Bill C-232 (Historical)

Climate Emergency Action Act

An Act respecting a Climate Emergency Action Framework

This enactment provides for the development and implementation of a climate emergency action framework.

Climate Emergency Action Act

[Monique Pauzé, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

Madam Speaker, we have had three bills introduced in the same session on achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, which I think sends a powerful message about how we need to do what is necessary to reach that goal.

The time has come to take decisive action to combat climate change. Canada needs climate change legislation that is rooted in the principles of good governance, guided by transparency, accountability, equity and, most importantly, science.

I commend and thank the member for Winnipeg Centre for this bill. I also appreciate the references to indigenous nations and the consideration given to indigenous knowledge. For example, we can learn a lot from New Zealand's experience of considering indigenous knowledge and incorporating the Maori people's good governance of the ocean into its policies. Government stakeholders worked in conjunction with Maori organizations and partners to develop the seven principles for ecosystem-based management for this shared governance.

I will now get back to Canada and the importance of protecting biodiversity in our fight against climate change. I cannot resist saying a few words about the large number of programs for indigenous peoples that involve promoting and developing projects that pollute and harm the environment instead of focusing on forward-looking and innovative plans for the future.

Relations between the Crown and Canada's first nations are a topical issue. Reconciliation is a profound and vital act. In order to achieve it, we must listen to first nations' environmental concerns and welcome their contributions. Nothing productive will come of always portraying their environmental concerns as those of opponents.

We recognize that indigenous peoples' knowledge of the land is extremely relevant in managing ecosystems and protecting biodiversity. In that regard, we must not just integrate the indigenous fact into a climate law for aesthetic reasons in order to ease our conscience. The intention must be firm and sincere. Experts have done a great deal of work, but unfortunately it has not translated into political action or legal commitments. The government could start by providing access to safe drinking water.

That being said, the Bloc Québécois agrees with the principles and objectives set out in Bill C-232. Just today, March 11, 2021, Quebec began honouring the victims of COVID-19, but let us look at what has happened over the past year.

Unfortunately, over the past year, the government has done a lot to help the fossil fuel industry, rather than to fight climate change.

According to the International Institute for Sustainable Development's 2020 report, subsidies for fossil fuels neared $5 billion.

The government made promises during the election campaign and once it was in power, but it has not acted on those promises. Whatever happened to the modernization of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act? What about the two billion trees that are supposed to be planted? What have they done to intensify climate action? What is their plan to end government support for the fossil fuel sector?

The Bloc Québécois has always taken a strong stance on environmental protection and the fight against climate change and what must be done to reverse Canada's unfortunate trajectory. Why not show the people that their elected representatives are committed to fighting climate change by being honest about the facts and pragmatic about the solutions available to us? Does Canada not want to preserve what is left of its international reputation for its efforts to fight climate change?

Every economy around the world is struggling, and everything has been disrupted, but many countries are responding with determination and resilience. The Canadian government should pay close attention to countries that are making progress.

It will certainly be crucial for the current and future governments not to drag their feet. In the challenge we are facing, maintaining the status quo would actually be a step backwards. What we really need is to leap ahead.

That is why bills introduced by the opposition parties must be taken into consideration. In that sense, Bill C-232, much like its companion legislation, Bill C-215 introduced by the Bloc Québécois, would benefit just as much from being improved if it is to be considered a legislative framework. Bill C-232 falls somewhere in between, since it is neither an action plan nor a proposed legislative framework. It is a halfway point and needs to be completed. I say that as a point of constructive feedback.

Here are some examples of the clarifications needed.

Clause 4 states that the minister must develop an action framework in consultation with indigenous peoples and civil society. Providing for that kind of consultation is appropriate, but the details of that need to be specified. Public consultation should be supplementary to the consideration of expert opinions. It should include elements that are ultimately incorporated into framework climate legislation.

Dedicating a section to targets is good. The strength of the bill is that it includes the target, specifies it and clearly states that meeting the target is mandatory. It should also clearly outline the policies it proposes, and they must correspond to the area of federal jurisdiction and not that of the provinces. Environmental policy is largely the responsibility of the provincial governments, and successfully fighting climate change depends in large part on the policies of and actions taken by Quebec and the provinces.

Measures for transitioning to a green economy also need to be incorporated. The Bloc Québécois's green and fair recovery plan can be used as a model. I want to be positive and give members something to think about by raising the experience of the United Kingdom, which is garnering a lot of attention, and rightly so. The success of its climate legislation is measurable, and the outcomes have been analyzed. I want to share with my colleagues some important observations.

The success of the United Kingdom's climate change act has been attributed to several factors. However, experts have emphasized the benefits of including the action plan within the text of the legislation. Why? Because doing so lends legitimacy to the act, makes it easier to understand and increases the support of civil society, economic and social stakeholders, and political actors at all levels. That is what ensures long-term stability. The legislation thus becomes permanent and there is less risk of backtracking at the whim of successive governments.

To critics of such an approach who may fear that it would weaken the legislator's prerogatives, I will point out that it is possible to strike a balance between policy directions and the different levels of precision or flexibility of a plan. The United Kingdom has done it, and has even inspired other states to try to do the same.

A recent poll was done of people, mostly elected officials, who were involved in the legislative process. They acknowledged that the U.K. climate change committee owed its success to its independence. They noted that having directions and recommendations from a pool of experts on every legislative aspect contributed to a political consensus. Why? Because the work was done by independent voices and that makes it credible. The elected members found that what had been communicated allowed them to better understand the issues and come up with better solutions. They added that once impartiality was established and in the absence of political or other interests, collaboration and consensus followed.

The United Kingdom has seen its greenhouse gas emissions drop by 28% since 2010, while securing economic growth of nearly 19%. During the same period, Canada had similar results in economic growth, but saw its emissions increase by 3%.

Several observations can be made to show that Canada's climate governance is not working. A healthy climate governance, one that works and is proven to meet targets, requires projects to be assessed annually. Second, the government needs to be required to table a response to the annual report. Third, the interim objectives have to be set long in advance. Finally, the recommendations have to be evidence-based.

In closing, I want to say that, in a spirit of co-operation and working for the common good, a climate law needs to be ambitious. What is more, the government must not ignore what the opposition parties are saying. Let us get motivated. We will get there.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Madam Speaker, it is an honour to rise today in support of Bill C-232. It is not lost on me that in the crisis of this global pandemic, perhaps the crisis of climate change has been lost. I have deep gratitude for my caucus colleague for Winnipeg Centre. She has recentred the conversation on catastrophic climate change and the impacts it is going to have, undoubtedly, on society in the years very soon to come.

The thought of guaranteeing Canadians a clean, safe, healthy environment as a human right seems so simple, yet time and again in the House we hear rhetoric from both sides, with consecutive Liberal and Conservative governments debating the merits of climate change. Time is running out. We know that. The youth across this country are telling us clearly that time is running out. Indigenous communities across this country are telling us clearly that time is running out, yet we hear from the Liberals a refusal to hear the calls from our youth.

I stand here today in the House of Commons a mere couple of feet away from what happened on October 28, 2019. A group of youth were arrested for occupying this space under the “Our Time” banner, recognizing that their futures were being gambled with by policies that were not meeting the size, scale and scope of this catastrophe.

We have heard about Bill C-12 here today. The Liberal government refuses to honour its commitments, legal frameworks and international agreements centred on consultation with indigenous communities. All levels of government are guilty of this. All parties have been guilty of this.

I am here today for those youth who were here, putting everything on the line for their futures. I am here today for the indigenous youth who led the protest at the B.C. legislature in support of the land defenders there. If we do not have a clear consultative framework that centres on our obligations to indigenous people across this country, then we know we are not meeting our obligations and our moral imperatives on the agreements that we profess to sign on to in the House. The idea of a right, for those living in Canada, to a safe, clean and healthy environment seems so simple, yet there has been only talk and no action. It is a dream deferred to a future date. We do not have the time.

The science at the interparliamentary committee on climate change has been clear. We have an opportunity right now, in this moment, to change course. If we do not do that, the cost will be far too great. If we do not intervene right now in these critical years, the impacts of catastrophic climate change will become irreversible. We have an obligation to future generations of the world. We have mortgaged their futures on a short-term extractory capitalist system that seeks to squeeze the lifeblood out of our natural resources and our earth.

I am deeply grateful to my hon. colleague for Winnipeg Centre for providing the House with the leadership and the framework to ensure that we have critical consultations in place, and that we meet our United Nations obligations on climate change. The government continues to commit to targets it has no real intention of keeping. It misses them again and again, and we are running out of time.

I am here today for the Water Walkers, and I think about the people who are leading the struggle locally in my city: Indigenous women who honour nibi, the water, and know that they, under the leadership of Grandma Josephine, walk the shorelines. I learned from their teaching that we should be granting our water, nature and air the same rights as we grant the corporations that have been polluting with impunity for far too long.

The idea that we can solve this by 2050 is too late. I have to share with the House the impacts, atrocities and environmental degradation of this planet. I feel that, when future generations look back at us in the House, they will know that we had a chance to do something different. They will read this bill and know that the opportunity was before us, yet it was not supported. It was not taken seriously, and the commitments were pushed down another 20 years.

By that time it will be too late, but the truth is becoming abundantly clear. The corporations that continue to degrade and pollute our world are going to be held to account. I will share with the House another thought. Maybe in the future, when they look at the size and scale of the impending wildfires and floods, and the ongoing diseases unleashed in pandemics, they might meet internationally and convene for real truth and reconciliation globally on climate change, like the Nuremberg trials.

These companies know the impacts and they know the science, yet they spend all of their time and their money to silence activists' voices and silence the science. It is clear that if we do not rise to this moment right now, we are in a significant, dire catastrophe. Climate change is threatening absolutely everything that we value.

We know that extreme weather is worsening, and that the resilience of our communities is constantly under threat. The future of our children and grandchildren depends on our actions here today. Globally we are being left behind, because other countries have a clear plan. They are sticking to their commitments. They know that we have to meet this plan by 2030. Bill C-12 does not do that.

I have sat in the House and listened to Liberals and Conservatives boast, brag and debate about how many pipelines they can build and buy, and how much they can continue to extract. I have been in the House when we have debated the failures of these successive governments to have meaningful, free, prior and informed consent in the legal fiction that is Canada. In unceded territories we have a legal obligation to deal with the rights holders of these lands, and indigenous rights in this country are inherently tied to land rights.

We have a strong, brilliant indigenous woman who has come to us with a private member's bill that lays out, as they have already identified, commitments they have already made. They talk about consultation, when the hon. member for Winnipeg Centre stresses that there can be no reconciliation absent of justice. To vote down this bill today would be a clear signal that the government is not committed to its obligations, because these are frameworks that are already clearly laid out.

Anything short of supporting this, and any conversation about kicking this obligation another 20 years down the line, will be remembered by the young people who were arrested here, the young people who were arrested on the steps of the legislature in B.C., and the young people who take to the streets for Fridays for Future. They are watching. The question is, when this is done, when this vote is over and when our time here in the House is finished, what are members of the House going to tell them? What are they going to have to say?

We will be supporting this bill. I will be able to look my son in his eyes and let him know that we did everything we could to stop this.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Hamilton Centre for his powerful words. I also want to begin by thanking our colleague from Winnipeg Centre for bringing forward this bill, which makes such an important contribution to a conversation about an issue that many of us feel is the most critical issue facing not just our country, but our planet.

I want to acknowledge that I am speaking today from the unceded lands of the Wet'suwet'en people here in my home community of Smithers, British Columbia. It is such an honour to speak to this bill at this juncture in time when we are searching for answers so desperately. After decades and decades of knowing about the severity of the climate crisis and after so many false starts, the sad fact is that, as a country, we are failing. All of our actions over all of that time have had so little impact.

I started becoming concerned about the climate crisis as a teenager. Now I am old enough to have teenagers of my own, yet so little has been done. Time and time again, we have made commitments, and set targets, timelines, and dates. Time and time again, we have failed to act in a concerted and consistent enough manner to realize the goals we have made for ourselves.

What Canada has shown is a commitment to building and expanding the fossil fuel infrastructure of this country. This has erased so much of the progress we have made through things like energy efficiency and clean energy production. With so little time left on the clock, we are still searching for ways to mobilize our government and fight the climate crisis, this climate emergency, with the seriousness and dedication it demands from us.

Canadians, especially young Canadians, and my colleague spoke so eloquently to this, want some mechanisms to break this pattern of complacency and apathy. They want to hold today's decision-makers to account for their promises, not at some distant date well outside the time horizons of our political process, elections and political calculuses, or the investment horizons of the private sector. After decades of failure, we know that does not work. What Canadians want is regular, binding, short-term and enforceable accountability measures that hold today's leaders to account.

This bill before us, Bill C-232, has a number of strengths. To me, its greatest strength and most important contribution is that it centres our work on the climate crisis and it centres in that work the rights of indigenous people. This is such an important thing to bear in mind and keep at the centre as we go forward together.

It was good to see in the government's own accountability legislation, for all of its flaws, a passing reference to the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. By comparison though, Bill C-232 calls not only for the full involvement of indigenous people in the creation of a climate emergency action framework, but it also calls for the Minister of Environment and Climate Change to ensure that the framework upholds all of the provisions of the U.N. declaration and that it specifically takes into account indigenous knowledge and science.

Reading this bill and reading, in particular, the clauses around the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People made me think of all the indigenous nations in northwest B.C., this incredible part of our country that I am so deeply honoured to represent in this House. Indigenous people in northwest B.C. are on the frontline of climate impacts and the changing climate is affecting so many aspects of their daily lives.

Thinking about our environment and thinking about the resources and goods produced by this bountiful place, there are few species that are more iconic than wild salmon. All five species of wild salmon swim up our rivers from the ocean every single year. In the fall, if someone goes on social media, they will see so many photos of smiling people processing salmon, drying salmon, smoking salmon, sharing recipes, and sharing techniques and traditions that have been handed down generation after generation.

It is at the very centre of the way of life in northwest B.C. However, with warming ocean waters and ocean acidification, the introduction of invasive species and droughts affecting spawning channels, things are looking very precarious for this iconic species.

I spoke today to Walter Joseph, the fisheries manager at the office of the Wet'suwet'en, and he spoke about the challenges in the tributaries where the salmon spawn, but what really has Walter worried, is what is happening in the ocean. He described the ocean as a black box. When the salmon go out to the ocean we do not know what happens. What we do know is that, for so many wild salmon stocks, the numbers are declining every single year, and we know that climate is having a huge impact on that.

On Haida Gwaii, we have seen tremendous die-offs in the yellow cedar, a tree species that is so critical to the Haida people. We know from work done by the University of British Columbia that this is a direct result of low winter precipitation and warmer temperatures. A team from the University of Victoria also found that sea level rise on Haida Gwaii is greater than anywhere else along our coast.

In the eastern part of our region we have seen the mountain pine beetle ravage our forests. We have seen years with extreme wildfires and 2018 was one of the worst years on record for wildfires. It left thousands upon thousands of hectares scorched. It left communities evacuated. It burned buildings from Fort St. James and Burns Lake all the way to Telegraph Creek in the northern part of this beautiful region.

Speaking of Telegraph Creek, I wanted to call to mind a young fellow who is really remarkable. His name is Montay Beaubien-Day. He is a 13-year-old member of the Tahltan and the Wet'suwet'en nations. When Monty saw his family's ranch in Telegraph Creek burn in the massive wildfires of 2018, it inspired him to join with other young people, such as Haana Edenshaw from the Haida nation and 13 others from across the country in a lawsuit against the Government of Canada for failing to attack the climate emergency.

At the heart of that suit brought forward by these young people is a deep-seated frustration with Canada's inaction on the climate emergency. The plaintiffs went to court because they wanted this country to be accountable for its promises and to take responsibility for the future it is handing their generation. How did we get to the point where our children, the young generation, has to take the country to court to ensure that they inherit a basic semblance of a livable future?

Indigenous communities are not just on the front lines of climate change when it comes to impacts, but when it comes to solutions as well. I have been so inspired by the work done by the Heiltsuk's climate action team on the central coast led by climate action coordinator. They are engaging residents and creating a community energy plan grounded in the Heiltsuk community's needs. Their plan is to reduce dependency on fossil fuels, bring the community back in line with Heiltsuk values and laws, improve the health and safety and create a green economy for the Heiltsuk people. Their aim is to have 129 heat pumps installed by the end of March. They are for almost one-third of the homes in their community and they will reduce emissions by as much as five tonnes per household.

I think of the Nuxalk Nation, which is also on the central coast. Their clean energy initiative is focused on building a run of the river hydro project which will be able to reduce the Bella Coola Valley's diesel consumption by up to 80%. On Haida Gwaii, the Swiilawiid Sustainability Society is engaging island residents, especially youth, in a conversation about a clean energy future.

I spoke with chief councillor of Skidegate, Billy Yovanovich, a couple of summers ago. His community has installed 350 heat pumps. The Haida are leading in so many other ways. Many of these communities are working hard to take action on climate change and these are not big communities. They are not metropolitan centres.

These are small villages, many of them with only a few hundred residents, yet they understand inherently that they have a responsibility to be a part of the solution. They are taking responsibility for their part of the challenge, and Canada needs to have their backs. The impacts we are seeing will not slow without our country also taking responsibility and doing its share. The sad truth—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

Resuming debate, the hon. member for Courtenay—Alberni.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Madam Speaker, it is truly an honour and a pleasure to rise today to speak in support of Bill C-232, an act respecting a climate emergency action framework. This bill, which has been tabled by my good friend and colleague from Winnipeg Centre, is such an important bill, and I want to thank her at the outset for her important work in standing up not just for indigenous peoples but for all Canadians and their right to have a clean, safe and healthy environment.

This bill would provide a critical framework, which is lacking right now, for a transformative climate action policy. It is framed around a green new deal that would make sure that all climate action initiatives would comply with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, as well as ensure the right of all those living in Canada to have a safe, clean and healthy environment and that we will uphold our responsibilities to future generations. This bill provides for the development of a framework that we desperately need when it comes to climate action.

We know that the Government of Canada has failed to meet every single climate target it has put out. In fact, as the government tabled recent legislation, it also failed to give people the confidence it is going to deliver a plan in a timely fashion. This is based on the fact that we are not even going to see a progress report on how we are doing until 2028 and that there is no milestone target for 2025.

We heard from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2018 that we had only 12 years to reduce emissions to pre-2010 levels, meaning a reduction of over 40% by 2030, yet the Government of Canada still has no plan and has not included indigenous people.

This bill is absolutely critical as an accountability tool for those who are most impacted by climate change. It explicitly outlines the importance of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to Canada's climate response and it would require the government to consult meaningfully with indigenous peoples and communities and civil society.

Canadians are exhausted. They are tired of governments committing to targets like the ones I cited earlier and then missing them again and again. We are running out of time.

I want to talk a bit about what is happening in my riding and the impact climate change is having on indigenous peoples in the communities I represent.

In three of the last five years, we have had record floods that have impacted wild salmon, of course, and impacted the communities of the Tseshaht people and the K'Omoks First Nation, with both the Somass and the Puntledge rivers breaching.

We had a drought in 2014, and then it rained just in time in August. We were afraid we were going to lose all our wild salmon, which is a critical food source for indigenous people, and it is not just food security; their culture is centred around it, and of course their economy. Wild salmon is critical to their survival and who they are. Where I live, the Nuu-chah-nulth are salmon people, so this is very important to indigenous peoples, who are going to be most impacted by climate change.

We saw the acidification in Baynes Sound, which impacted the Qualicum people and their food security with the shellfish they rely on. My good friend Chief Moses Martin, from the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, often talks about the importance of investing in restoration, in science and indigenous knowledge, of listening to indigenous knowledge, but he cites that the most urgent pressure right now on wild salmon is the warming of oceans due to climate change.

We know our oceans are a carbon sink and that 90% of carbon right now is being stored in our oceans, which are warming right now and making things more difficult. In fact, Humboldt squid, which is normally from California, landed on our shores in Tofino just a few years ago. It is mind-blowing to see the kinds of shifts that are occurring because of climate change. Of course, there are also the wildfires we have seen throughout British Columbia.

Youth are coming forward urging us for changes. We have all been on marches with youth against the impacts of climate change and them demanding action. We cannot wait. We heard from my colleague from Skeena—Bulkley Valley about the impact this is having on the children in his riding, and on my children.

I was really inspired by Ben Mason and Lister de Vitré, who live in my riding in Cumberland, British Columbia. They have been going around the community, to the Cumberland council, to the local legion and to local groups talking about new ways for economic growth, social responsibility and environmental safety. They are asking for a green new deal centred around indigenous values and knowledge. They want to see emissions cut by half by 2030, but right now we do not have the framework in place to do that.

As Ben Mason said, doing nothing is not an option. The way the government is moving forward without a plan and without the framework in place being proposed by my good friend and colleague from Winnipeg Centre, we are abandoning that generation. This is absolutely unacceptable, because doing nothing cannot be an option for them. We are their voice. We are responsible for their future.

I know there has been a lot of discussion about the cost of investing in climate change. I think about my good friend, the late chief of Hesquiaht, Richard Lucas, who fought so hard to get his nation off of diesel energy and get a hydro project into his community so it could do its part when it came to climate change. However, it also makes economic sense in the long term. We need to continue to listen to indigenous people in our communities who have the knowledge and the wherewithal to get us there.

Members have heard me speak repeatedly in the House about the cost and impacts of climate change. When I started as a member of Parliament, climate impacts were costing the Canadian government about $900 million a year. Now it is over $5 billion in not even six years. The PBO projects we will be running climate emergency costs between $21 billion and $43 billion by 2050. Therefore, spending money right now, supporting indigenous communities and bringing everyone together under a framework to tackle climate change makes economic sense as well.

I share this with the House as the critic for economic development for the federal NDP because it makes economic sense to do that. We cannot leave people behind. We know indigenous people are constantly being left behind. This is the opportunity for us to not only walk together, but to centre our framework and our plan around indigenous people.

I think about my friend Carol Anne Hilton, who is the founder of the Indigenomics Institute. We need to listen to the wisdom of indigenous women, who have ideas on how we can move forward when it comes to climate change and working with indigenous peoples. We need a plan that honours our international commitments and obligations to address this climate emergency. We owe this to our youth. We need a just transition to a green economy that brings workers along, moves away from fossil fuel subsidies and invests instead in a green economy.

Our party has been fighting for this for a long time. I think about the late Jack Layton and his climate accountability bill that he tabled back in 2006. We are ready to work with the government and the Senate to pass this bill now, to take the action that is absolutely necessary.

Canada is being left behind as many countries are moving forward, even right-leaning governments such as in Britain, Germany and Japan. They understand the economic opportunity as well. We need to do this, ensuring we do it with indigenous peoples and respecting them under the framework among others. The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples must be at the centre of our plan. Right now we have no plan. We need this plan to be in place. We need the government to follow its words with respect to supporting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

This is the government's opportunity to engage in meaningful consultation with indigenous peoples and accommodate the concerns raised across Canada, including its failure to obtain free prior and informed consent. This has to be addressed.

Once again, I thank my colleague.

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Madam Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleagues, particularly from the New Democratic Party, whose wisdom and power today pierce my heart and gives me hope.

It is my pleasure to speak on my private member's, Bill C-232, the climate emergency action act.

We have international commitments to fight the climate emergency and to uphold human rights. This includes the UN Convention on Climate Change, the Paris agreement and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Bill C-232 would uphold these international agreements and would recognize the right of all Canadians to a safe, clean, healthy environment as a human right.

More than 100 countries in the world have recognized the human right to a safe, clean, healthy environment in their legislation and/or constitution. Instead of building more pipelines and investing in companies around the world that violate indigenous rights and hurt Mother Earth, it is time for Canada to follow their lead.

I know many people in the House will shamefully vote against this legislation at a time when we are in the middle of a climate crisis, and we see violent attacks on our Mother Earth. Everything we value is at risk.

Exploitive resource extraction companies continue to contribute to the ongoing genocide and an epidemic of murdered and missing indigenous women and girls, as noted in the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

The exploitation of our Mother Earth continues to violate the fundamental rights of indigenous peoples and all peoples across these lands we now call Canada.

Indigenous communities and nations continue to be denied the right to traditional land-based practices, the use and management of their own territories, while other human rights to housing, clean drinking water and health go unmet.

Even the Canadian Paediatric Society is raising the issue of climate anxiety being experienced by young people, who are the front lines, fighting to save our earth.

The government introduced Bill C-12, but it is not nearly good enough. In fact, it is a slap in the face to science and will not allow us to meet climate targets.

Bill C-232 proposes a framework for developing a made-in-Canada plan to address the ever-more pressing climate emergency, while it offers a clear strategy for kick-starting our country's green economic transition and rapidly reducing our emissions, while also leveraging this moment as an opportunity to right the wrongs of our colonial past and address violence faced by BIPOC communities in our country.

Despite the opportunity that we have before us, I sense that most members here today will vote no to Bill C-232. Before they do that, I hope they will consider what is at stake: every single thing we know and value; our Mother Earth; our health and wellness, and even the existence of future generations; our air quality; our oceans and coasts; water and food security; more fires, hurricanes and droughts; the further displacement of indigenous peoples, BIPOC and coastal communities; and even an increase in future pandemics. To turn down this opportunity in the middle of a climate crisis and at a time when we need to plan for post-pandemic economic rebuilding is shameful.

I ask the members of the House to think about how history will remember us in relation to this legislation. The science is clear about the actions we must take right now to avoid the worst impacts of a runaway climate crisis. This must be done while respecting the human rights of indigenous peoples and all peoples of the world.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

The question is on the motion.

If a member of a recognized party present in the House wishes to request a recorded division or that the motion be adopted on division, I invite them to rise and indicate it to the Chair.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Madam Speaker, I respectfully request a recorded division on my colleague's bill, Bill C-232.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

Pursuant to an order made on Monday, January 25, the division stands deferred until Wednesday, March 24, at the expiry of the time provided for Oral Questions.