I will follow on what Professor Gattinger was saying. There are reams of data available now, but they're a completely mixed bag across the provinces and at the federal level. In the first instance, the National Energy Board has already taken steps towards establishing a portal, an online portal, where people can go to access primary data on a variety of energy-related things. However, it's incomplete, and it is not particularly user-friendly because the user gets directed to third party websites and then has to grapple with the various issues pertaining to that particular entity's data, such as the use of different definitions.
I think that in the first instance the committee should accept that additional resources are needed to take it from the step that has been established already at the National Energy Board—which is a pan-Canadian entity, in my view—to supplement their resources so that they can carry on the good work that they've already started.
At the end of the day, we might not have a bright and shiny thing that's quite as glamorous as the EIA's framework, which, as I say, they've been doing for a long time and with vastly more resources. I think that if additional resources could be provided to an entity like the National Energy Board, which can also.... Some of their links currently go to the CANSIM database, but from my perspective, that database entails a really terrible hunting and pecking operation, which I think is not at all a good use of anybody's time.
It's not that there aren't data there. It's that they need to be curated, collected, and then disseminated in a very consistent way so that anybody who wants to use the data can use the data.