Thank you, Mr. Chair.
If your objective were to prevent Canadian businesses from succeeding in the global economy, how would you do it? Here are some ideas.
You could impose taxes on your businesses and consumers of a type that other nations do not have. You could create regulatory barriers that prevent projects from being built, while other countries with rich natural resources and terrible environmental records beat us to the punch. While you're at it, you could sign on to international obligations that these other countries do not share. Finally, you could find a way to starve your primary industries of capital. That's the idea that you are exploring here.
You seem to be studying how to turn banks and other financial institutions, pensions and, ultimately, Canadian businesses themselves into climate agencies; to require them to disclose climate risks, like OSFI wants them to; to make banks impose climate standards on their customers; to have pensions divest their funds from climate laggards; and to limit or deny credit to companies based upon their compliance with government priorities. These are terrible ideas.
If you really wanted to reduce global carbon emissions, here are the first two things you could do.
First, unleash Canadian natural gas. Permit it to be developed, produced and exported without onerous regulation, red tape, carbon taxes and endless environmental assessment. Canadian natural gas could displace massive amounts of coal in China, India and numerous other countries that produce most of the carbon emissions on this planet.
Second, you could unleash nuclear energy. Unlike solar power and wind power, nuclear power is an actual substitute for fossil fuels, for generating electricity. It can produce base load, which solar and wind cannot do. You could do these things while enhancing Canadian prosperity. Instead, you seek to control and direct financial markets and the economy itself.
Free market economies are not managed. We don't really have free markets in this country. Instead, bureaucracies insert themselves into every facet of economic activity. Managerial governments seek to compel their preferred outcomes. That doesn't work.
Businesses don't need to be told to pay attention to risk; that's what business does. Competing in a commercial marketplace is the definition of risk. Publicly listed companies already have obligations to disclose material risks to their business. For most businesses, the biggest climate risk is not physical or environmental but governmental. It is the risk from changing regulatory demands that shift the legal ground beneath their feet. You represent their biggest risk.
Other natural resource countries are eating our lunch. Foreign investment is leaving. Per capita GDP is falling. Productivity is in the tank.
Canadians are becoming poor. Canadian prosperity is easily lost. We are seeing just how easy it can be.
Thank you.