I'm less able than Mr. Marshall to comment on how this is affecting people making decisions about investment. I guess he's saying that he himself has to be wondering about what, for example, NB Power and its regulatory process would come up with.
I have been studying very carefully over the last month the new regulatory framework of the federal government. There's still a lack of clarity for me, but I have strong concerns about the flexibility provisions for the large final emitters. We have what sounds like a very ambitious policy of 6% intensity reduction for large final emitters—that's about half of our emissions—-over the next three years, and then it's a 2% intensity reduction going forward to about 2015. Then we're not sure what happens after that.
The challenge is that there are several flexibility provisions. One of them that seems especially large is that there's no limit to how much Canadian large final emitters can get offsets from elsewhere in the Canadian economy. That's generally what would fall into the rubric that I was alerting you to earlier, which is subsidies--subsidies for people to do something outside of that regulated sector. What will the value of those offsets be? That affects the planning that Mr. Marshall is talking about. In my own case, my concern is about the total number of emissions and what the effectiveness will be of those offsets since they are essentially subsidy programs.
My own sense, and, again, I'm not a player in this, is that the message is still quite vague about what those values will be in future—the value of carbon credits, whatever, the value of the atmosphere—and that, to me, would still be murky for investment decisions, for example, in the electricity sector.