Natural Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you very much for the presentation. I have about five questions; two of them are just quick clarification questions, I hope. The first one is on slide 8, where you talk about the federal government playing a complementary role in key areas. I certainly understand the exports through the NEB, but the slide also says the federal government is responsible for international and “designated” interprovincial power lines.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you. The second question is on slide 10, which is a concern when you look at our reserve margin, which is going down. We certainly noticed that in the last number of years in Atlantic Canada, where you start to see the demand going up and the reserves going down, which puts us in a pretty tough position.

Natural Resources committee  Mr. Chair, I'm inclined to support the amendment, and for a couple of different reasons. I've read the draft report, and one thing that strikes me about it is that there are lots of “ifs”--if production gets here, if this gets here. Before we make any recommendations in this report, one thing we could have is context as to what some people think in terms of where we're going with this and what may be the best case, worst case, and most probable case with regard to development.

Natural Resources committee  On behalf of business groups, we certainly don't believe a moratorium would be the way to go. There's a negative context behind that. In fact, while—

Natural Resources committee  Again, we believe that intervention and interference.... Government getting in there and putting in place those regulations environmentally is very important, but we believe the market will work itself out and that industry will work with the market forces to make it sustainable economically.

Natural Resources committee  At $60 a barrel, it became very viable for an operation to invest the money to go after that development. Only five years ago, the projection was $30 billion in investment over the next 15 years. It's now sitting at about $125 billion. And I believe $9 billion per year is being invested right now.

Natural Resources committee  From my perspective, and from that of many people I know, we didn't know it was coming. We were unaware of this boom. The price of oil went up so dramatically so quickly that it brought a lot of investment.

Natural Resources committee  I don't believe there have been any studies done specifically on that--not that I'm aware of. I know that the Regional Infrastructure Working Group, RIWG, has the tools to do those types of studies. Perhaps that's something we could look at.

Natural Resources committee  Yes, I think there certainly are some opportunities. As they capture CO2 and come up with other byproducts--for example, what they're doing in fertilizer, with sulphur and that type of thing--there are opportunities. It's just a matter of setting those limits.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you for that. Certainly we believe that industry has a major role to play there in all of the environmental policies within their companies. I know there are some initiatives going forth right now, capturing CO2 gases. They're looking at pumping that into old wells, for example.

Natural Resources committee  We are a business advocacy group, but we do work very closely with our members. If there is technology or something we're aware of, we would certainly be working with our members to work on it.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you, Chairman Richardson, committee members. I'm pleased to be here to present to your committee on behalf of the Fort McMurray Chamber of Commerce. First of all, we acknowledge that we have no expertise in either environmental or social matters, and we defer to other stakeholders to represent issues in these spheres.

Natural Resources committee  May I have your comment on the water use?

Natural Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for being here. I have a couple of quick questions. One is about Dan's comments on his point 3.3, “Enhanced Reclamation & Land Offsets”, which he talked about. I want to talk about reclamation for a minute. I know that Suncor is actually doing some pretty creative work on their consolidated tailings, and they're going to fill their first pond by 2007, I understand.