Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to speak to the NDP's motion today.
Before I get into the substance of some of the issues raised in the motion, I do want to make a few general comments about the nature of the motion and some of the motivating factors behind this motion.
First, I would like to remind the House that the official opposition of any political stripe does possess, in the case of a minority government, a certain amount of power. That power culminates, I believe, in the exercising of a decision which would take down a minority government and cause an election. It is a power which, I believe, has to be exercised responsibly, judiciously, and one that cannot be taken lightly.
It is fair to say that this motion is more than tinged in partisanship. The leader of the NDP made comments this morning that were somewhat troubling to me and to the official opposition. He made comments, for example, around the notion, in my view, that the NDP is prepared to put this motion in a confidence form because it is unwilling to cooperate with the Bloc Québécois and the Liberal Party of Canada in taking the time necessary to expose for Canadians just what has been happening with this minority government.
In particular, this minority government has taken some effort to cover up what are now four raging fires out of its control: first, the in and out election advertising scandal; second, the Ian Brodie affair now spiraling out of control in the United States of America fed, in my view, by the leader of the NDP going on CNN international news just last night and telling the world about Mr. Brodie's conduct; third, the Cadman affair, where the Prime Minister refuses to refute what is clearly irrefutable, that is, his voice on tape speaking about offers to a tragically sick member of Parliament at the time; and fourth, the O'Brien affair, where the Minister of the Environment is now involved in having to defend himself repeatedly from all kinds of negative coverage involving his interference in municipal affairs.
There are other issues that are ongoing here that the government does not want Canadians to know about. Why is that? Why is it wrong for the NDP to play partisan politics with this motion? It is wrong because it is important for Canadians to get to know more about the character, the nature, the values, and the approaches taken by this Prime Minister and his reformed Conservative Party.
So, with respect to the politics of this motion, that is all I really wanted to say, except that it is unfortunate that the NDP, by couching this important climate change debate on a motion of confidence, is really aiding and abetting the government in its attempts to hide from plain public view what has been happening on a number of key fronts.
Let me turn now to the substance of the issue which is in the motion.
The motion is right in this respect: the reformed Conservatives cannot be trusted to do the right thing, either domestically or internationally, to fight the climate change crisis. They simply cannot be trusted.
We know the scientific evidence is overwhelming. This at a time when the government refuses to renew the funding of the climate change and atmospheric research foundation's programs and at a time when, last spring, the government cancelled the largest single university-based research initiative and effort in climate change science.
The world's leading scientists told us again in Bali that an increase in the earth's temperature of just 2° to 4° would lead to a catastrophic disruption of life as we know it today. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that a 1° Celsius increase could lead to 10% of land species facing extinction and 80% destruction of our coral reefs. This is now very serious business, business that should not be couched, in my view, in partisanship, as has happened here through this NDP motion.
The IPCC's fourth report in May 2007 says it is possible to limit temperature increases to 2° to 2.4° but only if we stabilize within 15 years our worldwide emissions and we move to cut those in half by 2050. Here is the kicker: We know that the economic costs of taking action now, today, aggressively are much less than the costs in the future if we fail to act.
The former chief economist of the World Bank, Sir Nicholas Stern, conducted a review on the economics of climate change for the planet. He concluded that the costs of ignoring climate change could be 5% to 20% of GDP, more than the costs of the two world wars and the Great Depression combined.
In contrast, the cost of tackling the problem can be limited to 1% of global GDP today if we act now. There are many effective low cost options already available: financial incentives to develop and deploy existing technologies; tradeable permits and carbon credits; renewable power investments; and voluntary programs, of course, which have been used around the world.
In 2007 the world's largest and leading management consulting firm, McKinsey and Company, showed that a great deal could be achieved in the fight against climate change without placing an undue burden on our economy, if governments provide incentives for the development and deployment of green technologies. It concludes that the annual worldwide cost for making the needed emission reductions to avoid worst climate change in 2030 is only .6% of that year's projected GDP.
We agreed to the Kyoto protocol in this country in 1997 and despite all of the desperate misinformation from the Conservative Party, it became international law in this country only in 2005, when enough countries had ratified the protocol. It set targets, yes. It also created a mandatory international trading system, one now abandoned by the government because it has unilaterally abandoned Canada, the only country of over 170 to abandon the Kyoto treaty. We have been completely isolated, as we saw in Bali, when we came together with the world to negotiate a framework for the second phase of the Kyoto protocol.
The Minister of the Environment went there and in the last two hours of a seven day meeting, he finally folded because he was under so much pressure to sign on to an international declaration calling for a 25% to 40% reduction from 1990 levels by 2020. He was the only minister to hold out, working in partnership with the Republican administration which was not even part of the official negotiating sessions, but under pressure he finally folded.
Here is the problem with signing on to such a declaration. The government's own “Turning the Corner” plan runs completely in the opposite direction of that commitment.
Study after study, including the Conservatives' own advisory body, have shown that the Conservatives will not even meet their own modest targets and will allow our emissions to continue to rise until 2050 and beyond.
The Conservatives talk about regulations. We just heard one of their members say that they have the toughest regulations in Canadian history. Check the facts: There are no regulations. The government has tabled no regulations yet. Nothing has been brought into force on clean air. There are no regulations on climate change greenhouse gases. They have exempted new facilities by giving them a three year grace period. They are pricing carbon at a $15 a tonne payment into a technology fund which is grossly less than what it should be.
It has been a pattern that we have seen south of the border about denying, delaying and ultimately deceiving one's own people about taking action on climate change when in fact that is not happening.
First the Conservatives came into power in 2006 and killed all of the Liberal measures that were in play, but then they brought them back in a re-gifted fashion in half measure. According to the C.D. Howe Institute, Deutsche Bank, the Pembina Institute, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, the National Energy Board and many others, their plan cannot meet their weak targets, and emissions will continue to rise.
The claim that emissions will peak in 2010 in their plan is baseless. The claim that it will meet its target of 20% below 2006 by 2020 is baseless. There are so many exemptions, loopholes, bogus compliance options and such lack of detail that there is no way to conclude that this framework will have any positive effect at all.
In fact, because of the overall weakness, Tom d'Aquino, the president of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, representing 150 of some of the largest companies in Canada, came to committee just two weeks ago and said that the government's, I think negligence using my words, in this respect is actually harming Canadian industry by perpetuating policy uncertainty that hinders rational investment decisions so we can continue the transition that we started years ago to a carbon constrained future and carbon constrained economy.
Those are the facts about the domestic plan and our international performance. It is not even worth getting into the details of the minister's performance in Bali because that action speaks for itself.
What happened previous to the Conservative government arriving? While the Prime Minister was denying even the existence of climate change--he said that he did not believe in greenhouse gases--we brought in four increasingly aggressive climate change plans during the two previous governments, culminating in project green launched by our leader of the official opposition in 2005.
The Pembina Institute said at the time that project green was “over six times more effective” than what the Conservative government has offered today. We offered large scale funding for alternative energy. It was cut. We invested in biofuels. It was cut. We conducted a highly successful public awareness campaign to teach Canadians about the dangers of the climate change crisis. It was cut. We introduced energy efficient retrofit programs for Canadian homes and buildings. It was cut, particularly for the poorest in Canadian society who need the most help. That is the track record of the government since 2006.
Let us talk about where we want to go now. Let us talk about how we intend to deal as an official opposition with the climate change crisis.
First, we are going to have a comprehensive plan using the full range of tools to fight global warming. We are going to do that first and foremost by putting a price on carbon so the polluter pays. We are going to provide serious support for renewable energy and other ways to reduce emissions. There will be help for Canadians to conserve energy.
Here is a twist: We are going to work in partnership with our provincial governments on both mitigation and adaptation. We will not dispatch in this case our Minister of Finance or the Minister of the Environment to pick fights. Canadians are sick of the tawdry games. They are sick of the intergovernmental bickering. They want their governments cooperating not just on economic plans, but of course, on environmental plans, and we will do so.
That is why approximately a year ago our party, the official opposition, produced the “Balancing our Carbon Budget” plan. This plan is the backbone of the reworked and reformulated clean air and climate change act, Bill C-30, which the government killed. In fact, it is my theory the Conservatives prorogued Parliament in order to prevent that bill from coming back to the floor of the House of Commons to be debated openly. That has been raised by the leader of the official opposition several times. This--
