To be able to develop the economic diversification we've been talking about and the value-added businesses and jobs around energy development, we need investment, particularly in new products that drive new processes. It's as true in upgrading and refining as it is in the entire supply chain. So the issue is what drives a business to invest and it's basically the return on investment and cashflow.
To give you an example outside the energy sector, in Ontario we've seen small companies like Automatic Coating Limited, or Promation, or Aberfoyle Metal Treaters Ltd. These companies have changed their entire business simply by focusing on new product development for the oil sands.
A lot of these companies right now are facing.... It's a big risk to go from an automotive producer to a producer of products for energy. What we're seeing is that a lot of that is driven by internal cashflow. So if you reduce the price, you reduce the cash and you reduce the investment.
We've been talking about how we incent investments. I'm not so sure the government...that we should be calling on taxpayers to subsidize. I think we should be looking at how we incent companies themselves to spend more money in these areas and very important...taxes are important and other costs, mandatory compliance costs and things like that are important, but so is financing. One of the biggest issues that we're seeing, particularly as companies are going into a recovery stage and a growth stage based on new products is that often they don't have the backing from the finance, the banks, to do that.
So these are some of the issues I think we need to focus on, particularly on the smaller manufacturing side. It's all about cashflow and about return on investment. If you reduce the price, you reduce the cash and the investment.