Thank you, Mr. Chair.
And thanks to the members for eating up a lot of time here today.
In a full cost accounting, the Parliamentary Budget Officer goes on to say that there could be key assumptions that have to be made about responses of monetary policy as well. In other words, in a nutshell he's proposing something that would take about 12 months to produce that would be far more comprehensive, and I think it would be far more valuable to this committee if he could undertake that study.
But my point here is that this only represents a particular and, I would say, narrow opinion, first of all. And secondly, I would go on to suggest that the assumptions that are made in here.... I think The Globe and Mail noted that Canada would have to turn itself into an environmental paradise overnight. It's a perfect case scenario and it really represents some things that are unrealistic--the California emission standards, for example. Buzz Hargrove of the Canadian Auto Workers union, a couple of years ago called that suicidal for the auto industry. It's not a realistic thing.
Don Drummond himself says that it's not reasonable to expect that technical advances will provide a solution by 2020, yet you're assuming certain things in the account itself.
Have you proposed this unrealistic policy scenario to cover what the actual costs are? They could be higher than what they're calling an economic upheaval, the biggest fiscal shock in Canadian history, deeply disruptive to the economy? Have you in fact underestimated what could be significantly higher costs to the economy?
