The good unintended consequences are that we'll have cleaner vehicles, fewer kids with asthma and fewer people going to hospital from dirty air, and we'll be reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. Those are all good consequences.
The thing you need to worry about is having enough market demand that you're moving with big players. If you move with California and with some of the northeastern states, you have enough of a core market demand that the manufacturers are going to be producing the basket of vehicles you need.
Say it's the same thing with electric cars. If you want to have a portfolio standard for a certain percentage of them, you don't go it completely alone. Make sure you're moving with at least enough of a chunk of the North American market, which probably means California and the northeastern states.
The other thing to really worry about, which I said before, is that we make a lot of these cars, too, right? We really need to be thinking about moving a big part of that value chain on the production side in Canada towards manufacturing not just electric cars, but more fuel-efficient trucks and engines. There are lots of firms in Canada, such as Westport Innovations in Vancouver, that are part of that cleaner, more innovative production chain for vehicles of the future.
Part of the link between those two is that when your firms think about where they're going to situate their manufacturing and R and D capacity, it's an advantage if you're actually using the stuff they're making.
Right now, we tend to be making the dirtier vehicles. That's probably not a good thing. We should be trying to move our whole auto manufacturing sector towards more of the value chain on the cars of the future. That's where firms such as GM are going, and if we miss that boat, as we're seeing in Oshawa, we're going to lose out.