First, thank you for having me here.
Like the rest of the panel members, I strongly believe that Canada has an important role to play and that we must move quickly to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. I do not, however, recommend the passage of Bill C-311. Bill C-311 is yet another target-setting exercise with no plan. I think that the editorial in The Globe and Mail got it correct this morning.
I'd like to remind you about Canada's traditional process for ratifying international treaties, to which the Kyoto Protocol stands as an exception. Typically, we develop our own domestic sense of priorities to address an environmental or economic issue. When we've identified our objectives and decided to pursue them in an international partnership, for competitiveness reasons, we tend to present our case in treaty language. We find some other parties. We negotiate a treaty that we sign. Then we come home and implement domestic legislation and regulations. Typically, we find that living with our first pass at the regulations isn't so comfortable and we amend them. Maybe we do it a third time. After we've lived with our legislation and regulations long enough to think we have it right, and our treaty partners have been through the same experience, we go back to the table, amend the original treaty language, and ratify it. That's what we did for the Law of the Sea, and that's why the elapsed time between signing the treaty and ratifying it was 11 years. That's normal history; that's not unusual history.
We in Canada signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol in a very short time without developing any implementation plan. Bill C-311 is enunciating yet another target. We're spending a lot of resources talking about targets, and we haven't even started to contemplate what an implementation plan would look like. If we were to stick with our historical successful experience, we would be asking a number of conventional questions: What regulations? Who is being affected? Who is changing behaviour and why? What are the implications of all this?
I'm going to tell you something quite different from what you will read in the Pembina report. I work largely for the private sector but also for NGO clients and three provincial governments. My job as a consultant is to develop policy and regulatory recommendations. I think I do my job well. I have been working on climate change for 15 years, and it's the biggest issue of the day for me. What's the reality? The reality is that 80% of the reported large industrial emitter emissions, 67% of all industry emissions including those that are not reported at a facility level, and 30% of all national emissions originate in plants that are located in 30 communities.
I have a presentation for you, nicely locked up in a hotel, and I'm going to e-mail it to the clerk right after this report.
We're talking 30 communities. That's your ghost town list. How do you stop that from being your ghost town list? It's not a whole country. It's not nicely spread all over the place. You can't go to Sydney—Victoria, to Mr. Blake Richards's riding and say that it's okay, his constituents can keep their jobs if they spend $40 a tonne building wind farms in China. In Blake's community, do you know what $40 a tonne is to keep their jobs? It's over $4,000 per man, woman, and child in the riding. There are 30 communities for which $40 a tonne to restructure the plants or buy offsets from China comes to over $400 a tonne per man, woman, and child in the community. I am not saying you shouldn't do this; I'm saying it's only in 30 communities.
The first recommendation is that this committee should have a subcommittee on which sit representatives of the 30 communities. Let's start talking about what their long-term sustainable core competencies are, sources of competitive advantage. What does that mean in terms of technology strategies? A lot of the technology strategies recommended in this report have no match whatsoever to the real sustainable sources of competitive advantage in those communities in a carbon-free future. There is no link. It doesn't work. And what do you get when it doesn't work? You get what Germany has.
From 1996 through 2007--so I'm not adding in the recessionary time--goods-producing jobs were down 18%; greenhouse gas emissions were down only 16%. You don't even have a one for one in terms of your job loss match. Jobs lost over that period were 6.4 million, so I don't really care about 250,000 jobs that might have been generated by the wind industry. Electricity prices for households in Germany--41¢ Canadian per kilowatt hour--that's not a special rate for wind, that's the rate that everyone in a household in Germany pays for electricity. Fifty per cent of the electricity in that country still comes from coal plants. Eight new coal plants have been constructed in the last eight months in Germany, and twenty more have been approved. The eight new coal plants themselves wipe out all of the zero emission reduction gains Germany achieved by being the largest developer of wind power nationally in the world.
If we don't sit down and look at the community list and the company list--it's only 30 communities--and build a strategic plan for each community, we will have 40¢ electricity, we will still be burning coal to make power, we will have significant industrial job loss, and we won't have greenhouse gas emissions even tracking with the job loss, because that's Germany, that's Denmark, that's Sweden, and that's not where we want to go.
I'll stop there.