Mr. Speaker, I would like to take a moment to respond to some of the comments that were made by the member and perhaps pick up on some of the debate that has been going on for the last little while.
I want to remind the House that this is not merely about hot air credits and to position it as such is really a falsehood. In fact, let us look back at the genesis of the Kyoto protocol. First, if we look at the reason why Canadian industries, as the member has rightly pointed out, have so readily embraced the notion of a domestic and international trading system, it is because they know what we know, which is that the international agreement and the Kyoto protocol call precisely for an emerging international trading regime. They wanted to get the jump on their competitors and, for that matter, ahead of the regulators who would be creating such a trading system.
The second reason that the protocol embraced an international trading regime is twofold: first, to facilitate capital flows into emerging economies in developing countries that are desperately in need of enhanced receipt of capital flows. We know that private capital flows have displaced public capital flows in terms of international aid by about 500-fold. This was considered to be a major mechanism through which we would be able to facilitate capital flows into those countries. Second, to facilitate the ultimate entry of those emerging economies and those developing countries into the Kyoto protocol in due course as signatories.
Canada is doing here exactly what the protocol set out for industrialized economies, which is to be a full participant by taking a leadership role by creating a domestic system and in so doing, getting the jump on the international system.
The question I want to put to the member is clear. If Canada was not to participate in the international trading system, what would we say to those players, those actors in Canada, and for that matter in the United States on a state by state level, who want to get more experience from trading and who ultimately want to help design the international trading regime? I think most Canadians actors would say that they want to harvest a market mechanism to achieve an environmental improvement. Clearly, the other side of the House does not.