Well, that's a great question.
I would say that the northern gateway project was free market-led, and they did make that decision. They did have a route, which was initially approved to go into Kitimat, so there was a private market case to build that pipeline over mountains a few years ago. Enbridge has said itself that it spent almost $1 billion on that; it obviously saw that there was a business case.
Now we're in a different position—to your point—and I think we are asking ourselves, if we don't want to go more north-south.... I mean, I haven't heard anyone say that they want to export less to the United States, but the option of being able to send oil to other markets is obviously very appealing and would give Canada different leverage and a different set of tools in the current geopolitical situation. There's actually a national security case to build to the west coast. The reason we usually talk about the west coast is that Asia is simply a better market than going to the east coast. It's much larger, and it's growing much faster, so there's more opportunity to displace existing producers.
For me, it's obvious that what's happening is that we need to de-risk it to a point where a private proponent could take it to its board to get approved and wouldn't get slammed by shareholders the very next day in the markets. I think what Alberta is doing—acting as a proponent, getting over some initial hurdles, getting it listed with that Major Projects Office, getting it designated as a nation-building project—are the right moves.
I think Alberta could spend a lot of the time doing some of the initial duty to consult, which has to be done anyway, and then waiting for the market to be ready. It's true that, at $61 per barrel in 2026, the market isn't looking for a million-barrel pipeline from Canada. However, we expect that in 2028-29, the market will be looking for those barrels, after the Trans Mountain expansion is optimized and is delivering its additional barrels. Since our Achilles heel is long timelines, it's very important that we, as Ottawa and as Edmonton, do as much legwork as we can to get that pipeline in a position for a final investment decision for a private proponent to take over.