Environment committee  Absolutely.

Environment committee  Absolutely. Thank you for the question. In terms of what those costs are, a lot of it them will be for consultants and a lot of them will be for time. Because not a lot of small businesses have the expertise in house to be able to do that sort of accounting, they will need to hire some consultants to be able to walk them through those different steps.

Environment committee  Quite simply, a significant part of any cost that's imposed on the business gets passed on to consumers. Part of it gets passed on, of course, to the owners of the business, who get a little bit less profit, but usually they find a way to jack up prices so that it can then be passed on to consumers.

Environment committee  I don't think it's a pathway to actually reducing emissions in any significant way, other than by imposing undue costs on small businesses and having enough of them shut down. The fact is that when businesses were consulted about this, a lot of small businesses said this was not something that should apply to them.

Environment committee  For starters, financing costs for these Canadian companies may increase, because they'll lose access to stable funding from a good source that wants to finance them. Such a measure will likely change absolutely nothing for Canadian fossil fuel consumption, because people still need to get to work and put gas in their vehicles regardless of whether that gas is produced here or elsewhere.

Environment committee  We have absolutely no opinion on voluntary disclosure. In fact, we think companies that are prepared to disclose their numbers on their own to do so because they think it will benefit them. If they decide to disclose, so much the better. In our view, mandatory disclosure is problematic, because it would impose significant costs on businesses.

Environment committee  I will do the presentation, and then Ms. Wittevrongel and I will take turns answering questions.

Environment committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon, everyone. I would like to start by thanking you for inviting us to discuss such an important topic. At the Montreal Economic Institute, we are great admirers of a French intellectual named Frédéric Bastiat. He said that what distinguishes a good economist from a bad economist—

Environment committee  Thank you. According to Frédéric Bastiat, the difference between a good economist and a bad economist is that the latter considers only the visible impacts of public policies, while the former also considers the foreseeable impacts. In the current conversation about climate and the financial sector, the visible things are major financial institutions, such as banks and insurance companies, and large publicly traded companies.

Finance committee  Honestly, I'm going to channel David Dodge here and say that this is the worst federal budget since 1982. We're in a productivity “emergency” according to the deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, and as we're in this productivity emergency, the budget taxes the very investments that we need to get out of this productivity lag.

Finance committee  If I may, I think you're absolutely right in pointing out that a lot of corporations are going to offer stock options. A lot of corporations that are rather small but growing fast are doing that because they're not able to pay the same amount to their employees as a fully mature corporation.

Finance committee  I think one thing that needs to be addressed is the issue that we still don't recognize a lot of training for professionals between provinces. Whereas a province like Alberta has been leading the pack in the number of different goods and services for which it's easier to do interprovincial trade—it has much lower barriers than all the other provinces—it is unfortunately at the very back of the pack when it comes to recognizing skilled trades.