I was listening to the conversation in the previous round and this round, and I'm going to answer it tangentially. To provide full disclosure, I believe in Pigou taxes. I'm referring to Professor Pigou of Cambridge from 100 years ago, who said that if you want to discourage something, make it more expensive with a tax. Liquor taxes are Pigou taxes, as are what we now call carbon taxes—so are cigarette taxes. The principle has been around for a very long time. Make something more expensive and you'll consume less of it. It's kind of hard to argue with that.
I think the problem—it reminds me a lot of the debates over the HST back in 1991, when Michael Wilson was the finance minister—is the aggressivity. I'm now talking about the carbon tax. The solution, to answer your question, is this. As the previous witness just said, it's rising so quickly that technology and investment can't keep up.
I think the criticism is not the carbon tax; it's the speed of the implementation of the carbon tax. Instead of squishing it through in what I think is five years—correct me if I'm wrong—maybe we should be amortizing that over 10 years or 12 years. I debated the head of Ecofiscal Commission at McGill. They are very pro-carbon tax too. We both agree that it's going to take 50 years to decarbonize the American and Canadian economies, not five or seven or 10 or 12 years.
Maybe we should acknowledge that and stretch out the amortization, which means a lower rate of increase so that the growers, the farmers and the greenhouse operators can adapt and adjust incrementally because it's not going up so radically so quickly.