Finance committee  That seems like straightforward economics, yes.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  I'll ask my colleague to point to the provision, but there's a provision in the law that requires us to establish a registry, and then there's regulatory authority that gives us the authority to provide some rules around the registry. The point of the registry is to track all of the credits so we know the offset credits and surplus credits.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  It's an effective price ceiling: there's nothing legal about it. But yes.

Finance committee  I guess hypothetically that's possible. We are going to be issuing a paper, a document, describing the proposed approach to offsets under this system in the very near future. One of the core things that we are saying in that paper is that the criteria we're going to rely on for determining offset credits are the criteria that have been worked on over the past year and a half by the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment in a project precisely to come to an agreement on what the core features of a good offset are.

Finance committee  I can only speak for the environmental statues, a number of which require annual reports. I was responsible for all of them for about a decade. They all have brief legislative obligations to report on the operation of the legislation. The annual reports, the reports that we have provided with respect to environmental legislation, have ranged from two or three pages, in the case of the International River Improvements Act, where nothing happens on an annual basis, typically, or maybe one decision, to a 200-page plus report under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, where we describe all of the science research, all the risk assessments, and all the risk management decisions that are made under the act during the course of the year.

Finance committee  —I'm going to cancel a meeting.

Finance committee  My apologies, but—

Finance committee  No, the offsets won't be priced by government. The price of an offset will be set in the marketplace. Facing an obligation to reduce my emissions, hypothetically speaking, I have a choice: I know I can pay $20 a tonne, or I can buy surplus credit from the business down the road.

Finance committee  To be clear, we are not establishing our own system. The provinces of Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia, and Alberta already have offset systems. The Province of Manitoba has announced that it will be establishing an offset system. The provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have announced they are planning to develop their own offset systems.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  This falls into the category of many of the provisions that Mr. Mercille has described where there may be a desire to do this in the future. Indeed, some provinces and some industries are asking us to do this. As I explained, many provinces already have their offset systems. Some are planning to develop them.