I have testified in front of other committees and commissions, and in front of Mr. Delbeke's commission on a group called “environment, competitiveness,and energy”; essentially, he's looking at how these three elements play. A market-mechanism emission trading system is another tool to help companies that deal with a carbon-constrained world stay competitive globally; it's as simple as that. At this point, there are European companies that have access to this, there are Japanese companies that have access to it, and Canadian companies are simply not acting right now because they don't know what the regulatory system is.
When I was in Ontario Hydro many years ago, we started and then we stopped, TransAlta started and stopped, and many Canadians companies started and stopped. We were leaders in this, and I would submit that as a result of inaction, we have lost that lead.
It's a pity, because it will be a choice. The way the U.K. government has spent a couple of hundred million pounds to make sure that London is the centre of trading.... And by God, it is the centre of trading—anything you want to do in carbon trading—and they haven't done this because they're nice people; they've done it because they know this is a strategic commodity. Why shouldn't Montreal or Toronto be the North American centre?