I think probably the biggest misunderstanding is the way the OBPS itself works. It's very different from the consumer-facing carbon tax, which gives a flat tax across all emissions. Then, of course, the rebate followed.
The key difference in the industrial carbon price is that there is a free allocation of a significant amount of emissions, so we're only pricing the marginal emission. You're basically trying to get a competitor to be as good as their next competitor, so the price isn't on all emissions, but it's only on that marginal price.
When we hear that it's just going to continue to pass on costs, it's basically industry admitting that they can't get emissions down, so it's a bit of a challenge. You hear talk out of both sides of mouths that, yes, we're going to reduce emissions, but at the same time we can't.
The way that policy is designed is to encourage those incremental year-by-year emissions to ultimately be able to keep Canada competitive. This is not to reduce the oil and gas sector, but it's to protect it from things like carbon border adjustments that we're seeing in Europe or other jurisdictions. We want to make sure that Canada is going to be competitive into the future.
