How are we going to know what impact that has on the greenhouse gas emissions? How are we going to hold everybody accountable for doing their part?

hy is it you can impose a new tax and keep your economy growing? Only if you cut other taxes by exactly the same amount. The problem with carbon taxes around the world has been you dump a new tax onto the economy and it's just adding more tax.

How are we going to know what impact that has on the greenhouse gas emissions? How are we going to hold everybody accountable for doing their part?

I think you're never going to get somewhere ambitious if you don't start out with great ambitions. What I would say is: we got a start. That to me is a very significant thing. Here we were, a historic meeting to talk about climate change.

You can't say British Columbia's carbon tax is exactly the same as increasing hydroelectricity rates in another province. They're very different mechanisms, but we shouldn't deny that both of them can have an impact, and that's why we're talking about this broadly.

There are limits to what we can do. That's for sure. That is true. One of the downsides of a growing economy [is that] we're accommodating a lot more people. They're buying houses and the market is growing. That is part of the downside of that, but I think that all of us do have to decide to act on it.

It is time for conservatives to do what they do best and insist that a wasteful, inefficient government program gets off the books. Small government and the death penalty don't go together.