Environment committee  Just to sneak something in here, I'm not aware of the analysis for developing countries and what it should say, but it strikes me that it seems to be reasonable that when we're putting a cost on ourselves, a price on carbon, that may affect our competitiveness and just shift prod

Environment committee  I'm very much in favour of that type of analysis. The goal here is not to destroy Canadian industry. The goal is to make it efficient and to make the world efficient too. I think we should be looking at those sides of our policy.

Environment committee  We need equitable treatment with our own domestic production and imports. China should be paying an equivalent tax on its production, and it will pay more if it's less efficient. If we produce aluminum more efficiently in Canada--and it's very energy intensive--and there's a pric

Environment committee  Nuclear has unresolved questions around it: waste disposal and hidden subsidies that are not well understood. I think all of this should be on the table. Prices should be adjusted to reflect a fair number for nuclear as opposed to the numbers we're told. I don't think they're app

Environment committee  He talked about setting standards and that sort of thing, which is really essential here--setting intensity-based standards for industry and then pushing them on developing countries. That won't get us to the kinds of numbers we're talking about, and I don't think he's claiming i

Environment committee  As was pointed out earlier, we're not economists, so we look to other people's analyses for this sort of thing. William Nordhaus, who is a very well-respected Yale University economist, has calculated that an economically optimal carbon price or tax would be about $27 U.S. per me

Environment committee  There are some areas we know we can put a tax or a price on quickly, like fuels. The infrastructure to collect tax on fuels is easily used. You would hardly have to hire anybody else to collect and manage that money. The national round table is moving into the next part of its a

Environment committee  There is no large-scale integrated cost analysis around anything I've ever seen in a plan. I expressed the view that when we do the analysis we're going to see lots of opportunities. There have been bits and pieces. The energy ministers had modelling done on energy efficiency a

Environment committee  There is an unreleased study at the moment on climate change impacts and adaptation, and we're waiting anxiously to see that. My senior scientist, Dr. Quentin Chiotti, was the co-lead for the Ontario chapter of the assessment, so I have some notion of what might be in it. But unt

Environment committee  I would like to answer that. I've worked for three governments: Ontario, Manitoba, and the federal government. It's terrifically hard to fight new policy into existence and new programs. They get dropped just like that when it suits somebody. We need to have a way of putting in

Environment committee  Is your question on differences within the federal bureaucracy?

Environment committee  I see. I think it comes from all three quarters, depending on who's being targeted for what measure. I'm certainly working very actively now on the vehicle fuel efficiency file. There's tremendous opposition within industry to being subject to a standard at all, to some extent,

Environment committee  Yes, I totally agree with you. I think we have to look at compact, mixed-use communities, transit-oriented development to get these big reductions. The experience is that if you build a road and you build a transit system next to it, you have trouble filling the transit system. Y

Environment committee  Yes, I'll take a little bit of a different tack. I think there are many things we know we can do right now, and some of them are beneficial. They're net negative cost. We do need some detailed analysis because we need to write a business plan on how we're going to get there. We n

Environment committee  I haven't. There are other analyses out there, but--