Thank you very much.
I have told you that it fis a privilege to be invited. I'm a citizen of Canada. I'm not here on anybody's behalf, and I'm not representing anyone or any organization, so it is a real privilege just to have a voice in front of this committee.
I have lived or worked in eight of the ten provinces and one of the territories and I have lived outside of Canada, so I think I can speak to our differences as well as to where we have a lot of similarities. It's about pollution today, but it's about everything. I want to say that everybody across Canada wants the same thing. They want clear air, clean water, clean food chains, and affordable energy. You cannot consider one thing without considering all elements. I heard one of the other speakers today use the word “integrated”. I think that's a word you should have written at the top of your page.
In some ways we've even come to think of air, water, and land as free goods, and we expect to have our energy nearly free. I think the reason we have that economic model, first of all, is that we inherited it from people who had continents that they once took full advantage of. We had the luxury of a new continent with an abundance of fresh air, fresh water, land for the taking, and energy resources at our feet, and we could afford to treat these resources as if they were free. That economic model doesn't work today. It was never appropriate, but it is absolutely not appropriate today.
I run my businesses as I have in the past when I ran Suncor. I used to tell people as early as the early nineties that there were five things we had to do well. If you did not do them all well, you failed. If you did four out of five things perfectly, you still had a failing mark. That was the only way we could think about the way we had to do business and the way we had to run our lives and our operations.
If you're interested, those top five were the health and safety of the employees; care for the environment and our communities; productivity, which is where we pay ourselves; quality and care for the customer; and profitability, which is where we have the ability to pay for our lenders. We had to be focused on achieving those things, and it became absolutely the way people did their work. They would no more think it was okay to put excess SO2—sulphur dioxide—or any other air pollutant up our stacks than they would think it was okay to injure another employee or to not make a buck.
I found that if you got people thinking in integrated fashions, they started acting in integrated fashions. That's what I'm asking you to consider with this bill.
The thing that's missing the most here is, first of all, that we don't have clear objectives. We talk about targets, but what we really want to do is talk about what the objectives of this bill are so that we can rise above political differences and regional differences and be clear in our minds about where we're headed. Then, think about the long term, which does not mean that we don't act now.
Once you've set those objectives, you work with businesses and people to set the targets. Many of our targets are already out there. We have standards around the world that we can borrow, so we don't need to argue about them. We need to provide the framework in which people can actually behave and do what they need to do to meet those targets and meet the long-term objectives.
This is where I'm going to say to you that it's the framework that most often doesn't get the attention, because we treat the environment as if it was one of the items that we have to do and do well, as if it were separate from all the other systems that we have in place in our country. I don't think that's the right way.
It's important for you to realize, when you have these considerations, that you have to take a look at the systems we use in this country to run the country. The biggest system that impacts the way in which people use these resources, both business and personal, is our taxation system, our fiscal framework. It's important that we consider overhauling that framework and stop taxing the good things in life—known as income or savings and taxation on work—and that we start taxing those things in life that are called consumptions.
This is not a moral stand. It allows people who want to buy an SUV to buy an SUV. The only difference is that you pay for your SUV and you pay for it fully. You're aware and conscious, in your choices, that you are actually going to pay for the privilege of consuming more of the world's resources when you do so and that there isn't anything free in this life of ours.
When you go through this and consider it as just a passionate plea from a citizen, I would really say that you can't look at your objectives, targets, and the policies you want to put in place without simultaneously thinking about the way we actually run this country and how inappropriate it has become, full of perverse taxation methodologies that are not consistent with the kind of country we want to run.
I'm not going to take up more than 10 minutes, because you have many more experts than me. It's just a plea to think in an integrated fashion and to use this particular bill to start getting changes made in the way we think about our fiscal regime and our economic regime in Canada. That way, we'll have a successful country.
Thanks for your time. It's been a real privilege to make that statement. I look forward to your questions.