One important piece—and this is going straight to Mr. Jean's concerns—was around addressing the short-term targets. The false debate that we can't allow to continue is that all action taken under Kyoto was meant to be taken domestically only. There was never any such negotiation under the protocol. Canada, the United States, Australia, and Europe all insisted that there be several tools in the toolbox for countries to achieve their targets, understanding that some of these changes are difficult to make.
There are two other significant options for the domestic targets in terms of doing them all in-house. One was the international credit option, which I know the Conservatives have an ideological opposition to but which other countries are successfully using. It fits in well with the clean development mechanism, and I believe it fits in well with Canada's long-term overseas development and strategic goals. It also combines well with the export of Canadian technology, which is how we use much of our overseas aid right now.
The government should be much more open than it has been to this point, and we've seen some movement from the minister. He was here only last week, and in scrumming with the press afterwards, he was claiming that he is open to the concept of CDM, open to the concept of this clean development mechanism.
The second thing is the application of missed targets to the second phase. This government and the minister have claimed that they will engage in the second phase vigorously, the second round of targets. Kyoto is partly designed and built so that you can encroach upon that second phase with more restrictive targets. If the government is truly serious about making these structural changes on the domestic front, this is one of the ways open to them.
The government simply can't, by its own decision, limit the options it chooses to use and then go back to Canadians and say it didn't have any options, that it only had this one and this option was too severe. It's a patently false argument to see several tools available and to just choose not to pick them up.
In terms of Mr. Bigras' point, it's well taken and understood on what was built into Bill C-288 to give the government some options. The reason we have some conflict with the territoriality—and I've explained this in private, but I'll put it on the record—is that with certain things, particularly the carbon market that has been proposed in Montreal and in some suggestions from Toronto, when you don't take a sectoral approach, when you don't have a hard cap on particular industries, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand and figure out how the carbon market works. It's not as clear or clean.
We have also done some analysis showing that Quebec will do very well under the sectoral approach. As he pointed out, much of the energy produced and consumed in Quebec comes with very few greenhouse gas emissions. Much of the industry in Quebec, in manufacturing or some of the other sectors, will not be taking a significantly larger hit when you look at things sectorally.
I understand that there might be some ideological reasons and bases for the argument, but we've looked at both. If there's some language that you would like to suggest that would open up some options for government, we're seeking that type of consensus around the table. We're trying to find places where we can all agree. The fundamental point is that this option really does give clear accounting for Canadians. It does allow the government to put forward a plan and then be judged by that plan in a most public way.
As Mr. Warawa pointed out earlier, that was the thing most lacking under the previous government. It was very difficult to account for actions. Canadians were left wandering in the dark in terms of what was actually getting done, and the results were actually quite tragic and have become increasingly expensive.
Committee members must appreciate this. The longer we delay and put off the setting of those firm targets, allowing business and communities to respond, the more expensive this process gets, because we must do this thing. We absolutely must.