To Mr. Bossio's and Ms. Dzerowicz's comments, I do want to point out for folks who would listen to this that the subcommittees and committees are set up in such a way that the majority of the members on the subcommittee are Liberal members of Parliament. With that majority, they can dictate what is or is not in a report in the private, in camera subcommittee meetings. As you're analyzing the words put forward by Liberal members of the party, I think it's important to note that.
I think it is important that we're having this conversation in public. The carbon tax is the central pillar. No Liberal member of Parliament, and that includes the environment minister and the Prime Minister, would deny that the carbon tax is.... They might use different language, but whatever language we use— carbon tax, carbon pricing—it is the central pillar of the framework.
We are the environment committee of the House of Commons. If we're going to have a responsible conversation about Canada's environmental policy moving forward, it seems to me that the reasonable place to have that conversation is in a study on the pan-Canadian framework. This is the overarching study that we're doing right now.
In the study we're doing, if we're going to study something called “international leadership”—basically if the Liberal majority has decided we're going to study Liberal leadership on the environment at the international level—and if the committee has decided we're going to study forestry, agriculture and waste as a sub-study for six meetings, certainly the carbon tax would warrant a six-meeting study as well.
I am putting forward in public a vote by the committee on the question of whether, as members of this committee, we think Canadians would be interested—as they spend the next year contemplating environmental policy as part of an election campaign—in a conversation among parliamentarians from all parties and expert witnesses from across the country and around the world on carbon tax or carbon pricing or whatever it is we want to call it.