Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
My name is Chris Henderson. I'm here in my capacity as managing director of the EXCEL Partnership. I'm going to do three things: explain to you what the EXCEL Partnership is, tell you what the view of this partnership is relative to Bali, and suggest what our views are in terms of where we go from here.
EXCEL is an acronym. It stands for “excellence in corporate environmental leadership”. It's a business body. It consists of companies like Alcan, B.C. Hydro, Dofasco, EnCana, RBC, Teknion, Suncor, DuPont, and others.
Membership in this group is not automatic. It only goes to sustainability leaders.
EXCEL is affiliated with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the global body for business and sustainability around the world. You get to be a member of EXCEL if you want to, as a company, and latterly if you meet certain performance targets for your environment and sustainability programs.
I note on the question of climate change, if you look at the carbon disclosure initiative, the top performers, in terms of their disclosure and their liabilities and action, are members of the EXCEL Partnership. We don't come before you, though, as a lobby group. We are distinctly not a lobbying group.
EXCEL was started over a decade ago as a learning partnership. Our members meet regularly, we learn how we will deal with the challenges of environment and sustainability and the opportunities inherent in them, and do that in a collaborative way across business sectors. We have companies from 10 or 12 different business sectors.
We were asked to come before the committee in our relationship with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
When we look at Bali—and some of our companies were at Bali—I'm going to put a business lens on this. I'll leave the commentary on the specific nature of the protocol and the negotiations to others who are more qualified. There are three things in Bali that we feel have some potential, but I agree with the analogy that John Drexhage made: it's very early days, and the progress is limited.
First, we do like the idea of global sectoral targets. The idea of being able to compete across economies is a key issue for Canadian companies. This does not obviate Canadian regulatory action, but we do like the idea of moving to global sectoral targets.
Second, we do think it is positive that the other major actors who are not signatories to the agreements in terms of their obligations, like the U.S. and major developing countries being on board, is important, so the regime of negotiation post-2012 we endorse.
We were hopeful there would be more clarity related to the creation of a more formal global carbon market, but were disappointed in that respect. There are still too many uncertainties.
But the most important thing I'd like to share with you is that our concern, from a business standpoint, is there is just simply too much short- and long-term uncertainty on this question in Canada.
The companies that are EXCEL members have been acting on climate change, and have done for decades in some cases. We think three things should be put before the committee and before Parliament.
One, we do expect, as you well know, that we'll see some regulatory provisions come forward by the government over the next few months. We welcome those. There are different views companies have on the specific ways that affect them. However, we think we need both a short-term regulatory environment and a long-term regulatory approach or a policy approach that really gets to the heart of capital stock investment and how we move to a technology platform that reflects the carbon realities we face. We don't see where the policy environment is to play with that in Canada at this point. We don't know how to.
Secondly, if we're going to deal with climate change effectively, the validity of a carbon market under a regulatory platform with offset trading and other mechanisms is highly useful. It's not going to be easy to do this. It's going to be complex, time-consuming, and costly.
So how are we going to design it? At one time the process of designing climate change action in Canada was a real interactive process between the Government of Canada and the private sector and NGOs and other actors out there. It isn't now. We don't know how we're going to design a trading regime. We don't know how baseline inventories will be set, we don't know how GHG protocols will be established. So we're going to design a whole economy, and yet perhaps the greatest repository of knowledge in this country of designing any market mechanisms, the private sector, isn't directly inputting into that process because we don't know what the process is. We need a process that's transparent and open and allows players to create that economy.
Finally, we have put before the committee and Parliament that we need to emphasize innovation. Regardless of the targets we have in the short term, regardless of the targets we're going to need in the long term, they'll be tough to get to. We can't get there without having an innovation approach that is not just technological, it's innovation and thinking how the government, industry, and other partnerships work, and how we deal with good ideas to deal with climate change and carbon emissions.
Thank you for your time, Mr. Chairman. I'd just emphasize those three points.