Thanks, Mr. Chair.
I came into this debate with an open mind. I think it is worthwhile to know who the minister is meeting with at COP. That's important disclosure, given the significance of the deliberations that are happening there. However, listening to the Conservatives' debate, it seems that their intention here is to somehow criticize the government for travelling to an international meeting to discuss a globally existential threat.
Given the fact that the climate crisis is a collective action problem that affects every single country around the world, we can't solve it without talking to each other.
I would bring us back to the debate about a hybrid Parliament and the indignation with which the Conservatives argued that the only way we can have Parliament function is if we are there in person. It's an assertion that I actually agree with, as someone who would benefit greatly from being at home more, seeing my kids and sleeping in my bed more than two nights a month.
The point of going to COP—at great expense, granted—is so that leaders can sit down with each other, look each other in the eye and talk seriously about how they're going to solve this problem.
The rhetoric around jet-setting around the world and sitting in air-conditioned rooms frankly diminishes the seriousness of the debate. I'm all for people having different opinions and different perspectives, but I think Canadians deserve for us to be serious on this issue. This is an issue that affects every single one of us. It affects our kids. It affects our grandkids. It affects our economy. It affects our country, yet to just talk about “how dare someone sit in an air-conditioned room” reduces us to the level of grade school nattering. This is not a serious conversation.
We're sitting in an air-conditioned room right now. In fact, most of the rooms we sit in on Parliament Hill are air-conditioned. Those of us who live more than a couple of hours' drive away fly to Ottawa to engage in Parliament—and yes, that releases emissions. It's one of the realities that we have to grapple with, because the status quo.... We can live in a system and work to change the system at the same time. The idea that we somehow are hypocrites because we exist in modern society is, frankly, ridiculous.
I have huge challenges with the way the COP conference has evolved, with the fact that it's crawling with oil and gas lobbyists, the fact that it's ballooned to 50,000 delegates and the fact that it's being chaired by an oil baron, who's using it as a venue to make oil and gas deals. All of these things are patently absurd, and I think deserve scrutiny and criticism, but it is vitally important that global leaders, elected officials and civil society come together on a regular basis to talk about how we're going to fix this problem.
Underlying the Conservatives' critique of this—underneath it all—is the fact that they don't believe that we should be having a serious conversation about the climate. They want to undermine the very conversation about this existential threat, because they don't take it seriously. I think that's really what we're seeing behind all of these interventions, all of these motions—a lack of seriousness on the issue of our time.
I won't vote to support this motion, as much as I want to know who Minister Guilbeault is meeting with at COP. Listening to the debate...it's not a serious debate. It's not about transparency. It's not about getting to the bottom of how many oil and gas lobbyists the minister's meeting with or how many environmental groups or what the substance of those conversations is. It's an attempt to discredit the entire global effort to get at how we're going to tackle this collective action challenge that we face.
I would note that, if you look at the delegations coming from Canada to COP, you see it includes lots of folks who have a pretty different perspective than I do on the climate challenge and the climate crisis.
I'll leave it at that. I spoke about 10 times longer than I intended to, Mr. Chair, but obviously I have some strong feelings about the disingenuousness with which this motion has been brought forward.