Sure.
I don't think too many would argue that it's a good idea to have your umbilical cord tied to just one customer, and currently the vast majority of our oil exports go to just one customer. That's a limiting factor.
Even if the oil exports that we do through the west coast are likely going to be shipped down to the west coast of the U.S. to be refined, where they've made substantial investments in heavy oil refineries and are counting on that oil coming there to refine, it would still give us the bargaining power to potentially have other buyers.
I just came back from Calgary—I did the oil sands tour a couple of weeks ago—and right now everyone there is talking about the 2015 bottleneck, about how if pipelines don't get approved, there's a major bottleneck for the Cenovuses and the Suncors. There are various ways to get the oil out, such as by train, but it's not as economic. On every barrel of oil they sell today, they're taking a $40 haircut.
So if we're going to proceed with the oil sands, I think we should try to optimize the wealth that we can squeeze out of them in a way that can diversify our energy future, similar to what Newfoundland and Labrador has done. I think they're actually a model for the rest of Canada.
If you look at what they've done, they've taken this sort of economist approach and said, “We have an asset—the offshore oil—that won't be around for more than a couple of decades. We're going to squeeze money out of this right now, and we're going to invest it in an asset that will be around for a few centuries: our hydroelectric potential and our wind.”
So they're taking the billions of dollars they're earning from the offshore oil and investing it in reproducible capital that will earn them billions of dollars, for the next couple of centuries, producing and generating clean electricity.
I think there's a lot to be learned there. To have that money to invest, in increasing the forms of capital to offset the finite capital that we're reducing, I think it's important to have the expanded market access so we're not held hostage by a single customer.