I not only understand Mr. McGowan's concerns, I sympathize with him. I am as Canadian as the next guy, and I would very much like to see more of any product that we make here being upgraded in Canada.
The unfortunate economic reality we're facing is that some of the existing upgrading capacity in the U.S. is being freed up. I understand that some of it has been built as an adjunct to existing refineries, which means it can be done a lot less expensively in those locations. But some of it has become freed up for no money, in large part because other heavy crudes from Venezuela, Mexico, and even the Middle East have reduced their volumes to the U.S., making all this upgrading capacity available at a very low cost, and bidding up the price of competing for this feedstock from Canada.
That has made building upgrading capacity here from grassroots extremely uneconomical and very expensive, and that disadvantage has been compounded by the fact that labour rates, which probably make up half of the cost of doing anything, are much more expensive in Canada than in the U.S.