Stephen Owen

[Electoral Reform, February 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues from the Conservative Party and the New Democratic Party for their speeches on this important issue.

For all of us it is a question of demonstrating to Canadians that our electoral system bears a reasonable proportion of the seats received to the votes cast. We have heard reasons for that. It is a direction we are going in for sure.

The Law Commission of Canada issued a report in the spring of 2004 which recommended a mixed proportional system. I must underline that the Law Commission of Canada statute requires it to engage in the fullest possible public consultation, as well as deep social research, both of which went into that massive report. It is perhaps the most comprehensive review of voting systems in the Commonwealth if not the broader democratic world. So, a lot of the work has been done. I will come back to that in a moment because it is important.

Following that commission report, we heard in the 2005 Speech from the Throne, with communication between the NDP and the Liberal government at the time, that we would look toward reforming the electoral system. The procedure and House affairs committee has come up with its report. Whether we go ahead with a special committee of the House or whether it is a subcommittee of the procedure and House affairs committee or that committee as a whole, we are inexorably moving forward under all of these demands and recommendations to seriously consider electoral reform in this country, not the least because six jurisdictions in Canada are looking at it very seriously.

British Columbia already looked at it once through its citizens assembly. It held a referendum at the time of its last fixed term election. My hon. colleague from the Conservative Party mentioned that it was barely passed; it was actually barely not passed in that it received 58% of the vote, a majority of course, but there was a 60% threshold put on it. That will be proceeded with in the next provincial election in British Columbia. The question will be put again. That was between the preferred single transferable vote system that the citizens assembly came up with and the current first past the post system.

Ontario is having a citizens' assembly as well. That is pushing us inexorably toward considering it federally. As well there are four other jurisdictions considering it.

I would equate this to the rise of medicare and our public health system which started at the provincial level. There was, I guess, a lot of resistance in Saskatchewan when that was put forward, but then in operation it became a model for the whole country.

I think the provinces have already started this process on its way and, as I say, through the House committee, through the Speech from the Throne and through the Law Commission of Canada, we have actually started on that route ourselves.

The purpose is to get some relative proportion between the number of votes cast and the number of seats obtained. Other members have mentioned the underlying even greater importance, the reason for that basic need is so we do not have groups in our society who are underrepresented because there are some barriers in our electoral system to their full participation.

I would add the outcome of regional disparity. Under the simple first past the post system, we have a huge disparity between the number of seats in any one region or province and the number of votes cast there for any particular party.

I have great sympathy for the NDP's long-standing interest in proportional representation because that party is disadvantaged. The NDP historically has been getting a lesser proportion of the seats than that party's proportion of votes. This is common for third parties in Westminster-style first past the post systems. The concern comes from that.

In that regard the current prime minister, Tony Blair, before Britain's 1997 election thought, as the mythology goes at least, that he was going to get a minority government and he needed the support of the Liberal Democrats in order to hold government. He made a deal that if he formed government, he would have a royal commission on electoral reform and put that to a vote against the current system.

Roy Jenkins, a former minister of the crown and wonderful biographer of some of the most important people in British history, including his most recent work on Winston Churchill, was made royal commissioner. In 1998 he came up with a breathtakingly sensitive, wise and tested system to blend the first past the post system with proportional representation. He very effectively shielded out all of the shortcomings of each and reinforced the strengths of each in a mixed member proportional system, which bears some real resemblance to the Law Commission report.

In passing, the member for Vancouver Island North mentioned the Law Commission of Canada and its president, Nathalie Des Rosiers, who is a former fellow law commissioner of mine before I entered politics. The question was asked as to what kind of work the commission has done.

The commission did the monumental study, after consultation and research, that was probably more extensive than anything done in this country on institutional child abuse. The centrepiece of that was the residential schools abuse which became the basis for the residential schools settlements, reconciliation and a number of reforms, awareness and recognition of that injustice in our country. The commission also opened up the debate on the same sex marriage issue by doing a major report in the late 1990s on civil unions. It looked at a lot of the complicated issues in a highly intelligent way as to the state's role versus the church's role in the solemnization of marriage. The commission has done a lot of breathtaking work on restorative justice as well.

As my colleague, the hon. member for Yukon, mentioned, it is passing strange in a way to see the budget of the Law Commission of Canada cut to zero, which may not actually be possible for the government to do without the consent of the House. It is a statutory and independent institution. It has statutory responsibilities to fulfill. If the government is able to reduce the commission's budget to zero, there is an issue of legal capacity that we have to carefully look at.

A new citizen consultative process has been announced by the government. The Prime Minister mentioned it about three weeks ago and it was mentioned again today. This is curious for a number of reasons.

We have a parliamentary process through the House committee which is just getting going again after the last, might I say, unnecessary election, but it also is subsequent to what has already been introduced. The member for Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington mentioned the democratic reform issues that the government has already brought forward. Whether it is terms, election of senators, fixed elections dates or the political financing aspect, how can we possibly take the government seriously when it says it is going to consult Canadians after it has already introduced all of these changes? It seems to be a little backward.

Let us do something meaningful and substantive with the citizens consultation. There are two models in Ontario and British Columbia that are highly representative and deliberative. Let us not just use a polling firm and a think tank to go out and have a few discussions across the country. Let us look to what the Law Commission has done. It is a statutory, independent public institution. Let us look to our parliamentary direct responsibility and role through our committees. Then let us have discussions with Canadians in a really fulsome way without barrelling forward with changes that do not benefit from that wide consultation and acceptance by the public. Let us do it in a way that will encourage the public to take part fully in elections in the future.

[Canada Elections Act, February 16th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from the NDP has raised a very good point. I guess if it were easy it would not be as enjoyable, but we have to try and come to some coherent compromises in so many issues that we deal with in the House. We are going to be dealing with it again on security legislation and whether the investigative hearing and preventive arrest provisions still should be part of our system. It is that balance between freedom and security and it is contextual. We have to find it.

In this case there is no doubt that a person's date of birth can be an important indicator of that person's identity. The very thing that causes concern to my colleague from the NDP is the very thing that also makes it of use in terms of identifying someone. Someone may have the same name as someone else, but their ages may be very different. It does have an identifying value to it. Yet we do not want to infringe on people's privacy. Those are some of the tough trade-offs we have to make.

In the circumstances, on balance, I would rather it not have to be done, but I do accept that there is an identification value to it which should and can be respected. It is open to the parties, yes. It is not just open to the electoral officials because, of course, a mainstay of the integrity of our electoral system is our ability to have scrutineers from each party there to observe the process as one of the safeguards for it.

I would rather it would not have to be done, but I accept on balance that there is a value to it. On balance I would say that adds marginally and quite importantly to the integrity of the voter system.

[Canada Elections Act, February 16th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his observations and insights into the electoral process. I agree that he has put his finger right on the key point.

After the presidential elections in the United States in 2000, I remember a joke going around that the Russians would send monitors to the next presidential election to ensure it was fair, which is the reversal of roles of course.

There is a grain of truth there. If we are going to hold ourselves out as a democratic example, particularly through our electoral process, and be advisors and monitors in other countries that are experiencing often for the first time the democratic right to vote, which in my experience and in my observations in a newly democratized country is taken up with enthusiasm and high turnout rates, we should be a little ashamed that our own citizens do not participate in the same way in our electoral process.

That is the balance. If we cannot show that we have integrity, then our participation will be even less. It is one thing to have people vote for all of us in this place and then think we are not listening to them, but it is another thing entirely if they think we arrived here in some clouded way.

We must not allow that to happen at the same time as we are doing everything we can to ensure that the existing barriers, whether they are physical, intellectual, illness, or remoteness, are overcome by targeted enumeration.

[Canada Elections Act, February 16th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, we are at third reading of this important bill now and I would like to begin by recounting how we have come to this place.

The recommendations for amendments to the Canada Elections Act emanate from the report of the Chief Electoral Officer following the January 2006 election. That is normal, of course, as he reports on the activities of elections and points out any failings or any improvements that may be made in the election process.

He produced that report and of course we went on to consider it in committee. The committee report went to the government and this bill is the answer, which falls very much in line with both the Chief Electoral Officer's report and the report of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs to the government. This will bring into force, for the most part, the recommended amendments from the Chief Electoral Officer.

The notion of the integrity of our elections is absolutely critical to our democracy, just as it is anywhere else in the world. It is interesting that Canadians are asked to monitor and help establish electoral commissions and the rules and procedures for elections in many newly democratizing countries.

In just the last few years, in the Ukraine there was major Canada Corps participation. Canadian teams of electoral monitors and advisers have been involved in the Palestinian authority and in Afghanistan. There was a team of Canadian officials in Bangladesh preparing for the election that should have taken place last month but has been delayed because of disruptions in that country.

The point is that we are seen as a country that has a sound electoral system. We must, as our first responsibility to our democratic condition, ensure that this integrity continues and is improved wherever it can be. The amendments to this act mainly deal with the identification of the voter.

I had the privilege of going with a Canadian team in 1990 to Nicaragua to monitor an extremely contentious election. Members might recall that it was a time when the Nicaraguans were in the middle of the civil war with the Contra rebels. It was a very dangerous time, yet the Sandinista government was submitting itself to free and fair elections, which is the standard we use.

I recall being up in the Honduran-Nicaraguan mountains in the northwest of the country checking out small voting stations, one a broken down old schoolhouse in the mountains, where there were literally hundreds of people lined up in the very hot sun. Many had walked for many hours to be able to exercise their right to vote.

There was one very poignant moment. One woman had walked for two hours, lined up for two hours, got to the front of the line, and did not have proper identification. She was heading back, another four hours both ways, to her village to get her voter card. That was the importance she placed on going through that electoral process. It also reflected the seriousness with which the Nicaraguan electoral commission, under the direction, guidance or advice of Canadian officials, was taking the integrity of the process.

When we have an international standard that we are often asked to advise on and monitor, the question is this: is an election free and fair? Of course free means the right of all adult citizens to vote in an election, but fair means that it has integrity, that there are no opportunities to stuff ballot boxes or for people to disguise their identities and vote improperly. That integrity is absolutely critical if we are going to ask our citizens to come forward and put their trust in the electoral and democratic system. Therefore, free and fair is an immensely important point.

We know that in the U.S. presidential elections in 2000 confusion was caused in Florida when voting machines were found not to be operating properly. There were irregularities. That cast a pall over the election, which I think many Americans to this day have not recovered from in terms of the feeling of unfairness that the vote may well have gone the other way had there not been those irregularities.

Let us look at the process under Bill C-31. It is not perfect. It probably never will be, but it is a reasonable advance in ensuring the integrity of that vote. For instance, there are improvements for access for the disabled. There are more convenient locations for the advance polls.

The access of candidates and officials to gated communities is clarified. The candidates' access to malls, privately owned public spaces, has been clarified. This is immensely important for any of us who have been candidates. Increasingly we are not going to meet people by knocking on doors but by going to malls, so this is important.

Also, there is an increased effort with the outreach provisions to get electoral officials to people unable to get to the polls.

I think these are immensely important improvements in that we must make sure our citizens have adequate access, but we must be vigilant against any irregularities.

What we have done in the committee, both in receiving the Chief Electoral Officer's report and considering it ourselves and in considering the government's response in Bill C-31, is to turn our attention to whether we were putting barriers in the way for people. They may be in remote communities, in aboriginal villages or in the inner cities. They may be living in shelters or they may be homeless. I think that all members of the committee from all parties were very seriously attending to the question. How can we ensure to the greatest extent possible, without risking the integrity of the system, that these people have access to vote? I think this was probably the toughest situation that all of us had to face.

We charged the Chief Electoral Officer to do a number of things. One was to ensure that areas of low enumeration and low participation were identified and targeted with extra resources to attempt to ensure access to identification and the voting process.

In regard to remote aboriginal villages, we heard evidence of people having difficulty providing adequate identification, so we also charged the Chief Electoral Officer to, first of all, recognize the aboriginal status card, which has a picture on it. It does not always have the address, but that card would be one of the recognized pieces of identification, as well as a letter from the band manager if the address was not on it, confirming that person's residence in that reserve area or wherever the person might live.

Those are reasonable attempts to deal with this tension between freedom and security: security in the system and freedom to vote. It is immensely important that we not drop our bar of the integrity of the system below that which we expect, advise on and monitor in other countries during their electoral processes.

We have an extremely important role. We have heard evidence from representatives of student groups and from people who work in the downtown east side of Vancouver, for instance, where the homeless or people in shelters have difficulty getting the adequate identification to secure their vote. The way we deal with the balance between integrity and freedom is not by lowering the bar so low that it could be open to abuse and therefore to lowering our citizens' belief in the integrity of the system. If they do not believe in it, they are not going to use it, and voting rates are going to continue to plummet.

We are concerned. I think we should express our concerns not by dropping our standards, but rather by redoubling our efforts through our electoral commission and the Chief Electoral Officer to get to those areas, to get to those people where there is evidence of low participation.

More broadly, as we talk about the Elections Act in this country we must attend to the issue of electoral reform, and we are in some parts of the country, in some provinces. We simply cannot continue to have dropping participation rates and fractured minority governments that do not properly represent the majority of the people in this country.

We must have some reform that will not do away with out constituency-based, first past the post system, but that at least will apply some adequate level of participation and proportionality so that the number of seats in the House represents in some better proportion than it does now the percentage of the vote achieved.

We have had some good experience with that, both in this country and abroad. In 2004, in the throne speech of the former Liberal government, with the encouragement of the NDP, I must say, we put forth the objective of studying electoral reform. A special committee of the House was to look into this. It was one of the processes that was cut short by the unnecessary election, if I may say so, of January 2006.

However, there we are and here we are, and what are we going to do about it? I would suggest that we charge the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs with this as the appropriate venue and place for this to be considered very carefully.

The government, through the Prime Minister, announced two or three weeks ago that in fact there was going to be a communication, a consultation, with Canadians over issues of electoral reform, Senate reform, decorum in this House, which is a very important issue, and public engagement. That is a bit curious, because for most of those topics, except for electoral reform, although that was started and stopped, the government has already put bills forward. It seems to me to be a bit backward to start a consultation process after bills on parliamentary reform have already been presented to the House.

Be that as it may, let us look at the quality of what was suggested. A $900,000 tender is being put out to a polling firm and an as yet unknown think tank to hold, across the country, a few consultations that are being called deliberative. Something can be called deliberative without it being anything close to deliberative if there is not the proper information brought forward, if there is not the time taken to advise people and have them well informed on the issues, the options and the different models, and then have a true conversation and a set of recommendations.

This is happening now in the province of Ontario with its citizens' assembly, which is very much patterned after the citizens' assembly process in British Columbia and which before the last B.C. election identified an alternative form of electoral process. That assembly process was deliberative. It went for about a year and a half. It was a widely representative group of about 178 people.

In fact, at the same time as the last election, the referendum was held on whether we would stay with the first past the post system or move to this new electoral forum recommended by the citizens' assembly, a single transferable vote system.that is quite complicated. Of the people voting in that election, 58% voted in favour of that change from our current system. The threshold was set at 60%, which is very high, but when we think that there was 58% represented, that is a very, very significant desire for change, certainly by a majority of the people.

We are watching that. It will come forward again for a vote in a referendum at the next B.C. provincial election in three years, so we will see where that goes. We also will see where Ontario goes.

Federally, quite apart from having polling companies and think tanks do some kind of quick, superficial testing of the atmosphere across the country, we want to look at it in an extremely in-depth way with a lot of consultation. Let me advise the House that in fact that process to a great extent has already happened.

The Law Commission of Canada in 2004 published a massive study. The Law Commission legislation charges that independent public commission to look into whether the laws of Canada properly conform to the social reality and the needs of the people. The Law Commission probably carried out one of the most in-depth research jobs, first of all, on voting systems in other democratic countries compared to Canada, and also looked at the different models that were going forward. It recommended on balance that we add an element of proportionality, not to do away with our current system but to add an element of proportionality to it. I commend this report to all members of the House. It is on the Law Commission of Canada website.

I commend all members of Parliament to do it quickly because as they may recall, the government, in its fall economic update, announced that it would basically eliminate the budget for the Law Commission of Canada, so it may lose its website as of April 1. Canadians may have less of an opportunity to see that fine work, that reasoning, that research, and the consultation which the commission is charged by its statute to undergo. It is extremely thoughtful and that is the way we should go forward.

There is nothing wrong with polling. There is nothing wrong with some deliberative discussions across the country with a think tank, but the place where these issues should be decided and studied, and where the consultation with Canadians should take place is through the House and the members of the House and, in particular, either a special committee or the procedure and House affairs committee of the House because that is our responsibility.

Second, we should be looking to the statutorily independent expert Law Commission of Canada for the fine work it has done and build on it, rather than simply ignore it.

Those are my remarks. I am speaking in favour of the bill at third reading, but I must conclude by reinforcing the observation of the committee that there are pockets of citizens in this country who do not have easy access. They face barriers in being able to exercise their right to vote and those include often aboriginal communities, but remote communities and people, often homeless, in inner cities.

We must redouble our efforts, through our electoral commission and Chief Electoral Office to ensure that those areas are targeted and the right to vote is brought to those people in an as accessible and effective way as possible.

[Business of Supply, February 8th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, it is passing curious to me that we are hearing from the Conservative government the constant harping about the fact that under the Liberal government for a number of years greenhouse gas emissions were actually increasing. It is curious because, during that whole period when numerous projects were being put into place and being funded into the future, projects that had real support from Canadians across the country, the scientific and environmental communities, that while they had not had a chance to get themselves working, the Conservatives, as opposition and then as government, were disclaiming the whole basis of climate change. They were deniers.

For them to now say that we did nothing and that they are rushing in to save the day and that under the Liberals it was terrible, they were not even in the field. They were saying that it did not happen, that it was not happening, that it was not a danger and that it was a waste.

Would the hon. member simply comment on what on earth the Conservatives were thinking for those long 13 years when they were denying the whole existence of a problem that they now claim they must rush in and save us from? It is very curious.

[Canada Elections Act, February 2nd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, one of the things that Canada has become best known for in terms of taking its international responsibility is providing assistance to countries that are newly democratizing or re-democratizing after civil war. In the last year alone we have assisted the Ukraine and the Palestinian Authority, even training people in Jordan to assist with elections in Iraq, and now in Bangladesh, although it has been delayed for some period of time and, regrettably, we have had election monitors there. The standards that we advise newly democratizing countries to meet are even more stringent than the bill is suggesting. We are looked to for our expertise in that.

I wonder if the member would comment on the reasonableness, perhaps, if she thinks it is, that we should be seen as experts on the international stage but we should be applying standards lower in Canada than we are advising and training people to apply in other countries.

[Business of Supply, February 1st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, it takes time to develop and invest in technology, which has been done. I mentioned carbon sequestration and capture as a technology that was developed through public investment in the country, when we had the financial resources to do it. It takes time to turn it around.

When we look at project green, the 2005 Liberal budget, which had $5 billion of additional money to go in a number of directions, that built the framework and the first phase of successive years, going up to 2012, of meeting Kyoto targets.

[Business of Supply, February 1st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad the hon. member has brought up this issue of roadblocks. In fact, we have all the legislative tools we need right now, through the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, to regulate greenhouse emissions. Therefore, who is holding up what?

Second, with regard to this mantra of 13 years, 11 years in majority, I repeat the observation from my colleague, the member for Don Valley East. The Liberal government was left with deficits of $42 billion a year from the previous Conservative government. It took five years or more to get in touch with that. We have had seven or eight straight surplus budgets, with $60 billion paid down on the national debt. It put us in a position--

[Business of Supply, February 1st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member's question is a critically important. I suggest this standard. Today we could go to zero CO₂ emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, from the tar sands simply by regulation. The science is available in Canada today because of previous investments by the former Liberal government in research and development into carbon capture and sequestration. We have the technology today and the costs are manageable to go into carbon capture and sequestration on an industrial scale. This could be done immediately. That is the type of standard to which we have to look.

[Business of Supply, February 1st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to rise today to speak to this important motion. I thank my colleague from Don Valley East for her important remarks.

I would like to add to this debate by speaking positively about the future. We have had many accusations back and forth, and that is understandable I suppose. This is, I think, the meta-issue of history, of a degradation of our climate and our planet. Never before have we been so exposed to danger for actually deteriorating human life and all life on earth.

We can recall those first Apollo pictures of the earth and the images they have created in our minds of a blue and green gem floating in, for all we know, an endless infinite universe of rock and fire. That gem is unique to our knowledge, and yet we are taking a risk with it because it is not actually a gem. It is actually only an eggshell; it is not solid. It is a tiny eggshell of blue and green over rock and fire. To think that we as a species would put at risk that extraordinary unique piece of magic floating through the universe is really an existential march of folly more than we have ever seen in society.

I am very pleased that whatever shortcomings or inadequacies the government or previous governments may have taken toward environmental degradation, that we are all coming together. This motion focuses us on the opportunity to state the absolute imperative of dealing with this in the most serious possible way.

It was interesting to hear a panel of people speaking about climate change on CBC Radio's The Current this morning after the 8:30 news. These people came from business, the environmental sector and from the scientific sector. Mr. Thomas d'Aquino, who is the CEO of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, not generally known as an eco-freak but rather known as someone who takes a very serious business-minded approach to matters, quoted Michael Porter, the Harvard competitive guru seen as the person who has the best grasp on why competitive economies are competitive around the world.

In 1990 he was commissioned by the Mulroney government and produced a report on the competitive nature of Canada. His main recommendation was that the lack of competitiveness and productivity in the Canadian economy was because our environmental standards were too low and that northern European countries, where they had higher environmental standards, were the ones that had the most competitive economies. Companies working under that sort of regulatory and fiscal regime were more competitive and more creative. They invested more in research and development. They protected themselves, for instance, from consumer boycotts that are against environmental practices that are damaging in other countries. They created spinoff technology industries that they could sell to the rest of the world.

As the world focuses more and more on the dangers of climate change, those technologies are going to be immensely important. We in Canada should be investing in those companies, as Mr. d'Aquino was recommending, and in those technologies, so that we can lead and supply the world with what is going to become and is increasingly being seen as an absolute historical imperative.

Sir Nicholas Stern, in his report that was issued a few weeks ago, compared the vastness of the economic damage that will be done if we do not deal with climate change to being greater than that of both the first and second world war. That is the scale we are talking about. It is absolutely breathtaking and it is something that we altogether as parliamentarians must take on the responsibility of solving.

We need regulatory and fiscal powers to do that. There are two critically important principles in environmental science and in fact in the whole issue of sustainability. One is the precautionary principle. I hope all of us in this House now have gotten over whatever our hesitation may have been in the past, that we have gotten beyond the notion of questioning the science of climate change.

In terms of risk assessment and dealing with risk, the precautionary principle would cause us to act positively. The consequences of severe climate change will be catastrophic even if the chance was fairly small, but in fact it is the overwhelming preponderance of scientific evidence in the world that sees this as a rapidly changing climate in historical terms, with the acceleration being caused by human activity. The precautionary principle says we must act. Now it is coming into all of our consciousness that we have not acted fast enough and we are going to have to do it together.

The other principle is polluter pay as a basic bedrock principle of environmental stewardship. We simply cannot have companies or individuals any further using the atmosphere as a toxic waste dump, and we can set the example in this country. It simply cannot happen. We know, and any economist will tell us, that if we are going to have a sound working economy, we have to internalize any negative externalities that the activities of those companies or persons cause. We simply have to cost out the price of pollution. We can call it a carbon tax or costing CO₂ emissions. We can call it internalizing negative externalities. We can call it whatever we want, but the point is, it is paying for the damage that is being done as we go.

The wonderful thing about that, and we have suggested in this motion a cap and trade system, is that we can actually let the market work in a way that is most efficient and effective by costing those greenhouse gas emissions. They can be capped at a reasonable point to start and then those caps can be dropped, so that people and industry have to successively reduce them over time as they develop the technology, as they rebuild their manufacturing plants, and as they add new processes.

We can use the market to cost it and then a trading system can allow companies that can easily reduce GHGs, because of their procedures or because of their technologies, to get credit for it and to sell that credit to other companies that can take longer times perhaps to replace their capital equipment. That is a reasonable way to do it, but it can actually start accelerating very quickly.

We can also, and this is immensely important, use fiscal mechanisms to determine behaviour and incent proper behaviour. We can have tax shifting. We want to make it neutral but we can do it in a fair way. We can take away incentives that cause bad behaviour, polluting behaviour by taxing it, or removing the tax benefit and putting the tax benefits on the development of renewable energy technologies. We can use incentives and disincentives in a very effective way.

Certainly, in North America and increasingly in China and India, we know that vehicle emissions are a major cause of pollution and greenhouse gases. California has just announced the highest levels of vehicle emission standards in the world. We can go to that level. If they can do it in California, we can do it here. There is a way that we can actually do that without crippling or damaging the automobile industry and of course that is an important part of the Canadian economy. By what is called niching, we can cause automobile manufacturers to make a certain proportion of models of their automobile production low or no emission vehicles, but they can spread the cost of developing that technology across their whole manufacturing units. And over time, of course, those percentages would have to increase.

Those are some ideas for us to positively go ahead, and I look forward to comments and questions from colleagues.