Well, I think it boils down to a philosophical decision made by the Alberta government. In the past, previous conservative governments in Alberta, in particular the government of Peter Lougheed, have used a mix of regulation and even in some cases public ownership to promote value-added production in the energy sector.
More recent Alberta governments have basically left decisions about investment to the market. The market is deciding, and they're deciding to build their upgrading facilities south of the border for a couple of reasons, first because it's cheaper for them in some cases to simply retool existing refineries in places like the American Midwest and the gulf coast, which are major petrochemical hubs in the States, rather than building new facilities here. The decisions are also being driven in that direction by the push for the development of pipelines. So up until recently, pipeline capacity, especially for exporting raw bitumen, was more limited, but as a result of recent approvals by the National Energy Board we now have what we would describe as bitumen superhighways taking resources.
This interest among American companies to have a continental strategy and to build in the States, together with the fact that we've basically built piping that allows them to bring the bitumen there, has provided an incentive for companies to ship across the border.
Our position is that while it may make all sorts of sense for individual companies to do their upgrading and refining in the States, that doesn't necessarily make that decision something that's in the public interest of Canadians or that should be supported here.
I think we should learn lessons from the Lougheed era in particular. There's a very close parallel, actually, between what happened in the 1970s with natural gas and petrochemicals and what's happening now with bitumen. Back then the concern that faced the new Lougheed government when it first assumed power was that natural gas was being exported in its raw form, and what they called natural gas liquids, in particular ethane, were being shipped south and being used as a feedstock for petrochemicals and plastics and that kind of thing. So the plants in eastern Canada and the United States were getting all the jobs and value from this.
Peter Lougheed and his government decided that wasn't in the interest of the broader Alberta public, so he used a mix of regulation and public investment to change the situation. For example, the Alberta Energy Company, which was eventually privatized to become Encana, was a public company created by the Alberta government to take this valuable ethane and turn it into petrochemicals. So they created a multi-billion-dollar industry that hadn't existed there before.
The short answer to your question is that what we need is a willingness to consider an active role for government that's not currently being considered, so we need regulation and public control. Otherwise the market will continue doing what the market has been doing, which is exporting literally thousands and thousands of value-added jobs down the pipeline.