There's one element of diversification you didn't mention. Let me go through it. There are two elements we've been talking about so far. One is what you might call product diversification, which is, in this case, heavy oil versus synthetic oil, which is the one we've been particularly mentioning, although you can also go into other types of manufacturing and other elements that one could talk about.
Then we have geographic market diversification, which is another concept or type of diversification.
But then there's a third one, which is often discussed in Alberta, but frankly, I think it's also an issue for Canada as a whole, and that's thinking about diversification across industries. This really gets to my point. You might try to move up the value-added chain in the case of bitumen going up to synthetic oil.
But the comment made by Mr. Calkins is right on the spot. If you have full employment already, you're not really creating more jobs, but you will push up wages. That could also hurt you in terms of industrial diversification, because what's happening is that you're going to end up drawing resources into that particular activity and away from other things that could be done, whether it's the agricultural industry, the manufacturing industry, or whatever. Actually, as you focus more resources into energy production, and if you do it through government policies that particularly move away from what the market is determining, then what you're actually doing, or could potentially do, which goes back to my point, is to undermine job creation.
Actually, it's not so much job creation we need to worry about in the future. We need to worry about incomes, because we're moving into a world of labour shortages, given demographic changes. That really pushes us more toward thinking about making the best use of the resources that we have available in this country in order to maximize what we want to achieve in terms of income.
We really have to worry about the productivity challenge, and I think trying to create more value-added by upgrading so we have less heavy oil and more synthetic exports goes to the point I was trying to make that you could actually undermine productivity in the economy. You could actually hurt us, because we will undermine industrial diversification that we actually need.