Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Minister, thank you for coming today.
I was looking in the news recently and noticed that Alberta Premier Redford returned a few days ago from her fourth trip to Washington, D.C. to plead the case for the Keystone XL pipeline. As you know, President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry will be making a decision as to whether to approve that pipeline. It's a very important pipeline for the economy of Canada, as you've said, and this decision hangs in the balance. Why else would the Premier of Alberta make four trips to Washington? Why else would Canadian officials be going to the United States so often?
What I see in the main estimates in front of me today, it seems to me, undercuts the efforts of the Premier of Alberta for the people of Alberta. I'm looking at the list of program cuts that has been mentioned by my colleague, Mr. Julian: the ecoENERGY retrofit program for homes, cut; the ecoENERGY technology initiative, cut.
I've marked these in yellow, and my page is covered with yellow.
There's the clean energy fund, the ecoENERGY for biofuels program, Sustainable Development Technology Canada's NextGen biofuel fund. We have the ecoENERGY for renewable power initiative, the program of energy research and development, and the ecoENERGY innovation Initiative.
My question to you is this. With this long list of things, isn't it embarrassing for the Premier of Alberta, when she goes to Washington, to try to deal with the fact, as you say, Minister, that Canada is losing tens of millions of dollars a day in revenue because President Obama does not have the social licence to approve Keystone XL, because we haven't done enough about climate change? We have all these cuts in the main estimates, right here, embarrassing and undercutting the efforts of the Alberta premier.
How do you respond to that?