Finance committee  It's totally fair to say that.

Finance committee  It's something that would be very difficult to do. It would require us to make assumptions that would certainly be easy to dispute. It's something that, if the committee decided to ask us to do, we could give it a try, but it would be very, very difficult for us to do. We've done difficult things before.

Finance committee  Of course. As parliamentarians, you are called upon to vote on the main estimates, i.e., budget appropriations. You are being asked to vote on the main estimates during the months of March and April, when the budget itself has not yet been tabled. So you have budget appropriations that essentially represent the status quo in government spending, what I referred to in a Senate committee as “last year's news”.

Finance committee  This would be a good way for you, as parliamentarians, to have a better idea of the overall plans of each of the departments and agencies and what they're going to do over the course of the year. Mr. Boswell may disagree, but it would require work for these agencies. However, it would give you a better perspective on their overall activities during the fiscal year, rather than a partial picture based solely on major appropriations.

Finance committee  The tax on carbon has an impact on everyday prices, especially those that are heavily reliant on fossil fuels, such as transportation and heating. It's something that is hard to disagree with.

Finance committee  I'm not sure what the impact on productivity would be, but in terms of the impact on prices, we would expect to see inflation reduced. The quantum would depend on many factors including the competitive framework, to which Mr. Boswell can probably speak much better than I can. But, yes, if we were to eliminate the carbon tax, one would expect prices to, if not decrease, at least grow at a slower rate than would otherwise be the case.

Finance committee  Yes. When we looked at the direct carbon tax paid by households, the indirect carbon tax paid by households through goods and services they buy, as well as the GST that's levied on that, and we subtracted the carbon rebate, we found that about eight out of 10 households were better off when we looked at the money in versus money out.

Finance committee  Sure. We did look at the impact of climate change on Canada's GDP. We also looked at the impact according to some key sectors. We found that changes that have already happened in terms of average precipitation and temperature levels across the country have indeed had a negative impact on GDP.

Finance committee  If I remember correctly, over the next several decades, we expect the GDP to be negatively impacted to the tune of about 5% or 6%, although it's difficult to be absolutely certain that this will, indeed, be the impact because we're projecting economic growth and the impact of climate change several decades into the future.

Finance committee  In our successive reports where we looked at the distributional impact of carbon pricing, I think we had, in the annexes, a profile by year to take into account the evolving price of the carbon tax or the pricing on pollution. To the best of my knowledge, it is still the case that the majority of households are better off once we also take into account the economic impacts of the price on carbon or the tax on carbon.

Finance committee  I'm sorry, I meant worse off.

Finance committee  I'm sorry, I misspoke. It's a bit like the chair's mistake indicating that Diarra's title is political analysis. I'm sorry.

Finance committee  Yes. I'm sorry for the confusion.

Finance committee  I probably would not have chosen that type of analogy, but I agree with her overall assessment that productivity is an essential part of economic growth and success. It's something that needs to be addressed if we want to maintain and increase our standards of living. Yes.

Finance committee  There is the fact that productivity growth in Canada has been lagging that of the U.S. and that of many other European countries and advanced economies. That is a worry for many reasons. It means that our economy is not growing as fast as it should and that we are more than at risk of losing ground compared to our main competitors and the nations with which we trade.