You often use the term “sustainability”. The notion of sustainable development relates to basic cost internalization principles, such as the polluter-pays principle, the user-pays principle and the life cycle of a product. Seeing as how you have to consider these principles as a whole, why do you think that cleanup costs are not included in the price of bitumen extracted from tar sands and exported in bulk to the United States without being processed in Canada? In addition, this is clearly a missed opportunity to create jobs in the country.
We are accumulating a historic financial debt, a global environmental and social debt, and saddling future generations with it. Hundreds of thousands of people will retire without a pension. Would cost internalization reduce the rising pressure on the value of the Canadian dollar and make it easier to continue exporting our manufacturing sector products? Could this be part of the solution to the problem?