the oil sands operations, the main problem is still the product. The main problem is taking the carbon out of the ground and putting it into the atmosphere. So in the long run, if we want a stable climate--and we will, and we do, and our grandkids will--we have to stop, period. There's no technological fix.

But the climate problem gives us some time. It's not a panic. We don't have to do this in five years. This is a half-century problem, but a half-century problem demands, if we're serious about technological change and about doing this with minimum disruption to our way of life, that we start to get serious now about what technologies and what innovations we're going to put in place to allow us to wring the carbon out of the energy system and to deliver more energy services, including delivering energy services to a billion people on this planet who currently have no access to modern energy and who deserve it. They deserve the ability to access it through their own hard work. We need to figure out how to do that with zero carbon emissions, and we need to do that over the space of a bunch of decades--four, five, you name it.

That means we need a serious conversation in Canada that doesn't get locked up on nonsense about dead ducks but focuses on a clear path that agrees on when we are going to peak oil sands emissions and when we are going to tail them off and that thinks hard about how to use all the engineering and managerial talent we have in this town and elsewhere to do things that can supply us with energy in ways that don't put carbon into the atmosphere.

[Alan Tonks, Liberal, York South—Weston, ON]

Professor Keith, thank you very much for that.

I'm wondering if Mr. Dyer could have an opportunity to address the same question.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Please be very brief, Mr. Dyer. Unfortunately, we're under really tight time constraints.

[Simon Dyer]

Absolutely.

I think I'd agree with Dr. Keith that we need to be talking about environmental limits. The discussion around oil sands has been extremely black and white. If you actually want to have responsible oil sands development, you have to be talking about what level of oil sands development achieves the environmental outcomes you need to achieve, and no one in Canada is talking about what level of oil sands development is acceptable.

Going back to the IEA's World Energy Outlook, it says, under the “450 scenario”--450 parts per million--the oil sands would only achieve 3.3 million barrels a day. There are 7 million barrels a day of proposed projects on the table currently.

So until we talk about limits and until we actually have the federal government enforcing the law on the ground and enforcing these limits in the oil sands, we're not going to have responsible oil sands development.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Thank you, Mr. Tonks.

Go ahead, Monsieur Pomerleau, for up to five minutes.

[Roger Pomerleau, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you to all of our witnesses for appearing before the committee.

My first question is for you, Mr. Keith. I enjoyed your presentation, and, although I am new to this issue

--I don't know anything about it--

I tend to believe that you are the one that is right.

You are urging us to reflect on the situation we see here. On the one hand, I would agree with you that the planet is overheating, and that this will be more than detrimental to us. On the other, we need energy.

How do you perceive the serious and far-reaching debate you are inviting us to engage in, on what basis should we do that? You say we need to be serious about this, on the one hand, but what should be the focus of our studies so as to find a solution bridging these two concerns: the need for energy, and planetary security?

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Go ahead, Professor.

[Dr. David Keith]

We will do this not, I think, by using less energy, and not by consumer choice. We will do this by switching our primary energy supply to supplies that don't use carbon.

It's important to think about the enormous success we've had in the rich world since the Second World War in cleaning up the environment. On mercury, on lead and gasoline, on air pollution, our water--on all those things we made huge, enormous progress. The places we made progress best were when government set clear targets and industry innovated to find ways to meet those targets.

That could be done here too. There are lots of ways that we can produce abundant energy without carbon emissions, from large-scale nuclear power—which is one of the things I think we must take most seriously—to large-scale wind power, or solar in some places. But we have to be clear-eyed about making that transition. And in Canada, we have to be clear-eyed about making investments in innovation, at both a university level and a corporate level, that allow us to win in a carbon-constrained world.

Currently the amount of energy innovation in Canada, the amount of money, is tiny by many measures of global standards. And it's completely unfocused. Money is dribbled across almost every imaginable energy technology, from tidal to whatnot, with no sense of strategy or focus.

I served with Angus Bruneau on the Bruneau commission a couple of years ago, which tried to make this very clear. I think the central challenge we face is to, first of all, be serious about the long-run challenge of reducing carbon emissions, but also to think about how to do that in a way that provides jobs, and high-quality jobs, for Canadians. That means thinking hard about a limited number of strategic choices we make about clean energy.

So for example, government after government has failed to deal with what we're actually going to do with AECL, and I don't see any sense that people understand the actual way the nuclear industry is working and the actual strategic choices we face. The same is true for many other technologies. We have a focus on bringing small amounts of wind power into Canada, but no understanding of the industrial implications of who actually owns and controls the major wind power industry. Some much more clear-headed thinking about the intersection of industrial policy and the need to decarbonize is needed.

[Roger Pomerleau, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Thank you very much.

Do I have time for one other question? Yes, then it would be for Mr. Dyer.

Sir, just like the company we heard from this morning you are urging us to engage in a public debate on a number of issues, to think about the cars we are building, the way in which we build, or plan our cities, etc. That is what this company was telling us we needed to do. You would agree.

If this public debate does not occur immediately, what do you suggest we do in the meantime?

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Mr. Dyer, go ahead.

[Simon Dyer]

Thank you.

Obviously there is a need for a broad-scale discussion on a national energy and environmental strategy. But in the absence of that, we need to make steps to address the carbon we're putting into the atmosphere. Canada still has no federal greenhouse gas regulations. Despite what you heard from our industry speakers this morning, the oil sands emissions continue to grow. That growth will continue until we have regulations in place that drive the kind of innovation we need to see. It's naive to expect technological innovation without the regulations to drive things.

I would say that greenhouse gases are the international issue of importance. But as an Albertan, I think we shouldn't ignore some of the regional issues around air, land, and water. I take a slightly more pessimistic view than Dr. Keith on that. There are some serious problems on the ground that affect the quality of life and long-term liability for Albertans and Canadians. Clearly, in our report Duty Calls, we outline the key areas where we would like to see the federal government involved.

[Roger Pomerleau, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Merci.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Merci, monsieur Pomerleau.

Mr. Cullen, you have up to five minutes. Go ahead, please.