I would agree with everything that Andrew said.
The other challenge, both in the public sector and in the private sector, is that the technologies that are the most energy efficient tend to be the most expensive upfront, and one of the problems for municipal governments, which are very constrained, is that their capital budgets and their operating budgets are separate. So municipalities will buy street lighting, for example, that is the least expensive, but 86% of the cost to the municipality is in the life cycle of the operations of that.
There is some excellent work that has been done and is continuing by Bob Page, who took over from me as chair of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, which is your agency to advise you as parliamentarians. It has done world-recognized work in this area about how to manage market shift, because you have the older technologies that may be cheaper, but how do you transition that?
I would say the Government of Canada, Natural Resources Canada, your own department, have done some work. I went to brief the Swedes, the Norwegians, the British. I was in London. I was invited by four or five national governments that are leading, ahead of Canada, that are representing work that the taxpayers of Canada paid for in this very area. So you might want to invite Bob Page to come to speak to you and ask him that question, because I don't speak for the national round table any more, but I can assure you they could answer that question in full.
There are some ways that you could help. Going back to Mr. Regan's comment before the question, the federal government could help municipalities by creating the situation, as with individual citizens and businesses, to amortize those costs against the lower operating cost, if you could provide depreciation allowances or tax write-offs that levelled the playing field for them. If you don't want to put a price on carbon, which is how the Swedes have done it, I'd love to hear the argument against a proper carbon pricing system that must include cap and trade in carbon. I've seen five countries do it, and they are so far ahead of us and their tax burden has been reduced and their energy sectors, including oil producers, are doing better.
I spent three years studying this. We have large support in Alberta, in the oil patch, for these kinds of things. And you now have a chair out of the oil patch who I think would agree with me--Bob Page--that you can get a mechanism that will get you a bigger economic bounce, help you fund carbon storage and sequestration, help clean up Canada's oil industry at the same time, and help municipalities and individuals fund and remove the financial barriers to our local governments and to our citizens being able to manage and make the right financial choice. If you talk to all of us, I think we would all agree that the pricing problem is a very real one.
I suggested I wasn't going to talk about pricing because I said if you fund plans and not projects the project will fund by the plan. If you can get the pricing right and end the perverse subsidies, you'll stop penalizing all of us. I think every one of us would tell you the current taxation and pricing system penalizes us. It makes it inherently more expensive to do the right thing.
I don't think that's anyone's agenda here, Mr. Anderson. I think we would be on the same page.
It is just a matter of getting the right policy solutions in place, and I would use your own expertise. I would start with the national round table, which I think are recognized as world leaders, to answer that question for you.