Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for the preamble.
The numbers of my amendments don't flow from this one. I will be quiet for some time after this one before getting back to the matter of an advisory panel.
Before we proceed to the ritual slaughter of my amendments, I'll just recap.
So far, attempts to do the things that most witnesses asked us to do.... We had the Climate Action Network, a coalition that includes most of the environmental law groups in Canada. Advice came in a written brief from the Tsleil-Waututh first nation because, of course, we didn't have time for them to testify in person. We've lost the chance for a 2025 milestone year or to put the target from the Paris Agreement of 1.5 into the purpose of the act or base the bill on science or to operate using carbon budgets.
This is an opportunity to bring Bill C-12 into line with most of the climate accountability acts around the world in one respect. All those things that I just mentioned are what you typically find in other climate accountability legislation around the world.
The one witness we did have time to hear from on this point was Professor Corinne Le Quéré from the University of East Anglia Law School. When I asked her about it, she pointed out that certainly all the laws she knew of incorporated those elements that I just described, which we already voted down. They do tend to have this element in common: that the advice that comes to government in setting their plans and targets comes from experts. It's heavily experts of climate science and expertise as well, for instance, in renewable energy and other technologies.
I'll give a quick recap because Professor Corinne Le Quéré's expertise was primarily with the French climate accountability legislation. I'll just let members know because we didn't hear about other laws. I think it's a large deficiency in developing a knowledge base for reviewing this bill.
Certainly, in Pakistan, which has climate accountability legislation, and in Denmark, the advisory bodies are specifically experts and are defined in the act. New Zealand includes something called a Climate Change Commission, which is independent and gives expert advice. Costa Rica calls theirs the Scientific Council on Climate Change. The U.K. calls it, of course, the Climate Change Committee. It is highly respected. South Korea calls theirs the Committee on Green Growth and it is independent and housed within the prime minister's office and not in any one ministry.
In this, by describing it as an expert advisory body, the chair is quite right. Subsequent amendments I will put forward describe how this expert advisory committee would work and how it would be composed.
I'll just take a moment to say we will come to NDP-4, which basically modifies the word “advice” with the word “independent”. I think that attempts to create the false impression that by the time the Liberals and NDP vote for NDP-4, we will have created an independent commission that's aligned with the way other countries around the world have devised and designed their climate accountability legislation. We will not have done so, because the committee will still be made up of political appointees. It's only their advice that will be described as independent, whereas the committee structure will not be.
Again, to have anything like the rigour of other countries' legislation, we should have made other amendments before this moment. Certainly, the advisory committee to provide independent advice needs to be an independent advisory committee made up of experts, as opposed to the model we have here in a multi-stakeholder group.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.