Thanks, Mr. Chair.
Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, for coming to testify.
I'm hard pressed to know where to start.
Ms. Donnelly, I don't think I'll be asking you any questions. Having heard your testimony and that of the other witnesses today, along with the testimony of other eminent economists, I can say that I don't at all share your view that a cap-and-trade system, or international emissions trading, isn't the way to go. In fact, I think of all the witnesses we've heard, your group is the only group that remains of the view that this is a system not worth pursuing.
I do want to again go back--just for the record, for our guests--to the announcements made by the government that we will not participate in any international carbon market. It has confirmed that four times in a row. It's very hard for us in the opposition to understand and to reconcile how this can be, and from so many aspects. We heard from the Montreal Stock Exchange, I think, and we saw the memorandum sent to the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Environment by Richard Nesbitt from the Toronto Stock Exchange on December 21, warning the government not to take such a stance, begging them not to take such a stance. And yet the announcements were made.
Going forward and keeping this very positive, so leaving aside the cheap talk about our trying to meet Kyoto targets leading to collapse like that in the U.S.S.R.--this is the kind of fear-mongering that's coming right now from so many commentators in Canadian society--I'd like to turn to Mr. Marcu in particular.
Mr. Marcu, there's one line in your presentation that you did not read. I don't think you did it deliberately, but you did actually skip it. I'd like to read out that line from your brief:
The debate over the nature and difficulty of targets is secondary--the real success of the US Clean Air program lies in the market's ability to drive overcompliance.
You also made reference to the studies that emanated in the post-U.S. Clean Air Act experience to show us that, under that system, the cost of reduction--unlike a tax-deductible transit pass, for example, at $2,000 a tonne, as we've just been reminded--actually surprised economists, when they looked back, with regard to the reduction of sulphur dioxide and other gases causing acid rain.
Can you help Canadians understand what this term means, “drive overcompliance”?