Finance committee  Thanks, Mr. Dechert. Yes, the devil is in the details. The federal government, current and previous governments, have signed harmonization agreements with most of the provinces to try to make these regulations a little more streamlined. There's a simple thing that could be done, frankly.

Finance committee  British Columbia has been doing relatively well, like many parts of the world, from the commodity boom we experienced up until last year. There has been a setback; you'll see it around the world. But compared with other natural resource sectors, such as forestry, which was already having difficulties before the recession, and certainly compared with the declines we've seen in the gas and oil sector, our sector isn't doing quite as badly.

Finance committee  Absolutely. Nation building is a strange euphemism. We've tried to come up with a way of describing the difference between two equally important types of infrastructure. With a museum or a sewage system, the challenge with those things is that they have future operating costs for a government.

Finance committee  In one of my other incarnations, I served as general secretary of a coalition of industry, independent power producers, first nations, and 40 local governments in the north of this province. We've been pushing for funding and support of a power line in the northwest, which some of you may have heard of, the northwest power line or Highway 37 project.