Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I would just like to return to the topic of refining. I've been looking through a number of figures, and actually talking to many of the businesses in this sector. From my research, I found that in 1971 we had 41 refineries—or around that. Now we have about 19. Our peak year for refining oil was 1977. We refined about 2.3 million barrels then, and now we're down to under 2 million barrels.
The question earlier from Mr. Cannan was about increasing capacity. My fear is the other side, that it's an industry in decline—and perhaps rapid decline. There is a fear that if we are constructing large pipelines that just export crude or unrefined conventional oil, these will require long-term service contracts of 15 to 20 years, perhaps. Some of the refineries in Canada don't—at least some of the industry leaders I've talked to said they don't—want to sign on to a 20-year deal.
My big issue is that this industry might be on the verge of collapse over the next little bit. You were talking about how we haven't built refineries and how they have all the capacity in the U.S. states. So we might be in an absurd position wherein crude is exported out, and we then buy back gasoline at the cost of our own refineries, our own refining industry.
My question is, has this been discussed? We've been hearing a lot about pipelines: Keystone, Enbridge, Trans Mountain, TMX, these giant pipelines. Has there been any discussion about the future of the refining industry and what we can do to keep what we have, or is it all for naught? Should we just throw up our hands and say it's dead?