Thank you for the question.
The issues you raise are indeed,key issues in the course of the policy analysis on various options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We use various sets of analytical tools that pull together different types of information.
One of the things we do is we match up what a regulatory instrument, whether it's a price instrument or a performance tender, would do in terms of industrial activity, what that does to prices, and then we work that through in terms of the impact on households. You can see the different impacts by location in the country, you can see it by income class of households. So it is a factor we regularly look at in the context of our economic analysis.
The second point I would make is that the impacts of these measures depend greatly on the details of the measures. For example, generally there's an assumption that any action to address greenhouse gas emissions increases the price of energy, and households thereby have to pay more. That's not always the case.
I think one key exception would be the performance standards the Government of Canada has put in place for light-duty vehicles, in collaboration with the U.S. government. Those are now working their way through the first period up until the model year 2017. It will generate a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
It will also reduce the total cost of operating motor vehicles. What happens is the vehicles cost a bit more because we require manufacturers to put technology in, but the fuel savings when people operate their vehicles means, for example, that for somebody driving a car a lot because they live in a rural community and they have a big commute distance, their overall cost of operating that car will be less as a result of these regulations. Yet greenhouse emissions will be reduced significantly in the country.