Finance committee  Thank you. Thank you so much for holding these hearings. Many of the members of the committee have forest product mills in your ridings, and those of you who don't have them have spinoff jobs. There are 250,000 direct jobs, and then there are another 750,000 jobs, many of them i

Finance committee  Unfortunately the rules are that I get to choose my answer, and I'll stick with our original presentation, which is that taxing investment is a bad thing, while reducing taxes in investment would be a very good thing.

Finance committee  That's two disobedient witnesses.

Finance committee  I'd be grateful.

Finance committee  I don't have the dollar costs with us, but they have been calculated and submitted to the Department of Finance. We can provide them to the committee as well. One of the lovely things about it is that you actually collect the same amount of taxes; it just happens a little slowe

Finance committee  I'd like to comment on your first question, if I may.

Finance committee  Let me use my 30 seconds. It's a false dichotomy to say that we can have social values without having a competitive business climate. If you've ever gone to a mill town where we've shut the mill--

Finance committee  Please, let me finish. I just want to make it clear for the whole committee that if you ever went to a town where we've shut the mills, you'd realize that investment in Canada has a social impact beyond anything any government program can do. And a second thing--

Finance committee  Let me finish, please.

Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  Thank you, and I thank the committee for allowing us to speak today. I know that you hear a lot of witnesses and that we must occasionally bore you, but I have to tell you that for us, it is really important to have a chance to be heard. There's really only one policy issue we'r

Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  That's a good question. Thank you. The Canadian forest is mature. It's extremely mature. In fact, most of Canada's forests are older than nature would let them be because of fire suppression. A mature forest tends to be a net emitter rather than an absorber of carbon dioxide.

Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  I think my answer was clear: our forests are mature, and mature forests are CO2 emitters. It is not rocket science. However, there is another option. If we plant new forests, we plant trees on land that is unsuitable for agriculture, we can capture CO2.

Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  You haven't said that to me before.

Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  Absolutely. Kyoto is an international agreement that is an instrument to address climate change, a profoundly flawed instrument, the only international instrument we have. So Kyoto was shorthand for addressing climate change. I know you guys have greater sensitivities to the wo

Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  The overall forest cover in Canada is now 91%, or what it was at the time of Champlain. We've lost 9% because of cities and farming. The rate of deforestation in Canada, according to the latest UN figures, is zero because we replant for everything we take out--usually two or thre