What I'm proposing with the transfer is only one piece of what has to be part of a package. It's not the end-all and be-all. I actually think the carbon budgeting idea that I offered in answer to a previous question is another important means of achieving that accountability.
The transfer is simply about making sure that we spend what it takes to win and that the money gets where it needs to go. So much of the federal government spending on climate infrastructure right now is tied up in the Canada Infrastructure Bank, which just adds years and complication to the process—instead of, for example, the kind of fleet-of-foot spending that we saw all parties unite behind in the first year of the pandemic.
The federal government is spending on climate, but they're not spending what it takes to win. It's sometimes hard to get at these numbers. My former colleagues at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives have done a good job with this, and if you generously tally up all of the funding that we've had to date and annualize it, it comes in generously at about $12 billion a year. Now, that sounds like a lot of money, but it's about 0.4% of GDP. Sir Nicholas Stern has proposed that governments spend about 2% of GDP on the climate emergency, which in Canada's case would be about $56 billion. We're not spending a little less than we should; we're spending less by about a fourfold to fivefold magnitude.