Thank you, Chair, for the opportunity.
I'm excited by everything I'm hearing around this table. This is fantastic. This was a great idea to go through this process to get a sense of where we're all coming from.
I come from a bit of a different angle as well. It's wonderful that we're finally taking climate change seriously and wanting to deal with carbon, which is what we see as the main instigator of climate change. The elephant in the room that many don't talk about is consumption. Consumption, to me, is the cause of climate change and the cause of a lot of other things we have to deal with in our society, in that it's unsustainable at the levels where it is today.
Given where we are today, and given where everybody else on the planet wants to go to meet where we are, I don't think you can get there from here.
How do we deal with consumption? Our society today is predicated on a mathematical construct called economics, which is a fallacy because it doesn't take into account the true cost of consumption. We look at every other angle in economic theory. Economic theory does look at consumption, but we choose to avoid that piece of it. I think we need to look at the social and the environmental costs of consumption in order to properly look at the true costs of what we're doing in society from an economic, social, and environmental standpoint.
Part of the problem we have with consumption is that for the last 60 years, advertisers have been telling us to consume, consume, consume, and to consume as quickly as possible. The taxpayer has been responsible for dealing with the end of life of that consumable good or product. When we're dealing with end of life from a consumer standpoint, and the consumers have been convinced they should consume, nothing is ever going to be done with consumption unless we take a different approach to it via stewardship and make producers responsible for what they produce. If we make producers responsible for what they produce, they're the ones who, through their market-driven ability, will find ways to do it in a more efficient, effective way so that it mitigates the impact of end of life. Instead of looking at end of life from cradle to grave, we should be looking at it from cradle to cradle.
Everybody looks at stuff today that we consume and they say, “Yes, but it's recyclable.” That seems to be the first point they go to, when the first point should be to reduce. The second point, I think, should be repair. The third point should be reuse. The fourth one, recycle, should be changed to upcycle rather than recycle. The second we think of recycling, we automatically think of downcycling, that it doesn't have as much value as it should, in my view. I think that if we change it, and if we frame it in this way, we'll go a long way to mitigating the impacts of consumption and we'll do it in a more responsible way.
How do you implement something like that? You look at it and think that's a complete shift in our whole economy. We need to start somewhere. If we're not willing to start at this level, then where is it going to start?
Everybody talks about packaging. I know the provinces have all been looking at it. Municipalities have been looking at it. There are a few key areas you can identify initially. Packaging is certainly one, but so are durable goods. Why is it that a washing machine only lasts five years? They want it to last for five years so that you buy a new one. Why is it more expensive to repair than it is to buy a new one?
We're now looking at pricing carbon, the cost of carbon. If we find ways to price in the quality of a good, or the lack thereof, then it makes the higher-quality products cheaper to consume than the lower-quality products. I think we need to shift, and that shift has to happen here around this table. This is where the leadership is in our country. This is why we chose to be on this committee. It starts with us.
It creates a different direction of growing as well. It's an economic shift.
Another aspect that is affecting our society today is this transformation of labour. We're automating. We're moving from the third wave to the fourth wave of the industrial revolution, and it's highly automated. It's eliminating jobs far faster than it's creating them. We need to be able to find ways for individuals to create employment. If we start thinking about different ways of manufacturing and consuming things, all of a sudden we'll start manufacturing things closer to home because—guess what—it's cheaper to do it that way given the new way of looking at things through stewardship. Also, if we start repairing things, all those repair jobs that we had a generation ago, which went away because we decided it was cheaper to buy a new item than it was to fix it, come back. That creates a whole level of employment within our society that we had lost, and it creates a whole level of experience in skilled trades that we had lost and which we need to come back, because that's once again the only way we can be sustainable moving forward.
Then if we look at things from an upcycle standpoint, all of a sudden things become more modular. The only thing that has changed in a washing machine in 30 or 40 years is the electronics in it, the control systems. Instead of throwing away the whole machine, if you just replace the control systems, you make it modular, and you take that out and you unplug a few electronic components, plug them back in, or if they're broken you replace them, or if it's completely obsolete you bring it back to the factory and the factory rebuilds it as a modular unit and then turns around and sells it again.
We have to start thinking in this way now if we're going to achieve any kind of sustainability within our society.
There are a number of examples of companies that are already doing this. I don't know if any of you have ever come across a Herman Miller chair. They're the ones with all the hydraulics in them and the mesh seat and back. They're beautiful chairs. They are the most expensive ones, but when you're finished with your Herman Miller chair, they will take it back for free. They will pay for the shipping. When it gets back to the factory in Illinois, they completely disassemble that chair in 15 minutes and they reuse every single part in a new chair, except for the foam armrests. Doing that has increased their margin by 25%, because they're no longer paying for a new part for a new chair. They're reusing a part from an old chair. It makes total economic sense to do that. They manufacture their parts in such a high-quality way in the first place that they have far greater longevity than you would typically find.
As I said, there are a multitude of other companies out there. Ford Motor Company itself actually built a car in this way. It's a concept car in which they can actually reuse every part within the vehicle again, except for the typical things like brake pads and oil and that sort of thing. It can be done. We just have to decide that's the way we're going to move forward as a society.
There are a number of things we as a government do that kind of bother me. Here we are talking about climate change and everything, but as MPs we are flying all over the place or taking trips here and there. A number of us have to commute from our home ridings, which is completely understandable of course, but why is the government not looking at carbon offsets to offset that footprint for flights? Why is the government not using electric buses? There's a company in Quebec that actually manufactures electric buses and we should be buying those. They're selling them all over the world, and we don't even buy them here in our own country.
It starts with us. We need to set the example in this country if we expect others to follow.
I know it's the first meeting, and I hate to do this to my colleagues, but at one of the first meetings we had as a group, somebody brought a paper coffee cup, and I had my steel mug, and I said, “You know what? From now on if we're going to come to these meetings, could you please buy yourself a steel mug and reuse it.” If we're not going to set the example, then who's going to? It's the same thing with the limousines parked in front of Centre Block on Parliament Hill idling for hours on end. That makes me insane. Every time I walk out of Parliament, I see these limos idling away and away and away, and it makes no sense. Why are they not electric? Why are they not hybrid vehicles? Why do we keep going down this same path?
I know there is no free ride, but at some point we have to figure out better ways to do things, and doing that starts with us. We have to lead if we expect others to follow.
Another topic I want to discuss is energy subsidies. We're pouring billions of dollars into subsidizing large corporations to build solar and wind projects. Yet the people who can least afford the high cost of energy are also the same people who can least afford to retrofit their homes in order to make them more energy efficient, to offset that carbon but also to help offset that cost. I think we should look at a study to determine how we can go back to something that we've done in the past and need to go back to. Instead of pouring those large subsidies into large corporate interests to build these, we should be pouring the money into two areas.
On clean technology, I completely agree that we have to look at better ways of doing things, including better ways of doing solar and wind.
We also have to look at low-income and fixed-income individuals. You know, I met so many of them on the campaign trail. That's why this is so important to me. When you meet people and they say to you, “I'm trying to determine, do I heat or do I eat?”, there's something wrong. In this country, that people have to make that kind of a decision because they can't afford to live in their homes because the energy costs are too high and they can't afford to get new windows and doors in their homes, or insulate their homes.... We can kill two birds with one stone if we decide, once again, that we will lead and make this a reality.
Conservation is really the direction we should be heading in first. I talked about consumption. Well, let's stop thinking about how we produce more to consume; let's figure out how we can conserve more so we consume less. It all comes full circle. If we start to think this way at the front of our brains all the time, on how to consume less and reduce our footprints on this planet, we will follow the mandate of this group, which is looking at how we can leave this world a better place for not just the next generation but for two or three or four generations, or as the indigenous communities say, seven generations ahead.
It really does start with us. I think we have the right kind of group around this table to start thinking in this way. I don't expect we'll make these changes here overnight, but we have to start to plant the seeds as a group. I will continue to work very hard on this, to try to figure out where we can plant the seeds and how we nurture them to take root and take on a life of their own.
It took a long time to get climate change to the point where it's accepted as real, but consumption is the one we need to work on today if we want to really save this planet for future generations. We need to look at the social and environmental costs but also at the ultimate cost, that we live on a finite planet.
Thank you.
