I'm going to give you an answer that may not be as simple as you would like. Generally, the business sectors, including the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, have argued that we need some way to price carbon. That doesn't necessarily mean the carbon tax.
Emissions trading, cap and trade, is a kind of way of pricing carbon. Certainly, Mr. Prentice has talked about how we have to align with the U.S., and the U.S. is moving down towards a kind of cap and trade regime. Although we thought Mr. Dion's scheme was a little complicated and not workable—that would be our view of it—we also think the same is true of most of the various proposals that are out there right now.
Permit me a little thought here. People talk about things like cap and trade as if it's like, “Okay, we'll just do cap and trade”. Just think about what it means to do cap and trade. What it means, basically, is that to cap something, you have to make a decision on a number. That means I have 200 plants in this country, and of those 200 plants, maybe 30 or 40 would come into a threshold that would require greenhouse gas mitigation. Somebody has to make a decision as to what the greenhouse gas number should be for those plants.
Who's going to make that decision? A government official? We ourselves can barely understand our plants. Every plant is different, with a different feed stock, a different technology, and different history. Even in Joffrey, which you probably would be familiar with, there were some built in the 1970s, some built in the 1990s, and some built in 2005. They're totally different plants.
The knowledge that you must have to make a decision on the cap is huge. The amount of government bureaucracy you need to make a decision on a cap is huge. Multiply that times the American economy.
So somebody has to make a decision. Then you have to get a differential between the number and the ideal number. Then you have to make that available either for punishing people or for rewarding people. Well, now we're talking about allocating money, serious money. This is going to make the mortgage meltdown look easy. There are going to be a lot of very difficult issues involved in setting caps that will affect industry dramatically.
The amount of intervention you would have in the economy would be huge, and I have a very simple principal policy: do no harm. I'd like to know just how we're going to design this and do no harm.
To conclude, I don't think the issue is carbon tax versus emissions cap and trade; I think the issue is design. That's essentially what the round table report said just recently. You have to design this to get a price on carbon to incent new technology. We agree with all of that. We are totally a sustainable development association, but you have to do it in a way that works. I personally have not seen any indication that anybody knows how to make this work. The European experience is a disaster on this. There's a lot of work that needs to be done.