You're right. The $1,200 you mentioned is part of the work done with the Canadian Academy of Engineering. That's what we call in technical terms a shadow price on carbon. In other words, if you were to bring in the latest, greenest technology available on the market, the final technology that's available, and you throw everything at that final piece of technology to make it economically and commercially viable. That would require that you have a tax of $1,200 a tonne. That will change over time. Abatement curves around these technologies go down typically; it's true. That's what we know today. We know over time these cost curves come down, but right now that's what we're talking about.
Another thing to put in perspective is that in that whole conversation on low-carbon transition we need to recognize our starting point. We're an economy that benefited tremendously from our abundance of energy, carbon and non-carbon. Its low price reflects the electrification of our economy in Quebec. The aluminum industry, there's a good reason there's so much. Pulp and paper is another one, or mining. Those are heavy, intensive, energy-consuming industries, and the abundance of it at a low price makes us really competitive in world markets. That's part of what we are. The same thing in Alberta, of course, for oil and gas. There's been a lot of innovation in the oil and gas industry, and I think that innovation could be exported because we're not going off carbon around the planet overnight.
That element of a carbon tax is in the mix for the second point you raise, which is to send a signal to consumers that if collectively we're embarking on this ambitious agenda, there's a cost we implicitly think consuming carbon imposes on the environment, and we should be prepared to pay something for it. If you compare $200 or $150 for the consumer for motor gasoline in Canada, that would compare to about $1.40 or $1.50 a litre for gasoline. You compare that with Europe, where they pay on average $2.00 a litre, and that translates into about $400 to $500 a tonne, if you do the math around it. If you look at Europe and their fleet of cars and their economic fabric, the cost of energy over time has created different decision-making by consumers, but that's over decades.