Thank you very much.
To start, because this is the first meeting we're having on this study, I want to come back to Mr. Morantz's question, which I think is a really important question. I think it's the question that animates the reason for the study, and it's important for the committee to get it right conceptually from the beginning so we know what it is we're studying and the kinds of questions we're asking. As I understand it, there's a great debate to be had—and I'm a partisan in that debate—about the role of government in delivering on a decarbonized economy and what that means for Canadians in terms of the infrastructure they have and the electricity they use, and what it means for workers in terms of where they fit into that picture. That's a whole debate we can have about the role of government, and I think it's an important one.
My understanding is that the study we're embarking upon right now is to say notwithstanding that debate, we understand that a lot of folks in financial markets and financial institutions are coming to understand that this is important, despite their legacy of not having done a good job, which Monsieur Garon has rightly pointed out. I think there's cause for some ongoing suspicion, and that's part of what we're looking at today. They want to respond to investors and consumers who are demanding more environmental responsibility from the companies they fund. They're recognizing the serious warnings that have been issued about economic disruption and the very real costs to those very same financial institutions in the event of environmental calamity, and I think they have some sense that they should probably do something about that. Welcome to the party, I say to them. It's been a long time coming, and yes, they absolutely do have something to do with that.
I think they're also trying to position themselves in what they rightly see as the economy of the future. The economy is changing, and they don't want to be left behind in that. That's all well within the market view that many parties around this table espouse and is nevertheless important, even for those of us who think there is more of a role for the public sector to play in leading the charge and being quite prescriptive towards these organizations and how they should play a role.
That's why I think this is important. It's why certain important market players are finally figuring out that they need to be there. It's a combination of largely different forms of self-interest, but they're coming to the table in any event. I take us to be looking at the kinds of infrastructure that has to be in place. It's not for them to do that, because they can do that on their own; they can finance projects if they want. But they're looking for some guidance, because the traditional models of economic and financial analysis for projects they fund have tended, as Monsieur Garon also pointed out, to exclude environmental projects. They're seen as high risk, partly because we don't have historical economic data to make empirical predictions about the performance of these types of investments, or at least that's what they would say. I'm not sure that's actually true, but that's what they would say. So they're trying to develop models to evaluate the long-term success of investments in these kinds of projects.
I think even more importantly for our purposes—because a lot of the large investors have access to privileged information and can have some level of confidence in the economic or financial viability of an investment—the question is how you produce that for your more run-of-the-mill Canadian investor who has some RRSPs, who's looking to invest in different kinds of funds, who wants to have a sense of ownership over where their money goes and have their money support things they think, in the long term, are good things and who tries not to support things they think in the long term are detrimental either to the environment or to other things. That's why we talk about standards of transparency and accountability. How do we develop metrics for your typical Canadian investor-consumer to evaluate, if they're investing in certain kinds of things, whether they can have some confidence that companies are acting in good faith to try to lower their emissions over time? How do we measure that?
That's part of what I take us to be studying here. That's part of the project, and I think there is obviously a role for government to play in laying out reporting requirements and developing metrics so that Canadians are comparing apples to apples when they're considering where to put their money. That may not be the entirety of what we're doing, but it's certainly an important part of what I take us to be doing.
I hope that's a bit of a supplementary answer to Mr. Morantz's question on what we're doing. It's not just about government coming in and setting up these definitions. Actually, it's pretty much the Wild West right now. It's about trying to figure out, for both the public interest and even within the context of the market, how financial actors who are currently saying they want to do a better job can do a better job and can be seen to be doing a better job, and how we can measure that. I think those are all important things to be able to do.
You've indicated a bit about the development of certain standards for reporting, but it seems to me that a few different areas are important to the new lower-carbon economy that's emerging. There's primary resource extraction, and there's the development of clean tech and the intellectual property that comes with that. Once you have those components, there's the manufacturing of components for a lower-carbon economy, and then there's critical infrastructure around the electrification, for instance, of various industries in Canada and items for personal use, such as cars. There are four categories, and they presumably may have some different reporting requirements.
What is your taxonomy of the different categories of work and investment that go into the new lower-carbon economy? What is the discussion around the different kinds of metrics we need to have companies be transparent about?
