Thanks, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for coming, witnesses.
That was a good point to finish on, Mr. Bramley. I'd like to pick up on a couple of the points you've made. A few other folks have made these comments, but I want to preface my remarks, if I could, with this. We're going to have the minister join us on Thursday and present to this committee and to Canadians what we intend to do in Bali, because we have no idea. All we know is that the minister is holding a private briefing session and a meeting for some people in Bali to explore his “Turning the Corner” plan. I want to put to you, if I could, just a couple of concerns we have about the plan, which is going to be presented in the international setting.
Here is my first concern. Just today, the World Wildlife Fund, in a piece commissioned through the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the U.K., released a major report that absolutely slams the government's plan, saying there's no way it's going to achieve 20% cuts by 2020. In fact, the Government of Canada will be subsidizing the expansion of the oil sands.
The National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, which has examined the government's plans, has said the government has likely overestimated the greenhouse gas reductions or did not provide enough evidence to allow the round table to perform an analysis.
The government's own National Energy Board concluded that the government's plan is insufficient to meet the targets it sets. In fact, says the National Energy Board and a whole bunch of independent commissioners there, under two of the three scenarios laid out by the board, greenhouse gas emissions will continue to rise--increase--under the government's plan.
Deutsche Bank has said Canada is failing to participate in the international trading market and has said we will not achieve our targets. The C.D. Howe Institute doesn't believe the numbers. Pembina has produced a report that says there are at least eight gaps in the plan. This has not been denied by senior officials in the three line departments with responsibility for delivering the plan.
We could go on and on.
Today the UNDP issued a clarion call for the planet. It said that a functioning atmosphere is probably a question of human rights. It said it is a matter of social justice, and the poorest of the poor will bear an inequitable amount of the pain and suffering that is forthcoming as we adapt to climate change.
All this while the Prime Minister says at international meetings that we're going to aspire sometime in the future to absolute cuts. The thing that's particularly egregious about that for me is that he said that in Uganda, in Africa, where I spent many years. In Uganda, the annual income is $300 per person.
I want to put to you, if we're going to Bali and we're going to be sitting down with Joe Lieberman and his colleagues, with their bipartisan bill in the Senate that is very aggressive--certainly more aggressive than the plan put forward here by the government--and if we're going to be sitting down with the United Nations, the Chinese, the Indians, and rapidly emerging economies who are overtaking us in terms of emissions, does anybody on this panel really believe we're well prepared to talk to these individuals with credibility about bringing them into the fold?
Lastly, didn't the Kyoto Protocol contemplate perfectly what's happening now, that we would take these 24 months, this two-year period starting in Bali, go to the table with cleaner hands, and say to the rapidly industrializing world that we went first? We're not playing a game of chicken. We had to go first. We built our economies on the back of the atmosphere and now we're coming to you and saying, post-2012, that it's time to sign up. Are we really now in a good position to sit down, with credibility, with these 169 partners? It will soon be 171, I think, with Australia signing on next week. We'll be alone with the Republican administration in Washington, which is on the way out the door anyway. Are we well prepared here to go and sit down with credibility, given that our own plan has been completely eviscerated domestically?
Mr. Bramley, can you start?