Natural Resources committee  Getting to your overarching point, I think it's really important for us to respect that we're in new areas that haven't seen our industry, that don't understand the impacts, and are now having choices to make about their local economy and their local energy supplies that they've never had to make before.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you.

Natural Resources committee  I think that gets to the point, and this is a really important point to understand in Quebec as well. Where does natural gas come from? Right now, more than 50% of new gas comes from shale gas, and that's expected to continue. It's 10 Bcf a day now. I don't remember the number exactly, but by 2015 it will be something like 25 Bcf a day.

Natural Resources committee  Gas is sold by thousands of cubic feet. So 1,000 cubic feet currently in North America is trading somewhat below $4, and the price in Britain is currently trading somewhat above $7. Using my napkin math, we can infer that this difference of $3 is a direct saving to people in North America from having the shale gas situated in North America.

Natural Resources committee  Just to your last question, the ownership of the underground, as you say, is separate from the surface, and that's true everywhere: America, Canada, and Quebec as well. In some places, the same person can own it, and in some cases, different people own it. The majority of Alberta is owned by the Province of Alberta on behalf of the citizens of Alberta.

Natural Resources committee  I have to say that what you said about the experience of Saskatchewan is just so obvious to people like us who live in western Canada. I think I said, walking in, that I was coming from a part of the country where they teach about oil and gas in elementary school and ending up where people really don't know the very basics of oil and gas.

Natural Resources committee  We do have a diaspora in Alberta from Quebec of people who sought jobs in Alberta, and I know a number of people who are from Drummondville, or somewhere in the regions in Quebec, who are saying, if we could ever have the chance to actually go home and operate in our own experience, our own expertise, this would be....

Natural Resources committee  We had a golf tournament in Fairlight in Saskatchewan. We have an oil field there in the Antler area, and we have a golf tournament for all the local landowners. They were all asking: When are you drilling more wells? When are you coming back?

Natural Resources committee  I was really referring more to some of the consumer-oriented infrastructure. If we're going to have, for example, long-haul trucking on natural gas, which is something that has been successful in other places—and in other countries it has certainly been more pervasive than it is here—we need an infrastructure: how does that truck obtain natural gas between Quebec City and Windsor, for example, or ultimately longer distances?

Natural Resources committee  So in terms of investment, I think a carbon tax system would be a more predictable environment for business to invest in than a cap and trade system based on government's controlling and limiting the number of certificates it issues.

Natural Resources committee  I am through our Quebec Oil and Gas Association. I am in that our company has also put in its own separate memoir. But the association itself has members who are presenting at the BAPE right now.

Natural Resources committee  Opponents of natural gas, which are organizations like ProPublica and groups like that in particular, are all funded by political action committees and foundations associated with the Democratic Party, which is also strongly associated with the coal lobby. The public relations coup that our opponents managed was to link problems associated with conventional drilling, which have existed for 100 years--and we continuously get better at that--to hydraulic fracturing.

Natural Resources committee  When Campbell in British Columbia started to deregulate, the B.C. oil and gas business, which had been somewhat languishing, suddenly took off. That was certainly one thing that was successful. We've seen the impacts of the royalty review on the business in Alberta; there is something that did the opposite of stimulating activity.

Natural Resources committee  I'll give you some anecdotal answers. I know that there is large investment going into natural gas infrastructure on mainland China. Just close to home, there are two large investments that have been made—I know that CNOOC definitely made one and may have made both of them—into the Horn River shale.

Natural Resources committee  The objection I have to cap and trade systems is that they depend on carbon certificates and they depend on those carbon certificates being limited. The experience in Europe is that political imperatives will then change the number of certificates. This means trusting that we're not going to just print more certificates when a political imperative comes up.