Environment committee  Yes.

Environment committee  Most of these opportunities are medium and long term rather than short term. Breakthroughs such as the Dupont adipic acid process for producing nylon made for spectacular improvements in the 1990s. These things have huge payoffs. The chemical industry is looking at catalysts that

Environment committee  No.

Environment committee  I think it's important that we have targets that are very similar in our sector to the Americans, for the reasons you've outlined and that I talked about in our submission. If we're much less onerous than the Americans, we're going to face border measures, and we're very concerne

Environment committee  Yes. If you look at chart 1 in our submission, we did tremendously in the 1990s, and we did that because we were putting new plants in, we were investing in technology, and the economy was such that it supported doing that.

Environment committee  I was just looking at our number. Our number was 65%.

Environment committee  That will be a challenging target. We probably won't be able to meet it by actual reductions. That's why being able to contribute to a technology fund is so important. The better capital cost allowance treatment we get, though, the better we'll be able to have new investments tha

Environment committee  The most positive thing has been the accelerated capital cost allowance. The fact that it hasn't gone to the five-year term and is stuck at two-year terms has limited the effectiveness of that. But certainly the two-year terms have been better than nothing. We were very pleased t

Environment committee  Our sector is a lot more capital intensive than it is labour intensive. I'll get back to you with my numbers on this, but I don't have a good sense of how many folks work in the chemical sector. It is probably about 600,000, but that could be off base.

Environment committee  The technology fund that was originally proposed in Turning the Corner was a very short-term measure, and it basically disappeared by 2018. It also very rapidly shrank in terms of the amount of compliance you could use for it. We were very disappointed, actually. We thought it wa

Environment committee  I think on the issue of long-term targets, to have them as aspirational or objective is one thing, but to have them where the law demands that you have to meet them is another thing completely, and that's what this bill does. If we can't meet them through technological improvemen

Environment committee  There are probably a number of factors. For one thing, we probably don't have as much low-hanging fruit to go after as some of the Europeans do. We tend to have more modern plants. We also tend, particularly in provinces like Quebec, to already be using hydroelectric power, so we

Environment committee  No, we haven't negotiated specific targets with the federal government. What we have done is emphasize to them the point that we need to move in pace with the Americans--

Environment committee  No, we haven't done that with any federal government.

Environment committee  Well, that would be very negative. In fact, I think the attachment to the CCPA brief, which is based on Environment Canada's work, shows that it would be even worse than you portray, because in Canada, because of the costs, it's more expensive than it is in Europe to achieve the