Mr. Speaker, I am happy to rise today today to speak to Bill C-12, an act respecting transparency and accountability in Canada's efforts to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2050, as it is officially known. I like to call it the climate action accountability bill.
I really am very happy, because this is the kind of legislation I have been waiting for ever since I was elected, just over five years ago. This bill does not go far enough as far as accountability is concerned, as I will mention later, but it is a good first step. We could strengthen that with amendments when it goes to committee.
This bill requires that the Minister of Environment and Climate Change sets greenhouse gas emission targets at five-year intervals starting in 2030 and ending, of course, in 2050 with the goal of net zero. I will say right now that I think this is the bill's greatest flaw. Science tell us that the coming decade, from now until 2030, is the most critical time for action on climate change. Now is the time when we have to be bold. Now is the time when we have to make sure we are not just kicking this down the road any longer.
Why is there not a goal for 2025? The Liberals have been in power for five years and have been talking the talk about climate action all that time, yet we have gotten nowhere on emissions reductions. In five years, the least they could have figured out is where we should be by 2025. That is the number one criticism of the bill. We need a 2025 target.
We also need a truly independent climate accountability officer whose only job is to monitor government action and effect. The environmental commissioner has other important topics that should be dealt with and is underfunded already on that front.
The advisory body this bill calls for should have a real specific role in setting targets, and the targets should not be set based on what the government feels is achievable without rocking any boats. They should be targets based on science and what we must do.
Another reason I am happy that this bill is finally coming forward is that Jack Layton tabled a similar bill in 2006. That is right, 14 years ago. That bill actually passed through the House of Commons, thanks to the fact that we were in a minority government at the time. People often think of minority government as not accomplishing anything, but the fact is that most of the good lasting actions by Canadian governments have come during minority Parliaments. That is another reason why we should embrace proportional representation in our electoral system, as they do in New Zealand and many other countries, but I digress.
Unfortunately Jack's bill was killed by the Conservatives in the Senate, an all too common example of anti-democratic action by that unelected body. I witnessed the same fate when my private member's bill was killed in the Senate last year, along with many others, as a handful of Conservative senators sought to stop Romeo Saganash's bill on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Happily, I hear there is a movement to change Senate rules so that private members' bills cannot be summarily stopped by a few unelected senators, but I digress once again.
I ran for office five years ago because friends and colleagues told me they felt we needed more scientists in the House of Commons. It is indeed an honour and privilege to be here. When Canada went to the Paris talks in 2015, shortly after that election, I was proud of the commitments we made there. However, I was deeply disappointed the following spring when MPs were literally instructed by the Liberal government to go back to their ridings to find out what we should do to meet those Paris targets.
We knew what we had to do. We had a long list of necessary actions to decarbonize our energy systems, electrify our transportation, retrofit our buildings to become energy efficient, and on and on. We knew we had precious little time to do it. Instead, we were told to spend six months or more talking to our constituents. I did that. I held town halls on climate change. The overwhelming message at those town halls was that we have to get on to it. People wanted to know why we were asking them, because we knew what we had to do and that we should just do our job.
I will not go into the litany of past commitments and broken promises by both Liberal and Conservative governments on climate action. It is clear that even the best intentions are stifled when the going gets tough. What the Liberal government did commit to at Paris was to use the old Harper climate target of bringing emissions down to 511 megatonnes by 2030. When it made that commitment, our emissions were at 720 megatonnes. By 2018, three years later, they had risen to 729 megatonnes. We are going in the wrong direction.
The Conservatives often give the excuse that Canada should not act on climate change, because we are a small country when it comes to population and there are much bigger contributors to global emissions.
The fact is we are the worst emitter on a per capita basis, and the rest of the world notices what Canada does or does not do.
A couple of years ago, I travelled to Argentina with the then Minister of Natural Resources for a G20 meeting on energy. The topic was energy transitions toward a cleaner, more flexible and transparent system. I was impressed by the presentations from countries such as Germany, Japan, the U.K. and China. They talked about bold action over the coming decade.
The U.K. minister, in particular, had a memorable way of summarizing his country's actions. First, was “walk the walk”, meaning legislate the targets and have accountability. At last we have something like that here. Second was, “put your money where your mouth is” and make significant investments now in clean energy transition. Finally was, “have your cake and eat it too”, meaning reap the benefits of the good jobs that are created by those investments.
What did Canada say at that meeting? Our Minister of Natural Resources stood up and said that they probably heard we just bought a pipeline, and spent the rest of his time explaining why that was necessary, in some Orwellian way. One could almost hear the face-palms in the room. The only thing that kept us from being at the bottom of the heap in that G20 meeting was the fact that the Americans were there, talking about clean coal.
We found out this week, from the Canada Energy Regulator, of all places, that those pipelines, the Trans Mountain expansion, will not be necessary; nor will Keystone XL. It turns out that if we are serious about meeting our climate targets, which this legislation would signal we are, we will not need either of those projects to handle oil exports.
There are many things in this bill that I like, beyond the fact that the government is admitting that politicians are bad at keeping promises without some external body looking over their shoulder and carrying some sort of stick. The Liberals are acknowledging in print that we must limit global temperature increase to 1.5°C, and that we are almost there so we have to work fast. The bill does reference the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the first step we must take in any transition to a clean energy future.
The Prime Minister recently said of the lack of a 2025 target, “ultimately the accountability for government's actions or inactions is from Canadians themselves”. These are not the words of a climate leader. They are the words of a climate follower.
We will support this bill at second reading, but the Liberals must work with us to strengthen the accountability provisions by creating a 2025 target and a more independent commissioner dedicated to this job. Canadians expect nothing less than this, and not just Canadians. Let us remember that the world is watching and expecting Canada to do the right thing. My granddaughter in New Zealand will thank us.
