On the good hand, it's a laissez-faire approach to encouraging private sector investments. You make the rules, you step back, and you let the best of the private sector find the right opportunities. That works well, but only if you have a significant cluster of participants with some common resource knowledge.
Canada's challenge has been twofold. One is that we have little knowledge about the offshore in particular. We have more knowledge about the Alberta foothills, the oil sands, and so on. There's a big cluster of hundreds of companies there. In the offshore context, we've had but five or six, and over 30 years most of those companies acquired exclusive data that they only use themselves. We need to unlock that and we need to demonstrate that prospectivity. With the demonstration of that prospectivity, you will attract the investment.
Our barriers have been that we didn't have a really good data repository, so we didn't encourage multi-client investment and we didn't have scheduled licensing rounds. Scheduled licence rounds are the key, because that gives you a predictable way in which to plan for your very specialized geoscience teams to work for six months, to prepare a bid for two months, and to make a bid in the following year. When you don't have that calendar of events, you won't get that investment and you won't get those people to work their area. We've changed that in 2013, so our trajectory is markedly up, but we've had 30 years of a pretty flat growth profile.
I'm happy. We're positioned well. However, there's still much more opportunity to follow some best practice.