Madam Speaker, I am honoured to rise today to speak to this issue in the House and I want to start by going back through a bit of history. I want to go back to the eighties, when I was growing up.
In the eighties, the big issue was the ozone layer. There was talk about the fact that it was thinning, that there were holes in it and that the sun's rays were causing damage. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney got together with some other countries. He brought 24 countries together, and they were able create the Montreal Protocol in 1987. That put the wheels in motion to solve this problem. He worked with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and now, if we look at the Government of Canada website, we see that ozone-depleting substances are decreasing and that it says ozone will be back to its normal state by 2050.
Around the same time, acid rain was another problem. There was literally acid falling from the sky. It was causing health problems and it was also causing problems with vegetation. Again Brian Mulroney was able to work with the U.S. president, and they made an air quality agreement that reduced the pollution that causes acid rain. Today we do not hear anything about acid rain because that problem has been solved.
During the time from Mulroney through to Prime Minister Harper, there were 10 different national parks created, including the Rouge River park in Toronto, and in 2015, Prime Minister Stephen Harper set the greenhouse gas reduction target to 30% below the 2005 levels by 2030. The common thread in all of these environmental successes is Conservative leadership. In 2006, in fact, Corporate Knights magazine named Brian Mulroney the greenest prime minister ever.
Of course, today Mr. Harper's targets have not been achieved by the Liberals. Even though they have been running the country for five years, they have not been able to move toward that. They are still many, many points away from hitting the targets that were set back then, so I will take no lessons from the Liberal government on environmental issues. They can brag about things when they have actually accomplished something for the environment.
What we need to hear is a made-in-Canada solution. I am a tall person, and that means I am good at certain things and not so good at some other things. For example, when a light bulb needs to be changed in our house, I am good at that. My wife is a shorter person, and when she needs something off the top shelf, I am very good at that. The point is that we all have strengths and we all have weaknesses, and that is true for countries also. Countries have strengths and countries have weaknesses.
What we always tell our kids is that they cannot become something that they are not. We have to be proud of who we are and use the skills and talents that we have to contribute to the world. For Canada it is a challenge, because we have higher greenhouse gas output per capita than lots of other countries, but there are reasons for that. Canada is a very big country. When a truck needs to move from Saskatoon to Nova Scotia, it is a long distance. There is a lot of energy required to do that. Flying across our country takes a lot of energy.
Canada is cold. We have to heat our homes. If we do not heat our homes, people will literally die, so it is something that we just have to do. We also produce lots of resources and lots of food, and those are very energy-intensive industries. It requires a lot of energy to produce those things, so we should not feel bad about that. It is who we are, and we should be proud of that. We should find ways—and we do find ways all the time—to utilize the skills that we have to make the world a better place.
This also translates into strengths. Our resource sector is a huge strength, and we can use those strengths to help the world. We all know that Canada has significant quantities of resources, all the different types of minerals, forestry and agricultural resources. We have lots of quantity that we can help the world with. We also have the best ethical and human rights records and laws in the world. We have the highest labour standards anywhere. We also have very high environmental standards. All of these things make our Canadian resources the best in the world.
We also used to have a very stable market-based economy, and once the Conservatives come back into power, we will make sure that we get back to that stable market-based economy that Canada is so used to.
We have a lot of technology to offer the world. We have carbon capture and storage. In my home province, that is a skill we have developed, and we lead the world in it. Canada leads the world in nuclear power. We have all kinds of advances in the agriculture sector. I worked at a company for many years that perfected zero tillage, which is a way of farming that uses less resources and keeps more carbon in the ground, making agriculture more efficient.
These are things that we have not only developed in Canada, but we have exported all around the world to help others in deal with that.
Of course, our oil and gas industry produces significant finances for our country. We are the fourth-largest producer in the world, we employ hundreds of thousands of people and billions of dollars come back to our economy and to our governments through the oil and gas industry. The challenge is to preserve our environment without sacrificing the jobs and our economy.
I like the proposed legislation, Bill C-12. The reason I like it is that it is a made-in-Canada solution to greenhouse emissions. It is far better than a carbon tax, in my view. The carbon tax penalizes farmers, business owners and people who are heating their homes. All of these people get penalized through a carbon tax. The carbon tax does not reduce demand unless the amount of the tax goes way up. Of course, we know that the government is planning to increase it to $170 a tonne, but that is not enough to make a significant difference in the consumption.
The carbon tax is based on a fundamental assumption that there are one of two possible outcomes. The first outcome is that things stay status quo and greenhouse gases continue to rise, and that causes trouble in our environment. The other outcome is that we have to make drastic changes to our lifestyle. We have to turn our thermostat temperature down from 21° to 15°. We have to get rid of anything that uses fuel. We have to make drastic changes in our lifestyle. It looks as though those are the two options we have.
However, I would suggest there is a third option. Canadians are very resilient, creative and smart, and I have a couple of examples that I want to share.
In Saskatchewan, there is a company called Gibson Energy. This company recently expanded its production capacity by 25% with a zero increase in greenhouse gases that go with it. This company found a way to increase production, yet keep greenhouse gases the same.
Right next door to my province, in Alberta, there is another company called Enhance Energy. It captures carbon from the Sturgeon Refinery and the Nutrien fertilizer facility and transports that carbon and sequesters it underground in old wells. So far, in less than 10 years, it has sequestered carbon equivalent to taking 350,000 cars off the road. This is a significant improvement and accomplishment.
What is even better is that we can take this technology and this knowledge that we have and export it around the world. We have our portion of greenhouse gases that we can affect in Canada, but if we can take our technology and leverage it by sending it around the world, we could punch above our weight. We could actually reduce greenhouse gases and help the rest of the world, which would achieve an even better result than just what we could on our own.
We can have a significant impact in the world and we can punch above our weight, and that is what Canadians do. Canadians are resilient and very smart, Canadian companies are very creative and that is where we can really make a significant difference.
As I conclude, I want to come back to a question I get a lot, which is, what would the Conservatives do?
There are two things we would do for sure. First, we would get rid of the inefficient, economic-killing carbon tax. Second, we would instead focus on made-in-Canada solutions like the Gibson Energy and Enhance Energy examples. We would allow Canadians to innovate, to be creative and to make a real, significant difference, not just in Canada but all over the world. As we export these ideas and share them with the world, we will also make the world an overall better place and help everyone reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
