Yes, certainly.
In its entire history, one of the things that Canada has tried to do is position itself as an independent country, but that's very difficult on the North American continent, obviously. There's always been a concern here: are we just simply a kind of branch plant, particularly of the United States? So I think that for a lot of people, one of the concerns in terms of oil and gas.... As I said, 71% of our companies in Canada are foreign-owned and mainly American-based, so that provides a huge amount of political and economic control over what kind of economy we're actually going to have, as well as political effects.
You mentioned the Norway fund. The Norway fund actually started based on the Alberta heritage fund model, which Peter Lougheed had come up with, but started 20 years after Lougheed began the one in Alberta. As a comparison, the current Alberta heritage fund has I think about $14 billion in it. It has been static for years. At the last count I saw, I think Norway's sovereign fund had about $770 billion. Because they have control over it, they put the money into an investment fund, but they invest outside the country. One of the effects of that is that they're able to actually control inflation. As I said before, one thing that eats away at the real wages of people in Alberta is the fact that inflation is constantly there.
This all comes down to political control and using a resource to develop your society and your country in the way that at you want to do it. There is no doubt that oil, which was the most important commodity in some sense in the 20th century, is going to continue to be very important in the 21st, perhaps rivalled only by water, but we are going to be seeing changes here. There are real pressures in terms of innovations and technological changes.
Some people are even talking about a post-carbon future. If that is going to be the case, what we need to do is think of how to actually get, from the current resource, the capacity for Albertans and for Canadians as a whole to move ourselves responsibly into the future, and to use this incredible resource we have in a way that will be sustainable for generations to come and not just simply hop on the train right now because it's a great ride.