Yes, thank you.
Hello, everyone. I'll keep it quite short so we can better have time for questions, and I'll also try to be very brief in my answers to questions.
I released a report with the C.D. Howe Institute, as I think everyone's aware, a week or so ago. That was something I had been working on since the government released its final set of climate change policies. There are actually three different sets of policies that we talk about since the government came to power. So we wanted to have all of this together.
The media contacted me in April, when the government came out with its policies, to ask what their effect would be, and I declined to answer, because as I'll explain in a minute, we really need careful analysis and modelling using computer models that have, yes, uncertainty associated with them, but they're the best tools that we human beings have to try to estimate the effect of our policies. We have learned a lot in 20 years of policies that have not been very successful, and that's sort of what I'm going to address right now.
The question I'm obsessed with as an analyst is how I can help policy-makers establish policies that will actually achieve their targets. I do find that when I hear lengthy discussions about targets, and even a little bit with your previous speaker, I get this very strong urge to keep shouting out, “What's the policy link to the target?”
In fairness to you politicians, there is a lot of political pressure on you to make strong statements about strong targets, and yet at the same time, there's a lot of political pressure on you not to match those statements with effective policies, because unlike what many people will have told you--and even, unfortunately, many of my environmentalist friends--reducing greenhouse gases involves policies that change costs for people. Some people will react negatively to those, and you'll have to do a lot of work to get the media understanding that that's actually the only path to get there. That's where I believe we are dropping the ball over and over again, when I look historically. Unfortunately, I feel we are still dropping the ball looking forward.
While my current comments are, yes, critical of the current government's policies, because those are the particular ones I'm focused on, I think you're all well aware that I've been critical of the policies of the previous Liberal government and even of what I've seen in the policy proposals of other federal parties. I guess I'm not going to be making a lot of friends here, but I really think that in the interests of our moving from two decades of discussions about targets to actually making changes, people like me are going to have to try to move the discussion in that direction. That's also why it was interesting to listen to the previous speaker talk about--