Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It's been really frustrating sitting here, listening to some of these arguments and these attacks being made. It's really interesting, because one thing that was said was that Saskatchewan managed to spend all their money and Alberta didn't. Well, Alberta got $1 billion and Saskatchewan got $400 million. There's a different order of magnitude in those two sums of money.
We're really having a conversation over the fact that the Government of Alberta created a program, and that program had private people then spending that money to do the cleanup. That's not something that happens willy-nilly, or at least not in the case of the province I come from. I actually was an MLA at the time this was being discussed, so I remember some of those conversations fairly in depth. It was a program that initially was very oversubscribed. To be able to do it properly and not have shell companies and companies like Dalian that the Government of Canada decided to use, that qualified for contracts under federal government indigenous procurement but was effectively a shell, one of the big challenges is that the Government of Alberta actually wanted to engage with meaningful work so that these projects could go forward meaningfully. That required indigenous companies to get appropriate equipment and get the appropriate training. That doesn't happen just overnight, especially in the context of a pandemic. This program wasn't simply about wells. This was about job creation.
The member from Newfoundland, Ms. Jones, raised some really good points. There are lots of ties to the energy industry in Newfoundland. There are many ties between Alberta and Newfoundland. That's part of why we have so much commonality. I have many constituents who go back and forth to Newfoundland. As well, many have retired back home to Newfoundland after having worked their career up here. It's really frustrating; I don't know if most of the constituents I talk to who are from Newfoundland would appreciate the fact that the Government of Alberta, and more specifically the energy workers, are constantly under attack by this Liberal government.
This is the problem we're [Technical difficulty—Editor].