Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and happy New Year to you and the members of the committee.
I'd like to start with Mr. Wamboldt and Mr. Gray.
Mr. Wamboldt, I've been happy to tour Suncor's facilities a number of times over the last few months. I've been up there of course with the NDP team on natural resources with our leader of the official opposition, Mr. Mulcair as well as a couple of times on my own. So we thank you for your accessibility.
I wanted to quote from an article that was written by Jeff Rubin, who's the former chief economist of CIBC World Markets. He says the following, which was published just a couple of weeks ago:
The rest of the oil sands industry may need to take a page from Suncor's playbook. Before rushing ahead to double oil sands production to 3 million barrels a day—and sending billions more in de facto energy subsidies to U.S. refiners—investors and the Canadian economy may be better off if producers figure out how to capture more value from what they’re already digging out of the ground.
My question to you to start, Mr. Wamboldt, is whether you would agree that the issue of value added is becoming perhaps the significant energy issue that we're going to have to contend with in the coming period. Why do you think the government's falling short on encouraging value added, wanting to rip and ship raw bitumen rather than concentrating and focusing on value added in the way that Suncor has so successfully done?