I would say that if you unpack the opposition to the pipelines, it's a mixture of local and regional site-specific concerns about the pipelines themselves and a concern about the environmental performance of the oil sands. It's very hard to unpack those two because, really, whether you're going east, west or south, those two factors are both at play. When you're going west you're looking at a mixture of first nations' concerns, bilge concerns, tanker concerns; to the east, you've got many of those things too; and to the south, you've got Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and lots of other stuff, and Barack Obama. You're right.
Mixed with all those things, I think, if you took out the factor of the environmental reputation of the oil sands.... We've been building pipelines in this country for decades and none of them have generated the kind of controversy that these ones have. I think it's because the pipelines have become a proxy for the fight about the oil sands, which doesn't mean there won't still be regional and local issues about pipelines. There still will be and we've worked those things out as a country before and I think we'll work them out again.
I think the key to unpacking the opposition to the pipelines is unpacking the environmental challenges that are facing the oil sands industry. I think, as I said before, that we're on path to do that. I think we know how to deal with social licence around pipelines. We can do it better, but it's not something we've never figured out.
The only thing I would add—and this builds on the question to Professor Plourde—is that one of my biggest worries is that we need a pulse of investment, public investment, in the next five to 10 years to lay the foundation of the infrastructure and the technology that will largely determine our economy in 2050 to 2060. Really, the infrastructure and the technology choices we make in the next five years will be our carbon footprint, so we're going to need a significant public and private investment.
This is where I get a little more worried about the question of pricing, because I think we're going to need a significant role for the federal government and the provinces. A lot of this is of national interest, not just a local one, and I'm worried that it's great to do it on deficit financing, which can work in the short term, but in the long-run I think that both federal and provincial governments are going to need some income coming from carbon pricing as a way of investing in the economy of the future. I just think that the reality of it is that we're not going to continue to have the political will to make those investments unless there's a revenue stream that they can be seen to be going back against. That includes the federal government. I think there should be some form of revenue stream around carbon pricing that goes back out to provinces, but that helps to deal with issues of a national interest to complement all of the provincial stuff.