Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank all of our witnesses for joining us today, on the first of many days of this very interesting and incredibly important study.
I had some concerns going into this study that we're starting today, because the utopian view of the world, as I think everybody around this table would agree, is that what we want is an economy and a world where we all have good, high-paying jobs, we're all able to drive the kinds of cars we want, we're all able to heat our homes and we're able to do all these things at an affordable price. The only problem is that we don't live in a utopian world, so we're in a situation here where we're talking about a just transition and where we have a whole variety of competing interests. My concern was that this study was going to descend into a picking apart of little pieces of it here and there, and I think we've already started down that path. I'm probably going to do it myself at some point, so I'm not pointing fingers at anybody in particular, just to be clear.
Part of the problem, in my view, is that when you start talking about this, you're using words like “pathways” and you talk about “principles”, and you use all this other lingo that we constantly hear so much, and the average person doesn't understand what that means. I'm not sure that some of the people using those words necessarily know what it means either, to be honest.
My question to you is, assuming my premise is correct that we all want to live in this utopian world, how do we approach this discussion using language that's going to appeal to people so that they understand it, grasp it and buy into it?
I didn't think anybody was going jump at that one, but....