International Trade committee  Okay. Well, this is the ultimate issue in terms of the linkage between human rights and trade: what do you do first? I think the evidence in a lot of other countries is that engagement is what really matters with countries that have a bad track record when it comes to human righ

International Trade committee  I heard all the discussion earlier about the fact that murder rates have dropped. Clearly the rule of law is being applied much more rigorously. But Colombia is a very complicated and messy place, where there have been private militias and drug lords. There are border disputes wi

International Trade committee  It is certainly that as well. I went searching through some of the information from Foreign Affairs on our bilateral treaty with the United States, and it struck me that these tiny U.S. states are much more important to Canadian companies. We actually do twice as much trade with

International Trade committee  It's theoretically doable in practice, and I'd be interested in hearing from Professor Simons where it's been done. It's nice in theory but hard to do in practice.

International Trade committee  I'd agree; that's why the elimination of tariffs everywhere is a good thing. It actually creates a much more level playing field internationally for us in pursuing markets abroad.

International Trade committee  Well, certainly for people who are pulse exporters, the elimination of the tariff or a reduction of the tariff would be a good thing. It would actually create a more level playing field against other sources of supply in the Colombian market.

International Trade committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Maybe I'll start by reminding members of the committee who the Conference Board is. We're an independent not-for-profit business research organization that tries to facilitate dialogue between governments, private sector, labour in Canada, and the not-fo

Finance committee  We've done a first briefing, which is on our website, and it sets out the elements of a national strategy for pricing carbon. We are creating a couple of forums right now, one on climate change adaptation, where we're getting some of the major emitters to sit in the room together

Finance committee  I don't have much expertise in this area. The Conference Board of Canada has never conducted any research on tax havens. I do apologize, but this is not a topic on which I can offer an expert opinion to members of the committee.

Finance committee  No, but unfortunately I was at the Department of Finance 12 years ago.

Finance committee  It's already showing up in people's baskets. When you go to the grocery store right now, a basic loaf of bread is $2.40 or $2.50, whereas was $1.60 last fall. Inflation is fundamentally a phenomenon driven by monetary policy, however, and it really depends upon whether the Bank o

Finance committee  Well, we haven't done a formal modelling of the fiscal impact. Our position is fairly simple. We are producing CO2 right now, and the consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is that it is having an impact on our physical environment; therefore, we think we ha

Finance committee  They also tried to tell producers not to pass it on to consumers, which frankly is the wrong position. The whole point of a carbon tax is to get people to understand that whether they're buying a big car or small car makes a difference to the environment, and thus to shape consum

Finance committee  I'll take the second part of your comment first. I'm not sure we know what the cost is or what the cost benefit is, because we're treating CO2 like a free good, and as long as we treat it like a free good we actually don't know whether this is a net win or a net loss. But on y

Finance committee  Perhaps I'll start by saying that the tone of your question implies that we make systematic errors when we do economic forecasting. That's not the case. If you go back to look at an article done in Policy Options magazine about two years ago on the accuracy of forecasters over a