Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I would like to start by congratulating you on your briefs. I took the trouble to read the briefs twice, not once, particularly the one from the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, the CCCE. In the seven years that I have been a member of Parliament, I have noted some developments at the CCCE. It recognizes that a price must be put on carbon and it has suggested some ways of doing that—a tax or a market.
Finally, the Council says exactly what the Vice-President and Chief Economist of the Conference Board said on January 31, and the government should be listening: "At the moment, we are behaving as though GHGs could be produced and emitted with no costs whatsoever."
The business community therefore recognizes now that there is a cost involved in greenhouse gas emissions. It cannot yet put a figure on this, but it does recognize that there is a cost.
On page 7 of your brief, you say, Mr. d'Aquino: "When rules do change, governments also must be careful to reward rather than penalize companies that have taken early action."
I understand what you are getting at in your brief, but what does it actually mean? When the result of a climate change plan is to move the reference year from 1990 to 2005, to you really think that this is rewarding companies? I am thinking of the Quebec manufacturing industry, which has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 7% in absolute terms since 1990.
Do you not think that we should go back to the 1990 reference year in order not to penalize companies that took early action? We would actually be penalizing companies if we use 2005 emissions as the reference level.