Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Minister, for being generous with your time with us today at this committee. I really appreciate your comments, and I'm going to start with something you mentioned there.
I want to take a top-level look first of all at the estimates. You talked about Canada's natural resource wealth and how, of course, across the world we stand out in so many ways, yet when we look at the budget for your department, last year the main estimates were $1.4 billion for the Department of Natural Resources, and this year they are $2.2 billion. They went up over the course of that time from $1.4 billion to $1.8 billion to $2.2 billion.
It's safe to say that over the last year there has been no real development in the natural resource industry sector in Canada, so is it safe to say at this point in time that you are becoming a cost centre for the Canadian taxpayers as opposed to a sector that used to be a profit sector for the Canadian taxpayers?