Thank you very much.
Professor Plourde, I want to commend you on your brief. This is probably the tightest, most circumscribed, most logical brief I've seen in this committee in years. So thank you very much for your effort in reducing it in writing and for being as comprehensive as you could be in the short time you have.
I want to ask you, if I could, Professor Plourde, about your explicit mention of market-based mechanisms.
For four years now, the government has rejected the use of international credits. They conveniently seem to have forgotten that the market mechanism, called tradeable permits, was one that was developed under the U.S. Clean Air Act. It led to significant reductions in the cost of reducing smog-causing chemicals. Instead, they really backed themselves into a corner by always picking and rolling and coming back to comments like “It's about buying hot air” and “It's about transferring wealth”. You know, the Prime Minister said it was a socialist plot.
The United States experts came and told us this week that the United States, and its 1,248-page bill in the Senate today, is going to be using and depending on international credits. It will be using that market mechanism to help reduce American GHGs under their targets, which will, of course, have all the concomitant benefits of their investing in emerging economies, developing countries, and so on. That was the original thinking behind the Kyoto Protocol's embracing of the market mechanism. There isn't a single Kyoto Protocol country that's achieved its targets without using international credits.
Can you help, maybe, the government understand why it's important to get out of that corner and to understand that in Copenhagen, which begins only eight or nine days from now, the Government of Canada has to be speaking about the use of international credits and not just about domestic offsets? You say in your brief that we must be linked to a certain extent with our trading partner, the United States. In simple economic terms, can you help the government and viewers who are watching understand why we need to use international credits to achieve our reductions?