Environment committee  First of all, I think it's extremely misleading what you said in your preamble, because Bill C-377 says nothing about how the efforts would be distributed between provinces. So it is absolutely false.

Environment committee  It's absolutely false to draw any conclusions about provincial burdens on one province or another.

Environment committee  Mr. Vellacott, there is absolutely nothing in this bill that talks about how the burden or how the responsibility would be distributed.

Environment committee  At the very end of the year.

Environment committee  I don't remember any specific meetings or interaction with the government of the day about the report, but I think we were almost into the election campaign at the time of the release, November 23, 2005.

Environment committee  No.

Environment committee  Well, I won't comment further on the different criticisms there have been of Canada. I think you've all seen that in the media. One way the government could approach this is to say that the targets and policies we've advanced to now are a starting point. They're what we're willing to do unilaterally, whatever happens.

Environment committee  It's not fair to say it's unanimous. It's a target, actually, that the European Union adopted as long ago as 1996, over 10 years ago, so this has been around for a long time. What really struck me in the last little while is that leading climate scientists who used to be very cautious about stating an opinion on what would be dangerous climate change--because that does involve not just scientific evidence but also a value judgment--are now coming forward in substantial numbers.

Environment committee  There has been a lot of new science on climate change. By and large, it has been very much pushing in the direction of raising our level of alarm, raising the sense of urgency that we should have, and it is a fact that the IPCC fourth assessment report, third volume, which came out this year, did confirm those numbers that we ended up concluding, the numbers for the Canadian reductions that we think we need to see by 2020 and 2050, the numbers we put in our report.

Environment committee  Yes.

Environment committee  I think that it is crucial for the whole world to aim at stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that will meet the objective of the framework agreement, in order to prevent dangerous climatic changes.

Environment committee  In the documents that the government has published, there is reference surrounding the government's 2020 target for Canada's emissions. There is reference to preliminary economic analysis, but there are very few details given. I think it's a very interesting question to see whether the government would like to table, publicly, an economic analysis that explains to us why 20% below 2006 by 2020 is the correct target, why that particular target was chosen, and why we couldn't do more, because I haven't seen any such analysis.

Environment committee  I don't believe that any government of Canada to date has yet proposed or committed to greenhouse gas targets based on science. Speaking to the targets that the present government has laid out for Canada's emissions by 2020 and 2050, there are no public documents, to my knowledge, that the government has put out that explain where those targets came from.

Environment committee  Thank you. Good afternoon, and thank you for having me again. I'd like to start by congratulating Mr. Layton for his leadership and his vision in introducing this bill. To my knowledge, it's the first attempt to ensure that Canada is legally required to do its fair share toward the prevention of dangerous climate change, which is the ultimate objective of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which has been ratified by almost every country in the world.

Environment committee  In the IPCC reports from this year, the IPCC makes recommendations on the amount of reductions in global emissions to get to certain temperature ranges, for example. And then there is modelling that disaggregates that into developed countries, different categories of developing countries, so you have to go and look in the details of that modelling to see exactly what the trajectory would be.