Right. If you put in a carbon tax, all you're doing is changing one of the many parameters that different jurisdictions look at when they negotiate with each other.
There were no carbon taxes in the 1990s when I chaired the B.C. Utilities Commission. But I had to chair regulatory hearings in which reliability and interconnectivity between British Columbia and Alberta, or between British Columbia and Washington State to the south—or how Alberta interacted with Washington State through British Columbia—were issues that had to be deal with.
If you're bringing up the issue of east-west connectivity, I have to say that I'm not a fan at all. I believe that if our political process gets involved in trying to decide which are the best projects to get greenhouse gases down, we risk spending way more money than we want to.
You talked about attracting industry. That would be the case when you put a large tax burden on Canadians to subsidize east-west connections. What's optimal for electricity consumers might be to interconnect with the United States and reinforce those connections. In fact, that will be part of the most economically efficient way of getting our greenhouse gases down: developing green resources that are beneficial to our neighbours to the south.
I would rather not decide that at the political level. When you talk about whether or not one region sees its cost go up more than others, that is absolutely the case.
I'm busily involved in policies that will minimize that, but if one region is causing more emissions, and you're trying to invest money to reduce emissions, I don't see how you avoid that. We're pretending if we think that everybody pays the same amount.