Bill C-619 (Historical)

Climate Change Accountability Act

An Act to ensure Canada assumes its responsibilities in preventing dangerous climate change

The purpose of this enactment is to ensure that Canada meets its global climate change obligations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change by committing to a long-term target to reduce Canadian domestic greenhouse gas emissions to a level that is at least 80% below the 1990 level by the year 2050, and by establishing interim targets for the period 2020 to 2045. It creates an obligation for the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development to review proposed measures to meet the targets and submit a report to Parliament.

Climate Change Accountability Act

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-619, an act to ensure Canada assumes its responsibilities in preventing dangerous climate change.

Mr. Speaker, it is my great privilege to reintroduce into the House, seconded by the Leader of the Opposition, a bill originally put forward by Jack Layton, the climate change accountability act.

Every day in this place we put ideas and different visions of our future in opposition to each other, and that is fair enough. We imagine and hope for very different things on either side of this aisle. However, on this issue, at this time in our history, it must be different.

We have before us the challenge of climate change, a challenge that calls upon us to look beyond ourselves, beyond this time and place.

Arresting climate change is the world's struggle. Everybody must play their part. However, we in here must lead. To fail to do so would be a failing beyond us as politicians and ours as a political system, a failing more fundamental.

All of us are entrusted with the care of the earth we inhabit and the well-being of all those who inhabit it. We need, now, to act upon that responsibility.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)