I must confess, it's very hard to tangibly give a number. But I think the greatest tragedy, if we don't do something in Canada, is that the market is going to go elsewhere. That's the bottom line. The market is either going to go over the counter, as I explained in my presentation, which is an opaque market among.... It's an interbank business, and no one really knows what goes on there; it's a huge market in the financial derivatives business today. That would be too bad, because the OTC business is really for the large player, so the smaller emitters who would feel compelled to do something, for a host of reasons—perhaps because of being afraid that another country would retaliate, or whatever may be the situation going forward—will not have access to a transparent price discovery mechanism, and we will be putting at odds a whole segment of our industry that will not have access to the over-the-counter business.
Likewise, my sense is that the real cost is that business is going to go offshore; Canadian companies will take their business elsewhere.
You probably often read of the extraordinary growth we have seen in the derivatives business in the last ten years or so. There's a reason for it. It's because derivatives have become a central part to a risk management approach, not only for life companies and pension funds and mutual funds and so on; it's become central to how CFOs and treasurers of companies manage their risk. They do it because it's cost-effective; otherwise they wouldn't bother, because it gets really complicated.
I think it's fair to say that managing cost with respect to greenhouse gases using an effective derivatives market, which we could build, provided we're given the proper regulatory environment by the federal government, will be an added tool for Canadian companies to manage the risk associated with this activity.