Thanks, Madam Chair. I don't really have any notes because I'm totally exhausted. But I just -- you know, committee -- at least our side is, we've had lots of discussion and debate about this bill over the last number of months, and we had to kind of carefully consider where we wanted to register objections and concerns with the bill. And so, you know, we thought about this a lot, and I think we saw a part of that even earlier today here where this side of the House didn't really want the bill called, period. Cabinet had to call this bill forward. So, you know, we could have had a vote and tried to prevent discussion of the bill on our side. We didn't do that. We did go into Committee of the Whole. We just concluded the discussion, you know, the opening remarks, and I want to commend everybody for -- particularly this side of the House and I guess the Minister for commenting on the bill. And, you know, we could have -- this side of the House could have tried to shut down the -- even the clause-by-clause discussion debate vote on the bill itself. We thought that that probably wasn't a good place to end up either. So, you know, one of the problems is if Bill 60 is voted down, it's -- the federal backstop will inevitably be brought into force. How soon and so on, I guess is probably some point for discussion. And if Bill 60 was voted down, there still would be an existing NWT carbon tax because of the legislation that was passed in the 18th Assembly. So we could be in a position, as early as Saturday I guess somebody said, April 1st, where there would still be an NWT carbon tax in place and then the federal backstop might kick in as well. So, you know, people could end up paying double carbon tax on their fuel.
Now, you know, the feds they might say well, gee, the GNWT, they kept their carbon tax in at this rate; we really only need to increase it this incremental rate. That could be an outcome but we're not sure. So, you know, we thought long and careful about how to try to deal with this situation in a more elegant way to try to deal with the NWT carbon tax that people would still have to pay without maybe bringing forward an emergency bill of some sort to repeal that legislation if Bill 60 was to be defeated. That's what we really have before us here is a -- perhaps a more eloquent solution in that what's -- it proposes is to basically delete all of the figures that are in the appendix and the schedule that set out increasing carbon tax rates over time as required by the federal government -- and I actually support that. So why would a guy like me who supports a carbon tax actually want to zero this out? Well, I want to work with Cabinet. I want to work with the federal government to actually bring forward a legislated approach to rebates, credits, cost of living, offsets, and a better plan than what Cabinet's brought forward. And I characterize that as a made-by-Cabinet approach. It's not a made-in-the North approach and nobody should be fooled by that.
So what this really does is zero out what's in the schedule before us and make it so that there would no longer be an NWT carbon tax. The federal government can still decide and will probably decide to implement the backstop, and I don't know I think we need to find a way to work together to come up with a better approach. And I think this provides some breathing time, some space to do that, which we kind of squandered that opportunity, unfortunately, earlier, but that's what this is really about, is creating some time and space for us to develop a better approach, hopefully with the federal government and hopefully with this side of the House this time around. Thanks, Madam Chair.