Permettez-moi de répondre dans la langue de Shakespeare et non pas celle de Molière.
In a nutshell, Canadians and Americans are amongst the highest users of energy per capita in the world, as you know. You also know that our carbon footprint is amongst the highest in the world. We are two federations, and we therefore have to deal with what we have seen in both countries: American states moving much more rapidly in some cases than the government in Washington; a situation in Canada that has caused us great grief in the business community for quite some time, which is that instead of having a cohesive approach to fighting climate change we have provinces going off in different directions, we have members of various parties in Parliament very much at odds, and the result is that we've lost years.
I say years. When I think back to the 1990s, Canada was not only seen as a global environmental leader but also as being in the initial stages of trying to build a response to global climate change, in the work of the Brundtland commission. Even in those early days we were world leaders in terms of our voluntary efforts. We as an organization were the first business organization in the world to acknowledge the principle of sustainable development.
Since then, we've lost a lot of ground and a lot of credibility. I think we now have a marriage of both interest and opportunity—a new leader in the United States, a Prime Minister and a leader of the opposition who are certainly willing to work closely with the Americans—and we have to get on with it. It's crucial to our competitiveness. It's crucial to bringing together what is a natural alliance in the international forums that are dealing with the next stage in the fight against climate change, and bringing to those forums the joint technologies, whether carbon capture and sequestration or other forms of technology, that we in North America can be leaders in developing. The more quickly we do it, in conjunction with our American friends as part of a very closely integrated economy not only in energy but in industrial terms, the more credible and more influential we're going to be in the world.