Notwithstanding, I think the mixed signals that the government has given really confuse.... I don't know of any other country in the world that has the energy prowess of Canada—the third-largest or fourth-largest approvable reserves in the world—that is required to decarbonize before it's able to get infrastructure built or to get products to market. We impose this on ourselves. While it might be interesting and very important in certain corners, it is leaving market and capital with an absolute, definable decision on Canada: that it's too risky.
You know, I worked with GasBuddy during the period of time when the B.C. government took the position of using every tool in the tool box to block the Trans Mountain pipeline. Kinder Morgan, a company that was prepared to spend $6 billion out of its own pocket to build a pipeline that we desperately needed, was chased away. As a result, you and I wound up picking up the tab, $32 billion to $50 billion, based on a number of estimates.
The reality is that if we continue to say, in condition, the way in which we're prepared to build infrastructure in this country, no one is going to be interested in doing this, save the Canadian government. The last time I checked, our financial situation is, to put it very bluntly, very weak. To suggest that somehow we should be trading away our most important, most valuable golden goose under the idea that we can't do these things, that we shouldn't be doing these things, is a negative to the Canadian economy and the people who are looking for work today.
Governments have a real problem with balancing their books in the way my government, in the time of the 1990s, knew how to balance a book and understood very well the importance of building pipelines, building our energy infrastructure. Yes, that was the Jean Chrétien-Paul Martin government, of which I was a member.