To be honest, I feel like I can't answer that question because I never had the opportunity to meet with the Prime Minister or hear anything from the Prime Minister's Office.
I want to be clear about this. I'm just one of many scientists in the country, but I was chairing the advisory body. The NZAB serves under the minister of ECCC, and I did have a liaison I met with in the minister's office. There is no obligation for the Prime Minister's Office to meet with the NZAB, but I find it highly strange that they wouldn't be interested. We were doing research with the Canadian Climate Institute that was directly relevant to the decisions that were just made on the MOU.
I'll be clear about it: Basically, the results of the work that the NZAB has done and our advice would have said that the way they've changed the industrial pricing system.... I don't mean just the changes in the headline price and the price floor, which are what have gotten all the attention. It's also the details: the changes in the tightening rate for the benchmarks and the grandfathering-in of old permits under Alberta's system. We would have been telling them that this is not going to work and that we could tell them this based on modelling that was done by the Canadian Climate Institute and based on our own analyses.
Would they have taken our advice? I don't know. Why they don't want to hear it, I also don't understand. If you don't want to hear from advocates on all sorts of issues, that's your choice, but this is just research evidence. As I said, the NZAB has no vested interest. We're not lobbying for anything in particular. We're just passing along advice based on the best available research.