Thank you, Judy.
The urgency is very clear, as we see with the recent IPCC report that just came out. We need to take effective action, and very quickly, to stay under 1.5° C and also to avoid the worst damage.
Public concern across the country is clear. An Abacus poll from this year shows that the top two concerns among Canadians are health care and climate change. We need to recognize that climate change is causing severe health issues, for example, from air quality and from mental health issues around floods, fires and evacuations. We certainly saw major impacts across Canada this summer from floods, severe heat, wildfires and even tornadoes.
On a personal level, our summer in the interior of B.C. was quite horrific. We had 20 days when we were advised to stay indoors because the wildfire smoke was so bad it was choking. One could hardly see across the street. We went from floods and landslides almost straight to wildfires, and it impacted us in our communities very personally.
For example, a friend of mine who had a baby under one year old was renovating the kitchen, so she had an outdoor kitchen, and she's very concerned about long-term impacts on her young baby's developing lungs from all that fine particulate matter he breathed.
Another example is my elderly neighbour, who had burning lungs for weeks. My neighbour went to the doctor and was told, “Yes, we're seeing a lot of people like this. Some people have to go the emergency room, but really the only thing they can do is send you home and tell you to close your windows and hope you have an air filter.” It became really personal in our area.
We understand that climate change is an international problem and that emissions need to reduce rapidly to stay below one and a half degrees or two degrees. It's also clear that the differences in the impacts of a one-and-a-half-degree world and a two-degree world are quite significant.
We have concerns about stranded assets and public investments in the oil and gas sector here in Canada, as the world needs to move quickly away from fossil fuels. If we want the goals of the Paris Agreement to succeed, we need to start redirecting investments now.
Already, impacts from climate change are causing huge economic impacts. Hon. Ralph Goodale recently stated that losses from floods and fires are causing Canadian taxpayers $1 billion a year, and the future costs of doing nothing or very little will continue to increase—for example, ever-worsening wildfires, floods, superstorms, droughts, ocean acidification, sea level rise and climate refugees.
For me, it gets pretty scary when you look the problem directly in the eye.