Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise today to speak against this Conservative motion. I will give Conservatives credit for one thing, though: they have made their position on climate change clear. We know with this motion that they are going to oppose one of the most effective ways of dealing with climate change, and that is by putting a price on carbon.
We also know, because we saw them do it, that they voted twice against motions to declare a climate emergency. That makes their position even clearer. They voted against the NDP motion and the government motion on climate change. They simply do not accept the urgency of the situation we are in. The fact that they have yet to announce any climate plans of their own really illustrates their failure to grasp the urgency of our situation.
This is surprising, as well as disappointing, because even business groups are now acknowledging that the costs of failing to act on climate change will be enormous. Earlier this year, the Insurance Bureau of Canada cited climate change as the primary factor in increasing insurance costs and noted that in 2018, severe weather caused $1.9 billion in insured damages in Canada.
Today a working group, chaired by the Insurance Bureau of Canada and Public Safety Canada, put out a report on how we might deal with the financial risks of the more frequent and severe flooding we are now seeing. It is not about how we can avoid those costs; it is about who is going to pay those costs. How are we going to take the risks off ordinary Canadians for things that are far out of their control?
For me personally, climate change is an issue that I have been engaged in for more than 30 years. In 1989, I was working for a small indigenous-led NGO based in Victoria, at that time called the South Pacific Peoples' Foundation and now called Pacific Peoples' Partnership. At the urging of our Pacific Island partners, we organized a public education program, including a tour of B.C. high schools, warning of the threat of global warming to coral reefs and the habitability of the Pacific Islands. Unfortunately, that warning is now becoming a reality with the sad news that in just two years, between 2016 and 2018, one-half of the coral that makes up Australia's Great Barrier Reef died. Coral reefs are dying all across the Pacific Ocean.
It is not the stereotype that Pacific Islanders will have to learn how to swim. What is happening is that the coral reefs, which are a main source of food supply, the main protection of the coasts against storm surges and a main protector of the freshwater lenses that human habitation depends on in the islands, are being destroyed by climate change here and now.
A second warning on climate change came from Australia this week with the release of a policy paper from an independent think tank called Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, in Melbourne. This report is entitled “Existential Climate-Related Security Risk”. The report concludes that “Climate change now represents a near to mid-term existential threat to human civilization.” The authors note that current Paris Agreement targets are insufficient, and as they stand, would lock in global warming of at least 3°C if we achieve the Paris targets. The authors cite the conclusions of numerous reports that at a 3°C increase in temperatures around the world, governments will be overwhelmed by the scale of the changes and challenges they will have to face. These include the spread of new pandemic diseases, heat beyond human survivability in many regions, massive disruption of agriculture and food systems, flooding of coastal areas, where literally hundreds of millions of people live, and the disappearance of freshwater resources, all resulting in enormous human migrations.
There is a danger that focusing on these doomsday scenarios will cause many to reject them as far-fetched, despite the fact that these are no longer probabilities. They represent the real risk of the catastrophe we are facing. There is also the danger that the sheer scope of the challenge will cause many to despair of any action at all. To me, this motion in front of us today actually falls into one, if not both, of those categories.
Therefore, I will be voting against this motion, because it is really a head-in-the-sand reaction to the very real challenges we face and because focusing on the costs of carbon pricing ignores the far larger costs of failing to act. Those costs are here, and those costs are now.
New Democrats are voting against this motion because we do support putting a price on carbon. We say yes to a carbon tax, not one paid by individuals alone, as the Liberals have designed, but a carbon price that also applies to the big polluters. We would like to see an end to the Liberal carbon tax exemptions for their corporate friends.
Putting a price on carbon is of course an important tool in the fight against climate change, but it is only one tool in what needs to be a comprehensive package of measures. There is no question that no single measure will be sufficient to meet the scale of the challenges of this climate emergency. That is why New Democrats put forward our plan, a plan called Power to Change—A New Deal for Climate Action and Good Jobs.
The Liberals and their policy depend almost exclusively on one tool, just the carbon tax. This will not get us anywhere near where we need to be. The NDP has a comprehensive plan that recognizes that we are all in this together and that success in meeting the challenge of climate change will only be achieved if we leave no one behind. If we ignore the question of workers and their jobs, if we ignore the circumstances of seniors, we will not get the buy-in we need to succeed.
The goal of our plan is clear: to do what we must to keep global temperature rise below 1.5°. In other words, we will have science-based targets, not just arbitrary percentages of reductions. This is the same approach I put forward when Esquimalt council adopted my motion for science-based targets in 2010: measure our progress and adjust our target reductions as necessary to achieve the results we need.
We know now that this means a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to 38% below 2005 levels by 2030. We know it means a reduction of at least 50% by 2050 if we are to reach a net-zero carbon economy, the one that is necessary to halt further rises in temperature.
Some have criticized our plan for being vague on targets for 2050, but I would say that the key to our plan is that our targets for 2050 are at least 40% to 50%. We are committed to whatever reductions science decrees are necessary to avoid catastrophe.
The NDP plan also calls for an independent climate accountability office, much like an auditor general in terms of our finance matters. This office would measure our progress and advise on the targets we need to meet to avoid the catastrophe that we really do face.
Unfortunately, the Liberals have kept the greenhouse gas reduction targets set by Harper, calling for a 30% reduction by 2030, targets that are clearly now inadequate. Even worse, the measures put in place by the Liberals will miss the reduction target for 2030 by 79 million tonnes, and if not adjusted, would only get us to the goal of a 30% reduction in another 100 years, yet the Liberals voted against our climate emergency motion, which called for a legislated requirement to act and a series of specific measures to adopt. Instead, yesterday we voted on their motion, which mandates little but hand-wringing. It says that we have an emergency; it mandates no action.
We have choices before us. We can put our heads in the sand. We can wait for someone else to act, arguing that Canada's share of emissions is too small for our efforts to make a difference, ignoring that we are among the world's highest per capita emitters of greenhouse gases, or we can make different choices.
We can end subsidies to fossil fuel industries right now, amounting to about $3 billion annually. We can avoid wasting money on buying and building projects like the Trans Mountain pipeline, which the Liberal government announced, just before I started speaking, it has approved once again.
The NDP has a real plan to create jobs in all communities across the country, jobs in renewable energy, in home retrofits and in restoration of what we would call the great environmental negative legacies left behind by the oil industry. Many of those jobs will use the same skills that workers in the oil industry already use. They will be good jobs, good family-supporting jobs, in every community.
It is time for the Conservatives to get on board and present their plan. It is time to stop pretending that climate change does not already come with a large price tag, which will only increase as time goes on. It is time to tell us what choices they would make about how we meet the challenge of mitigating climate change and avoiding climate disaster.
The Liberal action is both feeble and contradictory. Only New Democrats have put forward a clear plan to move forward together to meet the challenge of climate change.
