Thank you very much.
Thank you to the committee for the invite.
I want to acknowledge that I'm coming to you from the Treaty 7 region in southern Alberta. This has also been a gathering place for Métis and indigenous peoples other than Treaty 7 signatories.
I'm coming to you as the chair of the Net-Zero Advisory Body. We were created in 2021 under the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act. We provide the Minister of the Environment and Climate Change with independent advice on interim emission reduction targets, leading up to 2050. We give advice on the most likely pathways that will make sure Canada is a competitive net-zero emissions jurisdiction by 2050, and we also deal with any matter referred to us by the minister. We're a group of 13 members from all regions of Canada, with diverse and established expertise in a range of fields.
I have two main points.
The first one I'm not going to belabour, because everyone who has already spoken to you has made this point up front, and it is that emissions reduction and climate change are no longer just about emissions reduction and climate change: Emissions reduction is now a competitiveness issue. Every major economy on the planet is retooling itself to make sure they can reduce their emissions. They now understand that with this remarkable change in our economy, they have to position themselves to win economically in the future, and if they don't, they will lose. This is the fundamental change that has happened in the last few years. Emissions reduction is now about competitiveness.
The second major point is that there's actually more certainty than uncertainty when it comes to the technologies and approaches that we need in order to get to net zero. For 30 years we've been trying to reduce emissions, and we have many options to do that. We can keep our similar systems; we just have to make them more efficient to reduce emissions.
However, if the objective now is to get to zero emissions under a net-zero definition, rather than just reduce emissions, there are actually many fewer pathways and fewer technologies and technology configurations that can truly be a net-zero society. In some regards, although it's not easier, it is simpler, because the technologies are actually more limited in number. There's more certainty than uncertainty.
Where does this leave Canada? To be clear, the Government of Canada has done much. We've had billions deployed and still have billions in various funds. Budget 2023 introduced many investment tax credits, but we're chasing a moving target. Our major trading partners and our competitors are moving extremely quickly and extremely deliberately to make businesses in their economies able to compete and win in what is a fundamental retooling of the global economy tracking toward net zero.
What would it take for Canada to be more deliberate and to bring together all of the pieces we have into a more coherent strategy?
Number one, we think we need to do a more deliberate analysis of what Canada's unique competitive advantages are. To date, most of our programs and policies have been more of a blanket approach, but we're not going to compete economically in terms of the amount of money the investors spend with larger economies. We need to be more deliberate and targeted. We need to start with that analysis.
We need an approach that aligns the supports and policies with those inherent advantages. The Transition Accelerator and Clean Prosperity have just completed—to the extent possible—an apples-to-apples comparison of U.S. competitiveness versus the Canadian competitive environment in terms of supports, incentives, regulations and policies across a range of technologies that will absolutely be required in a net-zero world: different types of hydrogen, electric vehicle batteries and sustainable aviation fuel. In some cases, we stack up well. In other cases, we don't stack up well at all. Aligning our supports with these Canadian advantages is something that the Net-Zero Advisory Body feels very strongly about.
On aligning the demand side in a confederation that is sometimes difficult to navigate, in some cases we see municipalities taking a very strong leadership role and some provinces taking a very strong leadership role. The federal government also clearly has a foundational role in driving the economy to net zero, but doing better in aligning interests and approaches across three levels of government, along with indigenous interests, although difficult, really seems to be something that we need to put more thought into and make more progress on.
Another thing that we feel very strongly about is having plans that are implementable. For example, if we have a hydrogen strategy for Canada, we feel very strongly that we have to have competitiveness goals embedded in the strategy to understand, for example, how much hydrogen we need to use in Canada, at what price and at what carbon intensity and by when, if we're actually going to track a deliberate pathway to net zero.
It's only with this concept of quantitative competitiveness goals that we can assess whether or not we're making sufficient progress on the economy's key sectors that we need to get to net zero, or whether or not we need to retool or adjust our approach in order to make sufficient progress—