There are some areas we know we can put a tax or a price on quickly, like fuels. The infrastructure to collect tax on fuels is easily used. You would hardly have to hire anybody else to collect and manage that money.
The national round table is moving into the next part of its analysis—looking at the pricing side of things. I think this requires a great deal of design.
It's clear that if you put an efficiency standard on, then the public simply takes that technology. But you have to get into the design of how to turn it over. If you are allowing people to make choices on whether they are going to use more or less heating fuel than they need, then price will have an impact.
So the word “tax” is a bad word, in a sense, but at the end of the day it is what it is. It's not so much whether to tax as it is how to tax . You have to make sure that you're dealing equitably with people who don't have the wherewithal to pay extra prices. But it's obvious: they're going to use less if they pay more, and they are going to use more if they don't pay at all. If we don't put that broad signal into the economy, then we're going to have real trouble. So I favour some kind of a price, whether it's a tax or not, on a heating bill or whatever.
There are some good analyses on this in the U.S. and in some parts of Canada, in which they study how much extra you actually end up paying if you have that extra price. I won't go into detail, but the Ontario Energy Board and the shared savings mechanism are ways in which you can go through utilities and consumers can pay more on the price side while saving on the fuel side through less use. So there are ways to do this, but it takes a great deal of design.