Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to respond directly to the parliamentary secretary's comments.
First, he said this bill would bind Canada, and once it bound Canada to IPCC targets, it would run in contradistinction or against the government's own Turning the Corner plan. Well, in fact the government is already in breach of the existing international treaty obligations and has unilaterally decided not to be bound in its domestic plan, called the Turning the Corner plan, which, by the way, has never been subject to any kind of legislation or a vote in the House of Commons. It has unilaterally decided to be in breach of the existing legal standard. That's number one.
So the concerns the parliamentary secretary has for binding heirs and successor governments and having them compelled to have to live up to the standards set by an international body are not true. His own government has given plenty of evidence to Canadians that their domestic governments, including this government, particularly this government, have in fact unilaterally abandoned those standards.
Secondly, the parliamentary secretary continues along message track lines to foist untruths on the Canadian people about whether or not annex 2 countries, developing countries, are in or out of the international treaty. This is false. It's a patent falsehood that continues to be repeated ad nauseam by the government. There are 172 countries that have signed on to the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol and attachments thereto. All of them have in one fashion or another--this is directly on point to the parliamentary secretary's remarks, unless I'm missing something--agreed to common but differentiated responses to the climate change crisis in different timelines.
Our own minister, your minister, went to Bali to launch the two-year negotiation round as contemplated perfectly in the Kyoto Protocol to bring annex 2 countries like India and China and others inside the tent, so that by 2012 they would have hard targets like the 36 annex 1 countries that are first off the mark.
It is not fair, it is not right to continue to repeat fundamental mistruths about the Kyoto Protocol to the Canadian people, and I really would ask respectfully of the parliamentary secretary that he not do that, because it's not true.