Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It's a pleasure to be here visiting at the environment committee.
I wanted to ask a question that has sort of been on my mind. I started studying these things in my university days. It's a frustration or a problem about how we measure who's responsible for what in terms of the international community around carbon.
We look at current or historical carbon levels generally, and then we ask countries to make reductions relative to those historical levels. At the same time a country may increase its economic development during that period, or it may reduce its economic development. A country might take over more of the world's energy production by doing it in a cleaner way, but in the process it might be increasing its emissions but having a positive effect on global emissions.
For example, if Canada dramatically develops relatively low carbon but still has carbon-emitting energy sources and exports its production—that's not hypothetical, of course—we might well be increasing our emissions while having a positive effect on global emissions by out-competing other higher-emitting jurisdictions. It seems to me a bit of a problem to only look at, in isolation, how nations are doing in terms of historical trends without looking at the intensity of their production and the impact that intensity of production has on global emissions.
That problem of measurement has a policy consequence. It means that then we think about our goals as being to impose, for instance, in the case of this government, taxes on energy production, which discourage production—don't necessarily encourage cleaner production, just discourage production—and chase that production to less environmentally friendly jurisdictions.
I'd love to hear comments from Mr. Stewart and Ms. Turcotte on what they think of what I've proposed, and if there are better ways for us to look at, let's say, the kinds of obligations a country should have that take into consideration this problem.