Environment committee  Depending on how you structure it, you may need additional measures other than just a tradeable permit system to reach the target. This would mean that you now need to get into a higher cost than what just getting the permits would get you. That's where you can get a differentiat

Environment committee  As with previous governments, this government has been spending a lot of money on this issue. The point is, are these cost-effective investments? The answer is that so far there is not a lot of evidence that these are cost-effective investments. So in the end, I have not seen any

Environment committee  Previous governments were trying as well.

Environment committee  I don't know whether you have the answers here at the right level, but at some point in time, the answer to that is no. You don't lower the threshold. You're just increasing costs of doing business--

Environment committee  --to deal with a very small part of emissions.

Environment committee  I understand that. It's costly to report. You don't need to know who is emitting if you have a permanent system.

Environment committee  The only thing is that what you can't do with a single price of carbon is hit two different targets.

Environment committee  For example, if Canada were to have a more ambitious target than the U.S., then other kinds of measures would need to be brought in to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But in terms of the permits themselves, unless there was something different in the design of them, there would

Environment committee  I think you'd have more information in terms of what's actually happening. But what you don't have in this bill either is a cost-effectiveness issue. The bill does not ask the question of how you got there and the effort needed to get there.

Environment committee  It's hard to see how this focus just on clean energy will get to a broader context. It may be a first step, but it's a long way away, I would argue. I don't think we have a choice but to devise a Canadian policy; however, develop it in parallel with what the Americans are doing

Environment committee  I think the two, in some sense, are separable. If you think of this legislation as identifying a process, then the process itself would need to identify what the measures are. There doesn't appear to be in this any indication of measures specifically. So you need the regulations

Environment committee  I think what needs to happen is...Canada cannot act on its own. Major emitters must act. Whatever mechanism you want to put in place, whatever policy instruments you want to use, bringing down emissions is a different story than the mechanisms you're going to use to do it. The ke

Environment committee  In terms of having an effect on climate change or in terms of having a policy environment that kind of addresses some issues?

Environment committee  China is now the largest emitting country in the world, so we need to think of this from the perspective of the first question. The second question is that, again, a broader space in the North American space would seem to me to be broad enough to have all kinds of different het

Environment committee  It depends on who else is in the game with us, in some sense. If you think of this as a Canada-U.S. issue, whether we are net buyers of permits from the U.S. or we sell them, then it depends on the relative strength of the targets that are being met through the permits. So in som