Mr. Chair, it's right to note that carbon pricing is seen widely by economists around the world as one of those powerful means to signal to the marketplace how to allocate resources and make investments, whether they're producers, consumers or heavy industries. When you're able to weave that into your everyday budget allocation, it certainly has a very powerful impact. It's not surprising that some of the world's super majors have actually been among the most vocal supporters for having a carbon-pricing regime, and I'm not trying to take a comment from an individual jurisdiction perspective, but just in terms of research and economics, that's a textbook case of using pricing signals to allocate resources.
To the question, most certainly companies are paying close attention. This is not going to be a surprise to committee members: many companies are having so-called shadow prices in terms of their research allocation, i.e., that whether a given jurisdiction has a carbon price or not, they tend to build in a price for the medium- to long-term decisions they're making. As you can appreciate, in the oil and gas sector it's not uncommon to make an investment on a 20-, 30- or 40-year horizon in order to recoup very large capital investments. Companies typically don't reveal those shadow prices, but they have a shadow price for their investment decisions across large jurisdictions or their global operations to take into account what they foresee to be the operating environment in years to come. In effect, many of the large companies that are succeeding are actually doing this already.