I don't think Canadians should throw up their hands and say that the decisions have been made by market forces. At the end of the day, from our perspective, it's a choice made by our leaders. It's unfortunate that this choice has been made more difficult by the fact that the Alberta government and the federal government, through the National Energy Board, have approved the construction of these very large bitumen super-pipelines that connect Alberta to these refineries that are looking for new feedstock. If that decision had not been made, if those approvals had not been granted, we would have been in a better position to upgrade here.
In fact, the Alberta government knew that by building these pipelines they would actually be undermining their own competitive advantage. Before the construction of the Keystone pipeline and the Alberta Clipper pipeline, their own economists were telling them that one of the great competitive advantages Alberta had was that its refineries had access to relatively cheap feedstock in the form of bitumen. Bitumen was sort of a stranded resource. It needed more refining than traditional crudes. The result was that it was cheaper. We could have used that cheap resource to feed our refineries and create a more expansive refining industry, but we undermined that competitive advantage by building these pipelines.
Having said that, that has happened already. So what we're left with now is a choice. The only choice is some form of export restriction, which is exactly what Peter Lougheed did in his day. He basically said that in the case of natural gas, natural gas by-products, especially ethane, would have to be made available to Canadian companies for value-added production, and they couldn't be exported until all Canadian demand had been satisfied.