Natural Resources committee  I guess the future in oil sands, to my mind, remains with very large firms, because these projects, individually, are so costly that it's very hard to assemble the capital necessary to make them work. I feel that the future of the oil sands requires a lot of investment in the ope

Natural Resources committee  I think governments should have ambitious public policy objectives, put it that way. I think that's the responsibility of government: to identify what the public policy objectives are and to make sure they're ambitious in any kind of measuring. We've got international agreements,

Natural Resources committee  I think there are two things I would say in response. First of all, industy has to live with a lot of uncertainty on the exchange rate side, and also on whether the contracts are going to be there for them to sell the product. A characteristic of the operating environment of the

Natural Resources committee  But, principled flexibility, not just waking up one morning and deciding you want to do something different now.

Natural Resources committee  I have two quick points. I would agree with Professor Moore on the notion that North America provides a laboratory for this. I'm not a big fan of transfers for credits, because the accounting issues are phenomenal in keeping all of that straight. Is it permanent? Is it temporary?

Natural Resources committee  That is a different question than it was when it started. There is no price that Canadians can pay that will bring about a 2°C solution for the world. I think we need to establish that pretty clearly. This requires a world co-operation, and I think that is the message I would li

Natural Resources committee  I think it is a lot more than what people are charging now. I think Prof. Elgie was talking more about a hundred-dollar type of thing. That is where the conversation should start.

Natural Resources committee  What the history of Canadian climate policy over the last 25 years has shown is that we have relied mostly on a subsidy approach and that we have not gotten the type of results we anticipated from this. Essentially, giving an incentive for people to invest requires some kind of

Natural Resources committee  Thank you.

Natural Resources committee  Yes, another easy question. Thank you for that. There are, as you know, broadly two ways of addressing this issue or of thinking about this issue. One is the B.C. type of example, with the revenue-neutral approach. You raise some revenue and you return it in a way that's not cor

Natural Resources committee  I guess the view that I would bring to this is that it's our environmental problems that need to be addressed. We've talked about externalities. If doing something creates costs that are not borne by anyone, I think it is incumbent upon the policy framework to make sure that it i

Natural Resources committee  That's certainly one part of the puzzle, but not the only part. As I would highlight and maybe others have highlighted before, we need something broader than command and control or directives to say do this. As Professor Elgie has mentioned, this is a flat line, whereas what you

Natural Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. At the outset, please allow me to express my solidarity with the people of Fort McMurray in this time of crisis. In the few minutes available to me, I would like to make four points. I am going to take, perhaps, a slightly more abstract approach to this an