Industry committee  If I could just comment, we can still see what we can follow up on there. The tax credit issue is one that is much talked about, and not terrifically well understood, in my experience. If you go to the Department of Finance data on that, you can find information that basically defines what is a tax expenditure, as opposed to what is a legitimate write-off.

Industry committee  It would be better not to speculate for the record. It would be better to give you the information.

Industry committee  Yes. We were their colleagues in the Energy Dialogue Group. We can follow up on that.

Industry committee  Maybe Dane and I could talk about the natural gas side of things. You saw it in the prices. Natural gas, in particular, is basically driven by heating costs, and increasingly, as more and more people use air conditioning and you have gas-fired electricity, it's going to be driven by cooling costs.

Industry committee  If I can speak very briefly on natural gas, I have two responses to that. Yes, in a lot of developing countries they do control energy prices in ways that keep them artificially low. That's pressure they'll eventually have to pay the piper for, but for the moment, indeed, they give some of their industries a competitive advantage.

Industry committee  Briefly, on the question of clean technologies, and again it's something we should probably spend a bit of time on--we didn't particularly touch on it, but clearly it's something that all of our industries are involved in. My industry actually made some proposals before the finance committee a couple of weeks ago, with some ideas for the way we can introduce cleaner and more efficient technologies into the energy delivery system in Canada's cities and towns.

Industry committee  As I say, regulation is a key one. I think there are some things that can be done on the tax front to improve capital costs, and there's allowance treatment to improve the investment climate for infrastructure. Apart from that, our industries are investing billions of dollars all the time, working with regulators to get approval to put those investments in the ground, or, alternatively, in unregulated industries, working with our shareholders to get the dollars.

Industry committee  To underscore Mr. Konow's point about regulatory efficiency, if there's one positive thing the federal government can do, it should be in that realm. Regulation can be made more efficient in a lot of ways, more effective, certainly not less effective, and we can get the infrastructure built in a more timely way.

Industry committee  Mr. Chairman, I'll be very brief. Maybe we could come back to this in the rest of the conversation, but perhaps we could take a few minutes at some point to talk about the way markets, in this case the natural gas markets, actually function. I wouldn't want to leave the impression that somebody's in a position to say markets are going up, so I'm going to sell my product for more.

Industry committee  My colleagues may want to comment on this as well, but let me give you a couple of quick responses. First, I think if you updated that number, that 94.3% would be a lot less today, and that would be across the board--petroleum products and natural gas, and to an extent, probably electricity as well.

Industry committee  I suppose you could invite a lot of technical analysts in to talk about to what extent the hedge funds or speculators are actually driving our price behaviour. One thing we do know for sure is that markets in the short term are not particularly rational. They get onto a particular bugbear and will go tearing off.

Industry committee  Yes, for natural gas. So finding and development costs are probably in the order of about $4, which is what the price is today. Most forecasters have an outlook for natural gas in North America that is something a little over $4 to something a little over $6. So if you're asking what is the right price, it might well be in that range.

Industry committee  Not as such, but let me make a couple of points that I think you might agree with. First of all, volatility is bad for consumers; it creates all sorts of situations. For example, somebody who thought their heating price was going to be such and such for the coming winter finds out that all of a sudden it doubles, because they perhaps didn't take advantage of some of the options that are available to smooth that out.

Industry committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I will endeavour to respect your timelines. Obviously what's of interest to you is the opportunity to ask questions, so I'll move through it. There's a PowerPoint presentation, and I believe you all have copies of it. Just by way of introduction, we've all read your interim report with considerable interest.