Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I have two questions, one for Mr. Marshall and one for Julia Langer.
In my opinion, one of the strongest arguments in support of the bill was made by Dale Marshall from the David Suzuki Foundation. Allow me to quote an excerpt from his submission.
Canada could get more than 80% of the way to the 2020 target laid out in this bill merely by applying a sufficiently high carbon price through a tax or a cap-and-trade system.
As I said, I think this is one of the strongest arguments in favour of the bill that we have heard, particularly in so far as our 2020 targets are concerned, coupled with the fact that all of the witnesses agree on the need to set a carbon price and to use the market tools available to us. The National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy had adopted this position, and, if I am not mistaken, the Conference Board of Canada took a similar stand a few days ago.
Since we are likely to receive the official report in three weeks, as noted in the submission, and since we will likely be doing a clause by clause study of the bill before the report is tabled, perhaps Mr. Marshall could tell us what modelling was used to make these findings? I assumed he set a quota system. On what basis was quota allocated? For example, did companies that managed to cut their greenhouse gas emission levels receive additional credits that they could then turn around and sell on the market? Without necessarily getting into the specifics, what type of modelling accounts for these findings?