Thank you.
You've raised the question about the government coming out with policies while it's also engaged in the whole process of this act. I only want to make one comment here, and that is that in some senses, with different minority governments, if there are areas where the previous Liberal minority government had moved with some progress, and we have some evidence of the direction to go, I would be interested in the government moving on that, where possible. I'm thinking of the large final emitters program. I hate to see us get bogged down. Likewise, I had some regrets that the vehicle emissions policy was voluntary. If that one could be shifted, I would be happy about that.
I take your point, because I've just been hearing these announcements myself. I'm very keen to know how, for example, the ecotrust policy, I guess it's called, or something like that, differs from the subsidy programs I was just engaged in critiquing when they came out under the guise of Project Green, which I'm sure you're familiar with. It took us some months, but we analyzed Project Green by simulating the subsidy side of that policy--the climate fund, and so on--and we were rather skeptical about some of the impacts that were being suggested. So I'm intending to subject the new policies to the same kind of analysis, and I'd like to know what kind of analysis has already been done before jumping out with that.
You also asked me about the kinds of policies one should use. I don't want to take a long time to answer, but I'll just direct people to the fifth slide in the group you have before you. It says “Policy package of market-oriented regulations”. Number one is what I call a carbon management standard. One could call that an upstream cap-and-trade system, which I described earlier. Number two, a vehicle emissions standard, which is what California has and what Arnold Schwarzenegger is moving ahead with, I would apply widely across the transportation sector, and ultimately even think about it for air transport, which may involve biofuels or various things. The building standard is a way of carrying that over, as well. Again, it would take a fair bit of time to describe those in detail, and I don't want to go too far. But I can come back to those.
Finally, you asked me about the target and the analysis I've been engaged in, and that would be the final slide. My group also did some work, some of it for the national round table and some of it independent of the national round table, looking at how Canada could get those very deep reductions by 2050. In doing that, we still see that this could be very expensive, so it's important to understand that a target for the United Kingdom and what that might cost can be very different from a target for Canada. In Canada, a country with higher rates of economic growth and population growth and an expanding fossil fuel industry, it can be much more expensive to turn that around.
I hope I've answered the three questions you've asked.