Let me just talk about Suncor's experience here. Previous to that, of course, we merged with Petro-Canada a few years back and with what the Petro-Canada experience was.
The Oakville closure was brought up. That was a refinery in Oakville, Ontario. It came down in 2005. That was a very tough decision. I've been involved over the years in several of those refinery closures, which started as the industry began to rationalize back in the eighties. They are not happy decisions. We looked at Oakville every imaginable way to see how we could save that plant, but the problem is we're not immune to the economies of scale in the world. It was a small plant, and it was facing a massive investment in order to reduce sulphur in gasoline and in diesel specifically.
It just got to the point that the plant simply couldn't sustain the level of investment that was needed. We chose instead to expand Montreal, and we did expand Montreal. We didn't expand it so it had the same production capacity for light oil that Oakville had, but it was pretty close. We replaced all of the production capacity for diesel and about half for gasoline that Oakville had had.
The reason we didn't go all the way on the gasoline replacement was that, given the configuration of the Montreal plant, the cost of taking that extra increment on gasoline production capacity would have meant another major step change in the investment we needed to make there.
We were also concerned, even back in 2003 and 2004 when we were looking at this, about the long-term decline in gasoline demand in North America, which has been predicted for a long time now. We thought we would be better to import a small amount of our supply into eastern Canada, rather than building the capacity and finding out that we couldn't take advantage of it over the long haul.
That strategy has actually worked out very well for us, and we feel that's one of the reasons Montreal continues to be well positioned to face the future. Diesel supply is probably okay. Diesel demand is not bad. We're well positioned to absorb reduction in gasoline demand, and if we could—and I'll come back to support—with a line 9 reversal.... There's no guarantee western crudes will stay less expensive, necessarily, but that option sure gives us flexibility. The more places we can source crude from, the more viable plants are.
It may be a long way around.
The other piece is that I don't want to ignore—because we don't shorten our refining stats—the upgrader capability of producing diesel, which is where the growth will be, if anywhere, in Canada.