Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to the officials for being here. It's nice to see all of you again as well.
Mr. Moffet, certainly on your comments, Conservatives on this side of the table looked at each other in full agreement with you that global oil and gas demand will continue to increase. That's why Conservatives believe that the very last barrel of oil and gas used in the world ought to be from Canada, instead of the Liberal approach, which is to cede ground to dictators, despots and regimes with much lower environmental standards.
I must confess that it's a little odd to hear comments about the clear requirement in Canada to reduce permitting and regulatory timelines and fix the Impact Assessment Agency. I say this on behalf of all Conservative colleagues at this table, but I guess in particular because it just happened to be specifically me during the debates on Bill C-69 who warned that the government spin on the legislative timelines the bill would implement wasn't, in fact, true, and that there were multiple ways in which the bill had the ability for members of both the regulatory body and the cabinet to stop, start and extend the regulatory process repeatedly over private sector proponents.
I can also say that at that time—because it was again, oddly, specifically me—Conservatives warned that what that would do would be to create potentially endless timelines and uncertainty for private sector proponents and therefore make the regulatory decisions and permitting for all kinds of energy projects in Canada uncompetitive against the rest of the world. I'm not sure why Canadians ought to believe that the government that brought in this system, which was broken in the first place, will be the ones to fix it, but suffice it to say Conservatives agree with those two main principles you talked about.
For the finance department officials, one thing I'd like you to explore a bit more for this committee and for Canadians is the difference between investment and production tax credits. One of the main reasons the U.S. IRA is a threat to Canadian competitiveness, of course, is their inclusion of production tax credits, which are ongoing and based on actual outcomes—actual environmental and energy results—rather than, in Canada's context, only first-time early initiative incentives.
I invite any or all of you to make any comments on maybe the relative advantages and disadvantages of investment versus production tax credits and any consideration of that in Canada's context.