Foreign Affairs Committee on Feb. 25th, 2009

[James Lunney, Conservative, Nanaimo—Alberni, BC]

Mr. d'Aquino, please.

[Thomas d'Aquino]

First, I come back to the issue of perception. I know many of us in this room were probably offended, not once but sometimes twice or three times, by people who should know better, not only by the assertions in the United States--not to mention what was carried on the talk shows--that the perpetrators of 9/11 were people who came from Canada or across the border, but that even when this was pointed out to be clearly incorrect, some people in very high office right now repeated it.

What is deeply disconcerting about that is that these perceptions, once established, can really begin to run. And how do you get at it? In those particular cases, our ambassador and other officials went to see them and said this was not the case, that these were the facts, and they said they understood. But we're dealing here with a big country, where talk shows...and Americans, I think, are even more obsessed about sovereignty than we are. That's always been my argument. So unless the word goes out to the contrary again and again, we're going to have difficulty winning that battle.

Secondly, there is a perception that Canada historically has been a little looser in its treatment of refugees, in its treatment of immigration, and so on, and this perception has sort of gone out. I always like to shock our American friends by saying, “Hey, just stop in your tracks. Government figures estimate that you have roughly 15 million individuals that you know to be in the country, but you have no idea where they are, who they are, or what they're doing.” I say, “You know, when I go to bed at night, I should be a lot more worried about people coming north than you should be worried about people coming south.” I know that sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes they look at me in total disbelief. And I think Prime Minister Harper, in his joint conference with President Obama, very strongly emphasized the point, which is often lost on Americans and some Canadians, that the security of the United States is as important to us as it is to Americans, and vice versa.

So I think trying to get that across, but doing it intensively, constantly, has to be done.

I think the second thing that has to be done is this. Where we do have obstacles to cooperation, we have to be really sensible about them. One that has really befuddled us is the argument over privacy, where we had almost reached an agreement on how to deal with individuals who are identified as suspect--that coupled with the issue of who carries guns, who does not carry guns.

The way I tend to look at these things is that these are different times. And as long as the civil rights protocols can be respected on both sides of the border, surely coming to terms with who can carry weapons and who can't carry weapons, who might come to a border point and then decide to walk away, the Americans insisting that that person may be a terrorist and we saying we really have no hold on that individual.... We came up with an idea that said, why not simply take that individual aside, ask him who he is, what he does, where he is, draw your own conclusions, and give a report to the Americans? Anyway, all that came apart, Homeland Security withdrew the opportunity to do some serious cooperation on that, and it continues. To my knowledge, unless my colleagues know otherwise, it continues to be unresolved.

So I think there are some very practical things we can do where, if we apply common sense, we're going to be okay.

And then finally there is the answer of technology. Technology, to me, is the big answer, because you cannot have a 4,000-mile-plus border, huge empty expanses, without using technology. We don't have enough people, nor do the Americans, to police that border all the way across. Now, they've got Predators up in the sky—fortunately, they don't have missiles on them—looking down. But the use of technology, in one way or another.... I'm not offended by the Predators, as long as they're looking on both sides of the border.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. d'Aquino.

Do you have another question, Mr. Lunney? In fairness, I'll give you the same time as I gave the others and come back to Ms. Brown.

[James Lunney, Conservative, Nanaimo—Alberni, BC]

Yes, thank you. I just want to make a quick comment about Canada's energy footprint and pick up on that.

While we have a large energy consumption and output for a small population, when you consider the size of our country and the actual factors, I don't know why we apologize for the fact that we are big energy consumers. On a per capita basis, that is the nature of our country. We're just a large country, huge. So we have transportation concerns. Members of Parliaments here have these concerns, just coming to our Parliament, unlike most of our colleagues around the world. The U.S. of course has challenges that way, but other parts of the world are not travelling multiple time zones just to come to Parliament. So we have the huge transportation concerns in Canada. Also, we have a cold climate in the winter and warm in the summer.

So by nature of who and where we are, we are large consumers. Having said that, I think we need to be perhaps a little less apologetic for the fact that it's part of our life—not that we can't be responsible and still recognize that the world is changing.

Coming around to the question of the models with climate change, I want to ask you this thing. With anything with a scientific background around it, and when you're dealing with models and you don't have all the information, models are always only as good as the assumptions. I'm sure in the business world they have to consider assumptions all the time. It's a challenge making economic forecasts today.

It's just an issue we want to throw out there. Recent information has come out on underwater sub-Arctic volcanos, for example, that wasn't considered when these models were established in the international committees that were discussing these things. A huge range of volcanos in the Gakkel Ridge there, reported recently in December 2008 in Nature magazine—a 17-kilometre range and eruptions going up two kilometres under the Arctic ice, scattering shards of rocks for kilometres around there—could affect huge volumes of carbon dioxide associated with that, starting with eruptions in 1999, coincidentally when Arctic ice had accelerated melt.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Lunney.

Maybe we'll come back to it in the second round.

[Thomas d'Aquino]

Mr. Chairman, I know exactly what you're getting at. I have to tell you, as my colleagues will confirm, you have no idea the number of hours we spent, going way back into the early 1990s, debating the issue of the science. At issue there was this idea that we don't know. There are scientists on both sides. In fact, we kept a ledger of who said what, who was for, who was against, who could prove, who could not. While we know that a lot of people played fast and loose with the numbers and the credibility of those numbers, the conclusion we finally came to was that, while I personally find it intellectually stimulating, to continue to debate the science would really hold us up from doing a lot of things we should be doing anyway.

We've adopted, collectively as an organization, 150 CEOs who collectively administer $3.5 trillion in assets and are responsible for the vast majority of GDP.... The conclusion we came to is that we should be prudential on the science. In other words, we don't know for sure, but we do see evidence that increasingly is disturbing. So what did we conclude? We said, “Look, instead of dissipating energy in these huge debates about whether it is real or not, why don't we do things we should be doing anyway?” Why don't we invest in smart technologies? Why don't we invest in environmental innovations? Even though you're right that we're a big cold country with huge spaces—God, we've lived through these winters when we would pray for global warming sometimes—and also demographics that are working in our favour to increase C0₂ emissions, we came to this conclusion. Why not adopt the new technologies and new sciences, which is in the direction we should be moving in anyway, in order to make us less reliant on petroleum-based resources?

Once we got out of the corral of that debate, then whether it was coal, or ethanol, or nuclear, or oil and gas, or oil sands, or hydroelectric power, or biomass, we all said, All of these sources of energy are relevant. I don't want anybody in this room, one CEO arguing with another one....” You would not believe the degree of saying, “Listen, I'm in oil sands, so I'm okay; you're in coal, so you're not.” And we said, “None of that, because we all have to contribute to the energy needs of the planet in one way or another, but let's try to do it in the smartest way we possibly can.”

That way we left the science debate behind. It's not that we don't read it still. It's not that whenever there's a new study we don't pay attention to it. That's what we've chosen to do. It's what I call the prudential approach, which in the final analysis will make us all more responsible, more effective citizens applying and using the best of technologies.

Here is the last point. We recognized this in a major study we did in 1990 with Professor Michael Porter. The quicker we adopt environmental sustainable technologies, the quicker we do that, the more competitive we're going to be into the 21st century, we argued, and that's the way we feel now. I don't think we've done nearly enough, but we can and should be doing more.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. d'Aquino.

We'll move to Mr. Dewar, please.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to our guests for taking the time to be here today.

I actually wanted to start on the issue of energy, the environment, and the economy. It's a different triple-e than the one we're used to hearing around here. I think it's one that is welcome. Certainly if you look at the approach that we put forward—not in this past election, but in the election before, and the election before that—it was one that looked at the environment and embraced the idea of a cap and trade system.

I'll be posing my question to you, Mr. Plourde, to start.

The reasons we put forward the cap and trade model for the environment were threefold. One, it was being used in Europe, though we're still working out some of the kinks. Secondly, it acknowledges the nature of the problem of climate change, which doesn't have passports, as you are dealing with a continent. The third one was that when you're looking at greenhouse gas emissions and at how you deal with climate change, it seemed to us that there was a similar phenomenon before between Canada and the U.S., and that was the one dealing with acid rain. When you put hard caps on acid rain and you say, “This is it; if you don't meet this threshold, then we'll fine you....” Of course, we know what happened in due course.

I must say, it was through a lot of political pressure. I remember standing outside as a university student protesting against Bill Davis at the time, saying he should do something about acid rain. It wasn't something they embraced. At first they said, “Go away and leave us alone.” Businesses didn't really embrace it initially either. They said, “You're going to bankrupt us.” That's why we looked at cap and trade, because it makes sense.

We're now facing a bit of a dilemma. With all due respect to the success of the trip—and I agree with the comments made about Mr. Obama being here, and the fact that it was his first visit and was good news—the problem I'm finding is that we're a little bit behind in embracing this.

I wanted your take on this, because I read your comments here. You think it is right to have a continental approach, but when it comes to a cap and trade system, if you think that's the way to go—and certainly that's the direction we're going—what are the component parts that we need to catch up on, number one?

Number two, who should be leading this within government? Maybe you don't have an opinion on this, and I appreciate it if you don't. What department should lead? Or is there a model you can put forward that indicates it's maybe not a departmental approach?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Dewar.

Mr. Plourde.

[André Plourde]

Thank you.

Whether we use a cap and trade system or any other type of economic instrument—either putting in a charge, a levy, a tax, or a cap and trade, or whatever you want to do—basically what it does is distribute the risk differently. So with a cap and trade system, if you design it one way, you know exactly how many emissions you're going to get. You're not too sure how much it's going to cost you to get there. If you put in a tax, you know roughly how much you're going to pay per emission and therefore what kind of technological and behavioural response you're going to get, but you don't know the exact level of emissions you're going to get.

You can, of course, marry the two systems by having a cap and trade system, where the cap is something that you can buy your way out of at a relative price, with somebody becoming the issuer of permits.

So I think in some sense that there are big advantages, whatever approach you use, in having as broad a mandate as possible for this; hence, the continental approach—in part because it allows you to find what the cheapest ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions are by the people who actually know a lot more about this than people sitting in offices like me, or public servants. I have no qualms about that. So I think it puts the onus of action where there's the most information to deal with it.

So whether you go with a cap and trade system or something else, the key thing is to design it in a way that will allow the individuals who participate in it to find the cheapest way of addressing the problem.

The second thing is to try to have this as coordinated as possible, in the sense that what you don't want to have is what we tend to observe now, this plethora of little states, and little cities in some cases, taking initiatives on problems that are, as we've put it, planetary or continent-wide, at least. So I think it's important to find a way where you can act in an integrated fashion at the level of the continent, but also within individual countries, so that we're not redoing different things.

In some sense, the question of who should be leading this is a bit of a moot issue, because it really depends on which instrument you pick and what kinds of constraints you put on the instrument. If you basically have a permit system, where you don't freely allocate anything but where everybody has to bid within an auction system, it doesn't really matter who administers it. In a big-picture sense, you can probably create an agency and let them do it, even if it's a private sector agency under some government oversight.

More importantly, the issue, I think, is that you shouldn't try to do too much with a single instrument. That's the kind of problem we've run into for the last 15 years, at the very least, with this policy. We've tried to design a large final emitter system that was so complicated in how it was supposed to work, in terms of the allocation of permits and permissions and all kinds of things, that they essentially cratered in on themselves. It was too complicated to administer. If you think there are distributional problems and you don't like how the burden is shared, and you feel there are poverty issues, for example, or competitiveness issues, use other tools to deal with those. Don't try to lump too much onto the one tool that you want to use to deal with the problem at hand.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you.

Mr. Dewar, you have lots of time.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Thank you for that.

I wanted to establish the approach, certainly, and I would agree with you that you don't want to put too much on this: it is to design to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, not to provide you with all of your social policy instruments, etc. I agree with that.

In fact, I think of a provincial experience, and it is from Manitoba—I happen to have a brother who lives there and knows a bit about it. They used conservation as the way to go and provided very low-interest loans for retrofits. They then allowed people to pay those off through savings in their energy bills, and of course that reduced the amount of energy that consumers and businesses were using. For Manitoba that was good news because it meant they had more excess energy to sell.

I want to go to this point, because what they've done is successfully reduce up to 40% of their consumption in energy, which they then are able to sell. The sad part is—not sad for Manitoba but for Canada in some respects—that they seem to have only buyers as of late, though it's changed a bit, from the northern States. Quebec has the same phenomenon.

The direction I want to go in with this is that we heard that the President and the Prime Minister were discussing investment in a smart grid. We applaud that. One of the things we'd been pushing for in the last two elections was to have an east-west grid built.

How do you—and anyone else can please chime in on this—see the conversations that have taken place to date on energy policy and infrastructure? In other words, where should we be putting our investment dollars when it comes to the grid? The east-west grid seems to need some work, if we're going to go that route. But some might say, just do it north-south; that makes more sense. It seems the Americans are going to be going there. They've certainly announced a lot of money for this, and it's been front and centre in their energy policy.

Where should Canada be when it comes to that particular file? Should we be doing just east-west? Should we do a bit of both? How should it work?

[André Plourde]

It's clear that a problem Canadian utilities or Canadian owners of transmission facilities have shared with U.S. owners of transmission facilities has been an under-investment in transmission for quite some time in both countries. Some of this is for regulatory reasons; the shift in models of regulation has in some sense left very unclear what the incentives for transmission investments are. I think this is an issue that needs to be addressed.

In terms of the structure of the grid, what we need to let emerge is what makes the most sense from a commercial perspective. Set up the regulations or the framework you want in place and then allow people to make decisions as to where reasonable investments make sense. In some sense, if the customers are relatively close, it makes more sense to have transmission investments working that way than to decide, for example, to use hydro power from Manitoba to replace coal generation in Alberta. So we need to think.

If we think of this as a security system argument, we need to recognize again that Canada and the U.S. are integrated in various bits within the electricity system. The best investment for consumers as a whole is where it makes most commercial sense, to strengthen reliability and to make power available at relatively low prices once the policy framework is in place.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Plourde.

Mr. Boutziouvis.

[Sam Boutziouvis, Vice-President, Economics and International Trade, Canadian Council of Chief Executives]

Just as a brief additional comment to Mr. Plourde's excellent response, it seems to me that regionally—in the Pacific northwest between the provinces and states, in the U.S. midwest, in the east between Quebec and New York State and Quebec and other states—there already is tremendous collaboration. Pragmatically speaking, we should build on that collaboration. In fact, the leaders both agreed that it might be a good idea to build a grid stakeholders group to get together to discuss how to in fact improve reliability, as was suggested earlier by Mr. Plourde, but also to plug in...because we haven't done this yet. How do you plug wind power into the main grid? How do you plug clean, renewable sources of energy into the grid? It seems to me that, being practical and pragmatic, you use the existing collaboration, which is excellent.

We've had people from PNWER come in to see us, and they're doing fantastic work in the Pacific northwest, trying to build some of these transition grids from the northern tip of British Columbia right into Washington and into Oregon. The same is true in the U.S. northeast. The eastern provinces, with the five eastern states, are doing fantastic work together in this particular area.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

[Inaudible--Editor]

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you.

Madam Brown.

[Lois Brown, Conservative, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would really like a comment from both Mr. Plourde and Mr. d'Aquino on this, because both of them commented on this in their remarks. And just to preface this, last June I had a rather nasty hand accident, and it became a bit of a metaphor for me of what is going on in our market. I see the invisible hand of the market having been seriously injured with some of the policy decisions that we have made and government intervention into it, and Mr. d'Aquino, I sort of build on your comment about the need to get the blood flowing again. I certainly had to do that with my hand injury.

Mr. Plourde, you talked about having common policy decisions; and Mr. d'Aquino, you talked about the intertwining of our economies. What I would like you to comment on is, as our economies become more and more integrated, how do we ensure that these policy decisions that we make are not going to intrude into our economy in terms of the way the economy needs to work?

Mr. Plourde, you talked a little bit about that in your discussion of cap and trade and letting the market work. How do you see that happening with the policy decisions we need to make as two federations in North America, but seeing the intertwining of our economies?

[André Plourde]

In terms of simply energy, I'm going to talk about Canada-U.S. energy relations, not about environment aspects, which I'll come to later on.

In terms of Canada-U.S. energy relations, we've done a lot of market liberation over the last 25 years, and in some sense, it has resulted in exactly the kinds of things we should have expected: huge increases in Canadian energy production, huge increases in exports of energy from Canada to the United States. What has emerged over the last while, however, is that there are clearly regulatory issues both within Canada across jurisdictions and between Canada and the U.S. Building transmission capacity, building pipelines, building energy-related infrastructure of those kinds becomes much more difficult, in part because of the regulatory approaches that have been taken in Canada, within the provinces, and in the U.S. as well.

That, I think, would be a really important part of a policy agenda, to ensure better regulatory cooperation within Canada and across the international border to address those kinds of issues in the future. It is complicated, because it includes first nations issues and all those kinds of things, but the federal government has a duty, a responsibility, to take a leadership role in this area.

On the environmental side, I think it is not possible to solve or address this problem in an effective and meaningful way without government intervention. The government is the agent in the economy that can set the rules to make the behaviour. Whether it's technological development and adoption, or whether it is how energy producers behave or consume energy, or how energy consumers behave, government is the agent in the economy that must set the context. The responsibility, I would argue, of a government is to set the context in a way that allows us to deal with the problem in the cheapest way possible, and in that sense, that has been the struggle of Canadian environmental and energy policy for the last many, many decades. We've not been able to find the right coalition to bring together an effective and credible policy approach that will deliver real progress on the agenda, but also in a way that delivers results at the cheapest cost.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Ms. Brown.

Did anyone else want to venture quickly into part of that question?

We're going to Mr. Pearson, then, please.

[Glen Pearson, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Welcome.

Mr. d'Aquino, you've been around a long time. You've seen a lot of administrations come and go. You've seen various administrations up here come and go. I would like to ask a political question. Obviously, in your modelling of what you do, and over the years that you have been doing it, you sit and watch the states fight against an administration of the United States as provinces here develop different standards. You watch as groups like the auto industry, for instance, try to meet all of these various standards and have great difficulties doing it. Also, you're watching as federal administrations north and south of the border are not providing the grid kind of framework that is needed for the kinds of things that are being built.

You talk about two federations and how we need to harmonize. I understand that. But the question of politics always enters into it, and this picks up a little bit on what Ms. Brown said. We live a life here in Canada, it seems to me, of successive minority Parliaments. So every time you do a model of something you want to do for your organization, suddenly there's an election and something gets switched again. I know this is happening. I'm glad I'm not in the boardroom listening to you guys as you talk about this, but I know it must be deeply frustrating. Every time you think you're getting somewhere, all of a sudden something changes.

Here is my question for you. In regard to the institutions that we have as a federal government, regardless of who is in power at that particular time, how do you see strengthening those institutions so they survive those transitions? In other words, you would have a federal government come in and you might have a totally different environmental standard, or other things. I know you look at that. You're trying to be in it for the long haul. We often play for the next year, up to the next election. What are the ways in which you, in your organization, can help us to transition, so that whoever is in power at that particular point has institutions there that can help us build on the successes you've already put out there?

[Thomas d'Aquino]

You're absolutely right that we do have those conversations on a regular basis, but then again, I don't want you to think that we are holier than thou. We have a lot of conflicts within our own family, within our own community. I mentioned a little earlier some of the struggles among the various producers of energy. It's the nature of the beast that we will have people of different views. That's one of the great virtues of the great democracy we live in, that you're going to have differences of opinion, differences of interest, and appropriate institutions that would allow for brokering those differences.

You said it's a political question. Let me answer in a somewhat political way and say the following. First, I believe—and it is my view that a good number of my colleagues share this view—that with all the foibles and the problems we have, we really do live in the finest country in the world. We believe that. It's not just a throwaway line. One of the reasons we believe that is that we have a federation that allows for the give and take and the flexibility that one needs in a country of this gigantic size, where we literally have pockets of people and regions, and we've come up with a system. When I was a young lawyer doing post-graduate work and I was studying the Constitution, I did a course on comparative constitutions, looking at the constitutions of the United States, the Federal Republic of Germany, India--because it's an interesting one--and Canada. The conclusion I came to is that we are truly blessed to have a federation with a parliamentary system.

Now the specific answer to your question. Number one, we have to pay really close attention to the public service as an extremely important resource that bridges changes in government, that bridges changes in political complexion, and I don't think we have been doing that adequately. One of the greatest strengths of Canada in the lead-up to the Second World War and beyond was that we had this professional, independent public service, respected by both opposition and by those in government, where politicians and public servants worked together. I don't see that working nearly so well anymore. We have a public service that has lost a lot of its lustre, we have a public service that is somewhat dejected, and I think we have a public service that has seen artificial barriers being thrown up that I don't think are healthy.

I would say that a good, strong, independent, professional public service made up of the brightest and the best is one way of helping to bridge those transitions.

The second thing I would say is that--and it's easy for me to say, I don't sit in your wonderful crucible of democracy, Parliament--from the outside obviously we would like to see closer cooperation among parties and between parties. You may say I don't live in the real world. I've never been elected. I don't understand. Whether we're facing extreme economic hardship, the way we are now, or trying to come to terms with a national environmental policy that works for all parts of the country, or trying to come to terms with how we deal with terrorism in North America, or whatever the case may be, what we'd like to see is closer cooperation and some of the partisanship jettisoned in favour of really trying to come to terms with the kind of issues we're faced with.

The third thing, I would say, is the relationship between the provinces and the federal government. There have been various times when we have seen it work better. There have been various times when it has been godawful. When you look at all the areas of cross-fertilization, whether it's financial regulations, the debate over whether there should be a national regulator, environmental policy, governance policies, energy policy, in all these areas where there is overlap it is really important that we have the two institutions working together as closely as possible.

That's a very political answer. It may not give you a very satisfactory answer, but when we look at countries around the world, even with some of the problems we have we don't do too badly. We would like to see it work a lot better in some cases, and that's entirely up to you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. d'Aquino.

Mr. Goldring.

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I would like to make a comment on my colleague's comments about the great distances in Canada; they certainly are very true. A lot of the reason involves air travel, of course. They haven't yet invented electric airplanes, so we're rather tied to the system. And just as a matter of fact, the Turks and Caicos islands are closer to Ottawa than my riding of Edmonton East is.

We have to be careful when we're instituting environmental institutions. I draw an example here from what has happened in the past in Sudbury, where their approach to cleaning up the area from International Nickel was to build a 600-foot smokestack. Yes, the lawns started growing in Sudbury, but it just shoved the pollution into the air and transferred it over a thousand square miles. You ask, have we learned?

I was in the Caribbean and I saw Japanese trucks. I asked whether there was a Japanese community there. No, out in the harbour was a huge ship, and apparently what happens.... The Japanese, of course, do a wonderful job of environmental controls and of removing the vehicles from their streets and roads when they fail the emissions test, but they load them onto ships and send them to the Caribbean and sell them there. Where's the net gain in that? We must have realistic approaches to this.

That was just a comment. Let me turn to the question of the sustainability of Canadian supply, because I think that's as important as sustaining the American supply. They have hurricanes in the gulf. As we saw in the summertime, it shut down and boosted the costs on both sides of the border. Do we have the capability of providing Canada sustainably during those periods, without having that surge and apparently very high prices and a shortage of supply, even here in Canada? That would be one concern.

My final comment would be on this thickened border issue. Is consideration being given, particularly for shipments that flow through the United States to Mexico or flow through the United States to the Caribbean and beyond, to using our coastal ports, Atlantic and Pacific, in conjunction with American seaboard ports? Time is money, and I would think they'd look at the financial consideration of going around particular border areas—maybe through lesser-utilized ports of the Americas and also directly into markets like Mexico—rather than through Canada.

There are a couple of questions there.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Goldring.