What I would like to do is turn to the business community, because it seems to me that if I consider the position over time of not only your organizations but others--the Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters, the Canadian Petroleum Producers Association--your position could be summarized as the following: you have moved from skepticism to despair without an intervening period of leadership.
You have in your paper, Ms. Hughes Anthony, both positions beautifully laid out. You have, on the one hand, repeated, I hate to say this, the old canard--it's really stale--that there is much controversy surrounding the science around greenhouse gases, climate change effects, and human activities. It is on page 4. But then you urge us, in the spirit of despair, to get on with adaptation, because it's clear that no action will be enough to stop the effects of climate change; you can only slow down the changes. There is on the next page a dispute about the science. So here we are, we've moved from one to the other.
In terms of lack of leadership, you refer, and you have done over the years, to the badly flawed Kyoto Protocol, the fatal flaws of trading systems, and so on. But you fail--you always fail--to come up with a credible alternative at the international level. I can remember a press conference you gave with this coalition for climate responsibility or something, some kind of a front organization you all set up and which has now disappeared into the mists of time. I don't understand, given the evolution of the science and the evolution of our understanding of the economic impact on the world of not getting on with it, of not mitigating, why you don't change the discourse. I don't see why you, as the business community, don't take a leadership role and get on with it, instead of asking for more broad reviews and consultations and all the rest of it, which has the effect of slowing it down and making it harder to meet our commitments under the protocol.