Thank you, Mr. Chair.
This is an amendment that seeks to rename the short title of the act. Now that we look at the bill in its new form, we think it's important to build on the work of all parliamentarians of this committee and rename it as “Canada's Carbon Budget, Climate Change Action and Air Quality Act”.
We think it reflects the desire of all parliamentarians at this table to move aggressively on climate change. We have now built an operable plan into Bill C-30. It's workable, implementable, and understandable. It provides for emissions trading internationally. It has capped the total percentage of international credits. It has ruled out hot air purchases, very much as a result of the government's concern and our concern.
Most importantly, it takes Canada into the 21st century because it starts to speak about carbon as a form of budget. The single greatest threshold we have to cross as a nation-state to deal with climate change is to monetize carbon. It is the single greatest market correction that must be made. Hence, we have introduced the notion of carbon budget into this bill, and hopefully into Canadian society.
Not only does it reflect a carbon budget; it also reflects, as my colleague said a moment ago, sectoral carbon budgets. It reflects individual carbon budgets and treats carbon as a monetized asset. It reflects it for what it is: something with value attached. Until we actually monetize carbon we will continue to treat the atmosphere as a free dumping ground and receptacle for greenhouse gases and other pollutants. Science has taught us most of all that it is the equivalent of playing Russian roulette with the atmosphere, and Canadians don't want us to do that.
So we'd like to see the short name of this act reflect the carbon budget, because it talks about what we can do and not simply what we can't do. It tells us we can deal with the carbon deficit, for example, the way we dealt with the fiscal deficit in this country in the 1990s as a people, when we wrestled to the ground the fiscal trouble we were in and went on to make great strides.
In closing, on moving this amendment I would quote from a document recently published. Here's the quote:
Let them say that we never settled for second best. That we had the conviction to make the right choices. Let them say we had the courage, the commitment and the confidence to bring Canada to its rightful place on the world stage
We think renaming this act accordingly would be helpful, because—