Good morning. I'd like to thank the committee for inviting me.
The Quebec Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and Citizen's Action, ATTAC, is an international organization that focuses on financial issues, but from a citizen's perspective. The Quebec chapter of ATTAC has existed for 18 years. The term ''economic growth'' has become fraught with meaning and consequences. Today we can no longer blindly forge ahead with growth the way we used to a few years ago. Now more than ever, we realize that natural resources can be depleted, and that we are consuming much more than our planet can sustain. We are saddling future generations with a colossal ecological debt. Ecosystems have gone awry because nature is being overexploited. Economic growth as we know it encourages an excessive production of consumer goods and causes enormous waste.
Climate change and the loss of biodiversity caused in large part by an economy based on unlimited growth and the consumption of fossil fuels are already causing their share of catastrophes. Among other things, this will within a few years trigger massive population movements, thus creating a surge of climate change refugees. Consequently, we can no longer keep heading in that direction as though nothing were happening. It is no longer possible to continue to defend a productivist economy under which blind economic growth and job creation, no matter which jobs, justify dangerous decisions, damaging to the environment and all populations.
It's important to include new words in our vocabulary, difficult words like “negative growth” or “de-globalization”, that do not please everyone, but are necessary. Thus, Canada's competitiveness—we would prefer to say Canada's leadership—should not translate into a race to growth that can only be deadly in the long term; rather, it should highlight our way of approaching the transition, economically and environmentally, and we should become a model to follow in this great shift. As opposed to what those who want to caricature such a perspective say, we do not at all want to go back to the days when we used candles for lighting. A true ecological transition based on other principles than productivist growth can create jobs, provide a better quality of life and ensure a better future.
The Government of Canada must be the motor of important, necessary changes. To do that, it must support if not subsidize any measure conducive to energy savings, in sectors like public transit, housing, building insulation, and geothermics; take measures to reduce waste; counter urban sprawl, and densify urban populations; support renewable energy rather than fossil fuels; and stop any and all subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, and the construction of pipelines. However, we must support hydroelectricity, wind power and solar energy; take measures to electrify transportation; and develop an economy based on short supply chains. To do so, among other things, we must: encourage local economies in calls for tender, and make that a priority in free trade agreements; encourage, through subsidies if necessary, local and ecologically responsible organic farming, rather than agricultural industry based on exports, huge water consumption, pesticides and oil, which are toxic to the environment; maintain supply management and make it more accessible to the new generation, if not extend it to other sectors, since it is, among other things, very effective to control overproduction.
It's important to achieve these changes quickly. To accuse those who defend this necessary and urgent societal project of being unrealistic dreamers is a very poor strategy which may well prove risky over the long term. We are aware that many Canadian policies are going in the opposite direction. The Government of Canada continues to subsidize oil and gas companies; it purchased the Trans Mountain Pipeline, designed to transport highly polluting tar sands oil; it supports a static perspective on free trade based on the same principles since the 1980s, as though nothing had changed since; from one trade agreement to another, it has created large gaps in supply management; and it negotiates agreements that promote long circuits and the unlimited movement of goods, which causes huge fuel consumption.
We should no longer purchase, for instance, poor quality stone from Pennsylvania to restore the Quebec Citadel, which is very close, but rather opt for stone that is locally produced in Sillery, and is of much better quality. This type of situation, which occurs too often, is due to a thoughtless opening of markets. We have to pay attention to what our scientists are telling us. The temperature of the earth has already increased by one degree.
If growth and the plundering of resources continues at today's rate, the earth's temperature will have risen by 3.2 degrees by the end of the century, and that will have terrible consequences.
The Canadian economy must adopt new paradigms and make it a priority to cleave to everything the Canadian government negotiated in the Paris Agreement on climate change. Canada should even be among the most ambitious of the signatories and undertake a true ecological transition as quickly as possible.
Thank you.