Hello. Thank you very much for allowing me to speak.
I'll introduce myself briefly. I'm a professor at UQAM in Montreal. I'm a political scientist by training, but now I'm at the business school, where there is an interdisciplinary department focusing on environmental and social responsibility. I also hold the chair in decarbonization, and I do a lot of work on climate policy, Quebec and Canadian climate policy, and a lot of work on the Quebec carbon market, which is linked with California, as well as its relationship with transportation decarbonization. There are a lot of other regulatory instruments in the transportation sector, which is the second-largest source of emissions in Canada. I also do a lot of research on international climate finance, which could also be of interest to the committee.
I could speak to some opportunities to address decarbonization in the Canadian transportation sector. One issue is to continue with the clean technology credits. I think that this year's federal budget was an excellent start to the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States, which has really been a global game-changer in terms of clean energy production and incentives.
We need to be, perhaps, willing to do more on the production of clean fuels and clean vehicles. Some research that I've done suggests that when those incentives are available to individuals, they have positive political effects and people are ready to pay, to absorb a higher carbon price, effectively because they have those clean technology options as an off-ramp.
Other research in the transportation sector might consider efforts to address transportation demand management. That's how major metropolitan regions, other regions of Canada, manage emissions from transportation, getting people from using their private vehicles into public transportation. There's a lot we could do there with transportation system planning in major metropolitan regions.
There's some research we've done looking at California. California has a very rigorous transportation planning process using very sophisticated models to estimate the impacts on greenhouse gas emissions of their transportation planning in major metropolitan regions like Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc. That is tied to federal and state funding for transportation infrastructure. That's something you could revise or improve in the investing in Canada infrastructure program to have some more sophisticated requirements, maybe using some of these modelling tools seen in California.
The other issue I thought I would briefly address is emissions trading. Quebec has the emissions trading system with California, which is quite different from the federal carbon pricing system, and arguably it has, in my view, allowed Quebec to be more ambitious with its climate efforts than it would have otherwise been. Quebec reduced its emissions by 11% below 1990 levels without that emissions trading system, but, including the emission reduction allowances purchased by Quebec firms in California, it doubled that emission reduction and reduced Quebec's emissions by 26%. You can compare that with other jurisdictions in Canada. By way of comparison, if you want—it may be unfair—British Columbia has a carbon tax comparable to the $65 of the federal carbon backstop right now. British Columbia's emissions have increased by about 10 % or 11% since 1990, which is a 1% reduction since 2007.
There are some advantages. The reason that has worked in this case for Quebec is that it's cheaper to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in California because it's a dirtier economy than Quebec's, so to speak. There are some questions about that, whether the market is working. I'm happy to discuss it in more detail, but the prices on the Quebec carbon market linkage with California have been rising. They're about $47 a tonne right now versus $65 on the Canadian federal carbon tax. There is maybe something to revisit there.
I'd also emphasize that article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement was agreed to in 2021 in Glasgow, and that recognized legitimate usage of these emission trading systems at the UN level.
I'll conclude with that. Thank you.