Thank you.
We're very pleased to have you here today.
This has been a good opening session for our Parliament. We're finally getting the true picture from my friends in the Liberal Party. They have been talking, this morning, about the great economic investments and opportunities in massively increasing bitumen production and exporting it around the world.
When we had Minister Wilkinson here, I asked him about your energy scenario for 2050, in which you basically said we'd have pretty much close to the same amount of production in 2050 as we have today—maybe a little less. I said to Minister Wilkinson that it doesn't say much for their plan if energy stays the same, and Minister Wilkinson said that wasn't right and that he was going to make the CER do a new scenario.
I looked at that unicorns and rainbows scenario. I loved it—a multiple thousandfold increase in direct air carbon capture and all the possible things. Now we have TMX and massive increases in bitumen production per day and per barrel. I think Mr. Wilkinson was unfair in making you do all of that extra work.
Would you say that, in your first scenario, oil production was going to continue because Canada is a petrostate that got $34 billion from the taxpayer to make it happen? Your first scenario showed that oil production in Canada doesn't really decrease even as the International Energy Agency says major drops...and even as the UN's climate panel and others say we need to seriously drop. Canada is now leading the way in increasing global oil growth.
Does your unicorns and rainbows scenario get blown out now by the fact that we finally got TMX up and running?