As the member knows, because we talked an awful lot about this with Newfoundland and Labrador MPs, and as I mentioned to our colleague earlier, Newfoundland and Labrador depends more on oil and gas than even Alberta or Saskatchewan does. When we were hit with the two crises, we were hit extremely hard in this province as well and we had to look very carefully at a solution for the offshore.
There are a few things I should make note of that Newfoundland and Labrador's offshore product has going for it. First of all, it's in tidewater, which is why it's traded at Brent prices. As we now know, we've always said it's a sweet light crude, but we didn't really appreciate what that meant. It means these are some of the lowest-emitting barrels of oil in the world. That is a huge competitive advantage in a changing marketplace.
So when Premier Kenney said that he wanted to see the last barrel of oil sold in the world to be Canadian, I agree with him. It means that we have to meet those standards and that each barrel has to be the lowest emitting that we can find, and the market will dictate that.
What we've done in this province, a year and a half ago through the Atlantic Accord, was to have $2.5 million in new money for the province as the principal beneficiary of its offshore. Then since this pandemic, there's been close to $400 million to support workers, to lower emissions and to make the industry here more competitive.
We worked with the province very closely on that, so what they have done is brought together a task force of union leadership, of industry leadership and of government sitting together to determine where they will put the $320 million that we have given on top of $75 million that we gave in order to reduce emissions.
It is a considerable chunk of change, and just earlier we announced $41 million that's going toward the West White Rose Project to keep that in place and to make sure that those workers have good work. It was matched by the private sector.
That's what happens when you listen to people locally on the ground and you listen to those people who know. I am very proud of our offshore oil and gas workers here in this province. The president of ExxonMobil Canada, which is headquartered here in St. John's, said that there is no more hazardous environment that his people operate—his company operates—in in the world than Newfoundland's offshore. It is not easy out there. It takes guts and it takes pride, and we want to stand by these people.