International Trade committee  That's sort of nirvana, isn't it?

International Trade committee  It's not going to happen. It's certainly not going to happen in the near future. What is going to happen, however, is that the U.S. states are going to be more and more fractious on this issue. California is not going to back down from the western climate initiative and neither i

International Trade committee  —and a whole bunch of them, actually produced this proposal for a carbon tax of $40 a ton. The deal is that they'll loosen up regulation on the energy industry and give all the money back to the citizens of the United States, so it's completely revenue-neutral. I thought that wou

International Trade committee  It would be interesting to see if anything happens with that. It would be a very good thing, but it's going to be a long time coming.

International Trade committee  Watch out for the race to the bottom, particularly in the case of the United States loosening and not enforcing environmental regulations as a deliberate way of stimulating investment. That's illegal under NAFTA, but it's very elusive.

International Trade committee  There's an optimistic strategy and a pessimistic strategy. I mentioned them quickly at the end. The pessimistic strategy is that we have to make sure we protect our rights and Mexico's rights to honour our obligations under the Paris agreement from actions that penalize Canadian

International Trade committee  Okay. One of them would be to basically begin to move toward a North American clean economy strategy— in fact, NAFTA could be used to do that—which would include a discipline on fossil fuel subsidies, harmonizing product energy efficiency, and the institution of a North America

International Trade committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I am with the Smart Prosperity Institute at the University of Ottawa. We're a clean economy think tank with a research network of academic researchers across the country in this area. You might be asking yourselves why a trade agreement should