I think in the short term that's a difficult question to answer. From a medium- to long-term perspective, in terms of some of the capital that we're seeing pulled out, that certainly will have huge implications for the activity of my members and their ability to have a larger customer base to ultimately put their people to work and their equipment to work.
Let me just start by saying that the oil and gas industry is a highly specialized, highly segregated business. I represent drilling rig contractors and service rig contractors. Our customers are the producers. Producers like Shell, Suncor, and Statoil are the folks who ultimately are making the high-level business decisions as to where they want to allocate capital. From an international perspective, what we're seeing is that some companies go back to their boardrooms and make some calculations as to where they are going to get the highest returns for their investment. When they make that analysis and they ultimately decide to put more dollars into the Permian Basin, that impacts Canadian families, restaurants, and hotels, the folks who indirectly and directly depend on that type of investment.
What I would say is that we are absolutely in a highly global, competitive environment. From a technology perspective, a lot of this technology is starting to be proven during the downturn. That's where we see the true companies, the companies that have an idea and are taking a risk to put it into place in order to lower their costs of operation. In the past two to three years, we've seen significant developments in the use of different downhole tools that have increased productivity. In my membership, most of the high-spec rigs—the $50-million rigs, the walking rigs with operating systems that have sensors all over the rig, that understand penetration rates in order to drill in the most effective way—are working right now.
Oil is certainly not commanding the price that it used to back in 2014. But what I'm saying is that at a time like this, where it is so competitive, producers are at a stage where they have to use the best, most efficient, most high-tech equipment in order to lower their costs, and that's going to make us a better industry down the road. Government policy certainly matters, and Canada is not alone in saying that anything we do is not going to have a consequence or an impact on investment. When we've seen some fairly dramatic signals from the United States in terms of lowering the burdens of business, lowering corporate taxes, cutting red tape, we have to be very sensitive to what that is going to mean to our industry.
I'll just make one other point. You have to look at signals in the market, and where investments are being made. I represent small mom-and-pop drillers all the way up to international drillers, and if you look in any of the MD&As or the analysis of these companies, look at where they're upgrading their equipment. Canadian companies are investing millions of dollars in upgrading rigs. They're doing it in Canada, but they're doing that at a more exponential rate in the United States, to go after the Permian and the Eagle Ford basins, those sorts of plays, because that's where they see the market moving.