You used the term “facts of life”. What confuses me is that when this industry was first created and subsidized by both levels of government, the facts of life were that there was no money to be made in mining bitumen because it was too expensive to do, but the government set up a series of policies for tax incentives and research and development to enable the resource to be developed.
We now hear those inside the industry saying that we need a national energy security strategy because absent of one, we're losing this endowment and we're not maximizing the benefit, as the group from Alberta said. Now we're told that it's just the market.
It wasn't the market when we created this industry in the first place. We enhanced the market, we directed the market, and we gave subsidies to develop this product. Now we're exporting it at the lowest point of profit return for industry in Canada and Alberta. I don't understand why we suddenly say it's laissez-faire time now. We didn't say laissez-faire before: we said we'd like to develop this industry, which we did. That was taxpayer money from across the country.
We're now saying we're going to forgo the vast majority of the profit simply because there's a capacity available in the southern United States and now in China. How is it benefiting the Canadian economy to export raw bitumen to China, contrary to government policy?