I would like to add, and maybe just pick up on a point. In our discussion, I had mentioned the International Maritime Organization in London, and the need to have a level playing field for emissions. It was a bit of a passing comment and I didn't elaborate, but now that we have an opportunity, perhaps I could explain a bit more. I think this is critically important for the success of the emerging national corridor here.
Like the airline sector, we in the marine shipping industry are regulated at the international level very similarly to the air sector. The air sector is subjected to ICAO and IATA, ICAO being the UN organization setting the standard and IATA the industry association. We have in parallel IMO and ICS, the International Chamber of Shipping. In fact, I sit on the ICS industry board for Canada, regularly waving my Canadian flag. I raise this because the key ethic here is that marine shipping requires a global approach—air and marine are really two global sections—otherwise certain jurisdictions could create a competitive advantage or disadvantage. The idea is to have a level playing field of regulations applying to the entire industry, globally.
The global community is very discouraging of separate regional action and we have an emerging threat here in Canada. There's growing concern that the Canadians may be jumping up and stepping in to create regional action. If they do, it will put the Canadian shipping industry at a disadvantage vis-à-vis international shipping and vis-à-vis American shipping, with a carbon tax. If the carbon tax cascades down, it could, depending on how it applies, affect and apply to the shipping industry.
At the moment, we are part of the carbon emissions trading scheme here in Ontario. That's now being wound up. What's going to replace it? That is the question that still hasn't quite been answered. On the other hand, internationally, we're very much a part of—in fact Canada's leading the charge in some ways—creating this new program, which has just been accepted, to reduce emissions by 50% by 2050. It's a very aggressive and ambitious program and it will require a lot of interesting action, some of it regulated. Some of it will ultimately lead to a carbon levy being applied. That will all be done internationally, so another Canadian-led action on top of that one could put us at a disadvantage. That will affect the potential prosperity of this new national corridor, the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence waterway and it certainly could impact our ability to address the challenge and the opportunity to have even more trucks pulled away from the roads and more traffic moved over to the marine mode, where we all recognize we have an environmental opportunity.
In a backhanded way, that carbon tax could do just the opposite, yet we want to encourage more traffic, as we discussed earlier, away from the congested roads, which are heavy environmental polluters and so forth.
I just wanted to raise that issue with the committee because it may be something we want to talk about further.