Thank you to each of you for being here today. I appreciate the input.
I was just saying to my colleague Mr. McTeague that you are in service, but in many ways you're also part of a global supply chain, as part of manufacturing and the rest of it. When there are cost issues in terms of your business, ultimately that affects manufacturing competitiveness, which ultimately affects consumer pricing and the rest.
There has been an emergence over the last year in particular--with the Canadian Council of Chief Executive Officers, the council of sustainable environment, the World Economic Forum, and others--of a growing global consensus that there's going to be a price put on carbon through cap and trade, through carbon taxes in some cases, and in other cases through carbon tariffs. There are even discussions now that France and California are moving toward a carbon tariff regime so that imported goods will be hit with a carbon tariff. The U.S. Congress at some point is going to discover that they can call it an environmental policy, but in fact it can be a protectionist policy that can add to the price of goods coming in from China, India, and other emerging economies.
What would be the impact on your industry? Or perhaps I should first ask, are you seeing the same movement toward this kind of regime that we as policy-makers are seeing? What impact would there be, and how would you pass on those costs? Whether or not we as policy-makers act in Canada, if other jurisdictions move in this direction, it's going to have an impact on the economic environment here.