Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you very much, witnesses, for coming.
I would like to pick up on a series of questions that I put to other witnesses this morning from other industrial sectors. It has to do with the comments made by our Minister of the Environment, followed by comments made yesterday by the World Bank's former chief economist at the Economic Club in Toronto, and then followed by a document that was sent to the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Environment on December 21, some two months ago. In two cases, these comments advised the government and the people of Canada that it would be a very good thing for us to take advantage of an international carbon market.
I think most of you said we should have a domestic emissions trading system that ultimately should be linked up with an international market. Could you help us understand the implications of not participating in an international carbon market, if no such market were open to your industries and your companies?
The second question is to Dr. Page and your colleague from TransAlta. Could you help us understand how your company, your chief financial officer, your board of directors, and your shareholders—particularly your institutional shareholders—are meeting their tests with respect to your three CDM projects that are now underway around the world, as I understand?
We hear constantly from the government and other sources in Canadian society that this is all about purchasing hot air. But you're in the business of doing these projects. You have a CFO, corporate standards, a board of directors, and institutional and non-institutional investors; surely you're reporting and accounting to them.
Could you please give us some indication of what you've learnt so far and the robustness of the verifiability of those offshore projects?