I want to touch on something that my colleague, Mr. Falk, had mentioned earlier. I think we have a shared background of being in business. In business, data is key to everything. For small businesses, medium-sized businesses, large-sized businesses, data is your most important point. You're never going to grow without accurate and timely data.
It always baffles me as why municipally, provincially, and federally it's such a challenge for governments to deal with this data issue, because companies deal with it on a multi-billion dollar scale every day and control it and utilize it to their advantage to help grow their businesses.
My first question is for Mr. Egan or Mr. Cheliak.
Do you believe that an independent agency like the U.S. Energy Information Administration would be a more appropriate tool to deal with data collection on a Canadian scale? This would be a made-in-Canada approach to dealing with data collection across the energy spectrum. It would ensure not only that we're getting the appropriate data in a timely manner, but also that we're able to utilize that data to make conscious decisions about how our energy strategy moves forward over the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years. It would take into account the fact that we have provincial jurisdictions that we need to recognize and honour, and that to give that broad, overarching support to the provinces, we need to have a unified approach to data, one that recognizes that industries from across the spectrum will benefit from having accurate and timely data, and that we are not pitting one part of the energy sector against the other, but allowing all of them to flourish through the use of appropriate data.