Environment committee  I believe so, though there are questions, obviously, of stringency. Clearly, we haven't met our previous commitments, so there is more work to be done. I do think that carbon pricing can help reduce emissions in the most cost-effective manner in many industries. It does work best when you don't have as much concern about carbon leakage, about this competition effect, and you're dealing with either point sources or fuels where you can accurately measure the emissions.

Environment committee  Absolutely. I think it's important that we not couch this and say we need to hit these environmental targets, and so in order to do that we must produce less. Nobody wants that. We have very aggressive export targets set out in the Barton report and the economic round table. I think it's important.

Environment committee  I think there are a number of things the federal government is doing. I was chief innovation fellow for the Government of Canada back in 2017. I am, I suppose, promoting my own work a little bit when I talk about the economic tables and superclusters. I'll focus more on going forward.

Environment committee  Yes, I think there are issues around measurement and permanence—you know, making sure the carbon that goes in the ground is actually staying in the ground. There is an opportunity. As we heard earlier, we do have some of the largest boreal forests. We are one of the world's largest carbon sinks.

Environment committee  There are all kinds of possibilities for areas where there are waste products. That could be in forestry, for example. You have all of these products that could be ending up in landfills or areas like that. There is both an environmental and economic opportunity there. I think part of taking advantage of that is being able to price externalities so that those technologies would have a price advantage over more emitting sources.

Environment committee  Is that buying or selling?

Environment committee  We are looking at that issue. If we go back to the nitrous oxide, we believe there is a role there for the Internet of things, such as soil sensors and that kind of thing, which would help farmers with the proper use of fertilizer. We're going to be investigating that to see how much of a bottleneck that is and what are the costs of getting these areas on better cell coverage—and ideally in the future 5G—and what the benefits would be as far as greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental performance standards go.

Environment committee  We're very early in our research. We haven't come up with any new policy recommendations for the next Growing Forward; I can't remember what they're calling it now.

Environment committee  Yes, the framework; we have not developed anything on that. Part of what we'll be looking at, however, is best practices from other jurisdictions to see if there are policies that the federal government or provinces may wish to adopt.

Environment committee  That's a good question.

Environment committee  There are small differences. Those differences are small unless you're getting really innovative and doing things like feeding seaweed to cows—there are pilots—and things like that. The biggest gain that we've seen—we're very preliminary in our research—has to be more on the genomic side, basically just technologies to breed cows to emit less.

Environment committee  On income support in general, again, as my colleague was saying, a lot of these technologies have an upfront cost that is particularly expensive for smaller producers. We've been looking at mostly southwestern Ontario. There are new technologies that can help reduce fertilizer use, but they have a payback period of maybe six, eight or 10 years, so it's not necessarily cost-efficient for the farmers to use those.

Environment committee  Good afternoon. Thank you for inviting me. Today, I'll limit my remarks to agriculture, since that's what we're working on at Smart Prosperity, although I should note that Smart Prosperity has argued elsewhere for the important role of clean innovation and market incentives for enhancing forest carbon sinks and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the forestry sector, including through innovative bioenergy and other bioproducts and for moving towards a resource efficient, circular economy.