Thank you, Minister, for appearing before us this afternoon. Welcome back, and also welcome back to Jonathan Wilkinson. It's good to have you back at the table.
I'm going to jump right in. Let's talk about carbon taxes, or as you call it, carbon pricing, but I think Canadians better understand the term carbon taxes because they know this is coming out of their pockets. I believe every member around this table acknowledges Canada has a responsibility to address its greenhouse gas emissions and the impacts of it. Where we differ is how we do that.
Over the last year and a half, your government has crafted a climate change plan, which includes the imposition of a massive carbon tax on Canadians that will ramp up to $50 per tonne of emissions by 2022. Even though most provinces have some kind of a regime in place to do that, none of them has a $50 per tonne price. This is a policy that definitely comes out of your government.
Canadians have a right to ask what this will mean for them directly, for their families, and for their business. A report was prepared by your department. I'm assuming some of that work was started even before you got into government, but the report is dated October 20, 2015. That report appears to outline the impacts of the carbon tax.
I will quote very briefly from that report. It's from Paul Rochon to Jean-François Perrault and right on the front page it talks about the context and key findings. It says, “These higher costs”, referring to carbon taxes, “would then cascade through the economy in the form of higher prices, thus leading all firms and consumers to pay more for goods and services with higher carbon content.”
Then we go to the details and we read this memo, referring to the memo that presumably your department prepared, which provides an assessment of the economic greenhouse gas emissions impacts from a global carbon price. The key findings from our assessments are as follows. Bullet 1 is blacked out, redacted. Bullet 2, what these key findings were, is blacked out. Bullet 3 talks about the price that's required to limit the rise in average global temperature to two degrees. The actual price is blacked out. Bullet 4 is blacked out, nothing there, and so it goes throughout the whole memo.
There's a failure to let Canadians know what they're going to be expected to pay, what the impact will be on them and their families. Now we have this report that I believe, legitimately, Canadians should have full access to, given that it has such ramifications for them. In your mandate letter, Minister, there's a provision that says your government will be transparent and wants to improve transparency and openness with Canadians. I think this is a case where Canadians really have a right to know what a carbon tax will mean for them.
Can I get your commitment today to provide Canadians with a fully unredacted version of the report that was done within your government?