The first one is on the kinds of projects. If there were a public partner, what kinds of projects could we move forward? In a sense, it all depends on the amount of capital that can come to the table and who the partners are.
I noted that we're in conversation with SDTC—early stages—about a possible cooperative relationship to leverage public money. I noted NRCan money in our water heater project, where we're leveraging for the taxpayer, through the federal contribution, about $9 of private sector money. We think it's a very good return for the taxpayer in that case. It's project to project. It will depend on the initiative.
To your question about how risk-averse the corporate sector is, look, I think any investor is going to be prudent in the management of their capital and they're going to look for the best possible return on the investment.
Utilities.... My member companies aren't interested in proprietary technology. Their fundamental interest is in flow-through of natural gas to end uses.
Our work is on bringing commercialization of technology into the market and then acting as a bit of a test bit, if you will, to provide opportunities to test those kinds of technologies.
How those move forward, again, will depend on who the partners are and what kind of capital can be leveraged. Utilities have a certain constraint in that because they are regulated entities. There's a limit to how much ratepayer capital they can bring to the table because the regulator determines how ratepayer capital will be used.
There is an opportunity to bring shareholder capital to the table, but you often have instances where you have a significant asset base, which is obliged to serve the customer in a particular way, so there are limits on how effectively you can use shareholder capital. It's not as cut and dried as it might seem at first blush.
The point I wanted to highlight was that the utilities are actually putting capital on the table in an effort to leverage new technology applications.
On your last point about referencing the energy framework initiative and the idea of carbon pricing, at this point, as CGA, we don't take a position on carbon pricing. At various times in the past we have, but—