Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Mégantic—L'Érable.
It was with great hilarity that I listened to my Manitoba colleague's speech. One thing that I noticed was that not a single number came out of his mouth. It was all straight opinion.
Numbers are important. If there is no talk about numbers, there is no talk about environmental policy. If there are no numbers, there are no facts. Numbers are, in essence, science. The government professes to support science, but let us notice how it obfuscates, skates around issues, and presents no proof of what it says. It simply does not care about science.
I would like to quote a sage from 2,000 years ago, Hippocrates of Kos, who said, “There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.” All I heard from the member opposite was nothing but opinions.
Let us look at the numbers regarding the carbon tax, which is the signature policy of the government in terms of the cost to the economy. One would think that the government would use metrics, but knowing the government's proclivity for obfuscation, there are two possibilities: either the government knows the real number in terms of the cost to the economy but will not tell, or it is blindly charging ahead with no idea of the effect on the environment or the economy.
Interestingly, my colleague from Manitoba talked about B.C. and all that kind of stuff. I am going to segue into a letter from a citizen from Seattle. He was talking about the activists in B.C. He said, “Thanks to [those activists] who seem to have once again to have blocked an oil pipeline to the coast. Those of us living south of the border will continue to enjoy importing your oil at substantial discounts while exporting our oil from Gulf ports at world market prices. Your gift to us, around $100 million per day Canadian, is greatly appreciated. We marvel at your generosity while doubting your sanity. All of this will have zero impact on the global climate, of course.”
Again, the effects of what the government is doing in terms of blocking Canada's oil exports and in terms of its climate pricing are truly daunting.
A few weeks ago, I challenged the environment minister in committee to provide a number in terms of how much reduction there would be in greenhouse gas emissions as a result of the carbon tax. I demanded answers. She was just going around and around. Throughout her answer, I asked, “What is the number? What is the number?” Naturally, she gave us nothing. In fact, the exchange was so hilarious that it was featured on This Hour has 22 Minutes. The whole segment was on how the government provides no answers to any specific questions.
Let us come up with a few answers for the effect on the economy of a $50-a-tonne carbon tax, which is what the government wants. A $50-a-tonne carbon tax will increase fuel prices by 11.6¢ per litre. Canadians can go to the natural resources website and see that Canada consumes about 105 billion litres per year of domestic fuel, so when we do the math, we see that Canadians will pay about an extra $12 billion per year for domestic fuel. That means the average family, just for that alone, will pay between $1,000 and $2,000 per year extra.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer has a very interesting article, headed “PBO says carbon tax will knock $10 billion off GDP by 2022”.
It said:
The government's carbon pricing plan will cause the GDP to drop, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer's (PBO) latest report, costing Canadians $10 billion they would otherwise have gained by 2022.
The article went on to say:
The report warns that the levy will “generate a headwind” for the economy as the price on carbon is boosted from $10 per tonne of CO2 in 2018 to $50 per tonne in 2022.
It adds, “...in economic terms, headwinds aren't a good thing.”
In terms of the effect on rural and northern communities and poor people, the member for Nunavut—and I spent a fair bit of time in Nunavut myself in a previous life—spoke at length. He asked the parliamentary secretary about some kind of price relief for the Nunavummiut. Anyone who has been to any community in Nunavut—indeed, in much of the Northwest Territories as well—will know diesel fuel powers those communities. Also, snowmobiles are very expensive and use a lot of fuel. They are vital for the hunting, trapping, and fishing that people in those regions engage in. The answer the parliamentary secretary gave was basically that they would look at it and think of something.
My own riding of Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa is the size of Nova Scotia. It is a very dispersed riding, with lots of small and remote communities and lots of wide open spaces. There is no public transportation, so people have to drive, regardless of their income. My constituency is one of the lower-income constituencies in Canada. Not only are our people forced to use their vehicles—keep in mind we love our pickup trucks—but so are farmers. The member opposite went on about agriculture. We agree how terrific our farmers are, as the member for Kitchener—Conestoga pointed out so eloquently. Community farmers are price-takers and not price-makers. They will not be able to recover those carbon tax costs. I go back to the point that rural people have no option but to drive.
Going back to the cost of carbon tax, there was a report done by Chris Ragan, the chair of Canada's Ecofiscal Commission. He pointed out that Canada currently emits 700 million tonnes of emissions annually. A price of $50 per tonne placed on these emissions comes to $35 billion, and in an interview he said that this is not the most efficient model for growing the economy. He went on to say, “The best way, if you really care about economic growth, is you use the revenue from a carbon price to reduce the most growth retarding tax we have, which is a corporate income tax.”
Thirty-five billion dollars per year is the upper estimate, so it would be between $10 billion and $30 billion per year.
Again, a report from the Conference Board of Canada states that carbon pricing alone can't meet Canada's GHG reduction targets.
The government's record on the environment is absolutely appalling. It is long on rhetoric but woefully short of results. It is appalling hypocrisy. Montreal and Quebec were allowed to discharge millions of litres of sewage. What did we hear from the other side? We heard crickets. Victoria is currently dumping raw sewage. The wetlands fund and the recreational fisheries conservation partnership program were cancelled.
We ask ourselves what the outcome of the carbon tax will be. It should be a truism in environmental policy that when one does an environmental project, there is an environmental outcome. If a scrubber is put on a smokestack, SO2 is reduced. What is the outcome of the carbon tax?
When Conservatives do environmental policy, we insist on real and measurable results for environmental programs and policies. For example, when Brian Mulroney was prime minister, he negotiated the acid rain treaty. Those were very tough, tense negotiations with the Americans, but there was a clear and definite result for our environment. Our government would put in place new parks, remediate contaminated sites, restore wetland funds, and on and on, producing real results.
Given the flaws in the government's carbon tax plan and the cascading of the GST on top of the carbon tax, which will result in significant cost to Canadian families and the economy, I am very pleased to support the motion by my colleague.
