We are working very closely with the provinces, but our efforts at the moment are focused primarily on helping those jurisdictions decide whether to implement their own pricing system, and if so, how to design the system in a way that makes the best sense for their jurisdiction, or whether it makes sense for them to agree to have the federal backstop applied. That has been a major focus of both of our departments over the past year.
The question of how provinces and territories would spend revenue that flows from their own systems or the federal system is a different question. There are two things I would point to.
First of all, in the lead-up to the pan-Canadian framework, the provinces, territories, and federal government put in place four working groups to explore the range of activities that should be undertaken to address climate change in Canada. One of those was a working group on carbon pricing, which Mr. Coulombe and I had the pleasure of working on. That working group issued a consensus report that included a number of principles, and those principles included some general directions around the way in which carbon pricing revenues ought to be deployed. Consideration should be given—albeit not exclusively— to disadvantaged households, for example, and to people in remote communities, etc., but also to supporting clean technologies. There is, then, a set of principles that jurisdictions have generally agreed to.
On the other hand, the federal government made it clear that it is not imposing any conditions on the way in which jurisdictions use revenue from their own systems. Ontario has a pricing system. The federal government has nothing to say, in terms of climate change, around the way that money is spent by the Ontario government.
Similarly, Minister McKenna has made it clear that if a jurisdiction asks the federal government to impose the backstop, that money will go directly back to the government, and there will be no conditions on the way that money is spent. Of course, we can have discussions about—