Thank you again, Minister, for being here with us today, I assume from Newfoundland, the home of my ancestors. It's good to see you on the Rock.
I'm going to start again with the oil and gas sector. We just had the Canada Energy Regulator, CER, put out a report a couple of weeks ago on “Canada's Energy Future 2020”. The authors included what they call the “evolving scenario”, which is assuming some action towards the fight against climate change. That evolving scenario wasn't going to get us to net zero. At least there was a recognition by the CER that that's the kind of thing we're going to be doing.
Under that scenario, they showed the difference between our ability to...the pipeline supply we had, the pipeline volume and what we would be exporting. What is showed was that we have three expansion pipelines in various stages of building right now. We've been talking about Keystone XL; there's Trans Mountain expansion and there's Line 3 expansion. All these pipelines exist right now, but they're going to be greatly enlarged to take expanded production from the oil sands.
What this scenario from the CER report showed was that we will only need one of those expanded pipelines to handle the expanded production from the oil sands. In fact, if we wanted to get to net zero, we might not need any of them.
I'm just wondering what the department has projected would be in those pipelines. Are we going to have three pipelines with only one-third capacity being used? Are we going to have one that's being used and the other two won't be needed?
I'm just wondering what your plans are for that future, because that's where we're headed. It seems like I keep getting very conflicting statements from this government about the importance of fighting climate change and the doubling down on the fossil fuel industry.