Thank you.
Good evening, everyone.
Thank you very much, honourable chair and members of the committee, for the opportunity to address you this evening. I will be making a PowerPoint presentation.
This is what's at stake. This is our home. All that separates us from the inhospitable infinity of space is a very thin layer of atmosphere that surrounds the blue dot we call our home.
We're changing the composition of that thin veneer. We're changing it dramatically. The atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is rising at a rate unparalleled in the history of the planet, to the very best of our knowledge. The impacts of that are extraordinary and severe. You can see that in the projected temperature change by the end of the century of many, many degrees across the planet. Associated with that, we're seeing increased droughts, increased deluges, rising sea levels, loss of our alpine glaciers, the retreating Greenland ice sheet, and so on. We all know all about these impacts.
In December, Canada and 195 other countries made a commitment to the rest of the world to reduce our level of greenhouse gases to that thin veneer that separates us from space to 30% below 2005 levels by the year 2030. Minister McKenna has said that's just the beginning. That's a floor. That's not a firm target. It's a floor. We need to do even better than that.
Our challenge is how we will get there. We have a big gap, a big gulf, in this country now. In 2012 the previous government closed the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, which was contributing $11 million a year in direct support of climate research in this country. In 2013 the previous government closed the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, which was spending $5.5 million a year on largely economically oriented research in support of environmental stewardship in Canada.
About that time, the board of directors of the climate foundation said we can't let this issue fade away. We created the Canadian Climate Forum, dedicated toward promoting constructive dialogue on how Canada can face the climate challenge. We created that about three years ago. We're a very active organization based here in Ottawa.
It's not enough. We need to go further now. The challenge for this country lies right in front of us. What we are proposing here tonight is that we create in this country the “Canadian climate council”. This would be a multidisciplinary, very broad body that would draw on the talent pools across the nation to focus on policy, very firmly on policy development, and we would take into account science, engineering, entrepreneurship, health, and first nations—all of the things we need to be looking at in terms of the multidisciplinary matrix that is so important to us.
As the Canadian Climate Forum, we've had meetings now with over 20 senior bureaucrats in over 12 ministries in the last several weeks. They have delivered to us a common message. I'm going to read you one quotation from an assistant deputy minister, who shall remain nameless, who said, “While we should be able to convene across departments on the climate change file, we have not done a good job of it, nor are we likely to.”
What we're proposing is a national council that would pull together all of the different threads, all of the different constituencies, take full advantage of our university sector and our government research labs, our provincial government research labs, NGOs, and others to sit around a common table and deal with a set of common questions, provided by the federal government, that would allow us as a nation to directly address the climate change challenge.
We have a model. This is not something new. The model is called the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions. It's been in existence since 2008 in British Columbia. It was funded by a $90-million endowment from the Gordon Campbell government of the day. The institute lives off the interest from that endowment. It's policy focused. It's multidisciplinary. It's working on five major topics of critical importance to British Columbia: transportation futures; energy efficiency in buildings; how we can make maximum societal value from our natural gas resources; how we can integrate the western Canadian electrical grid, which my colleague here mentioned earlier; and we are politically independent. Gordon Campbell looked me right in the eye and told me this two years ago. He said, “Tom, we gave you an endowment because you must be politically independent.”
What we are proposing tonight is essentially taking the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions model and scaling it nationally. We have put in a submission to your committee, to the Minister of Finance, that would allow us to do that, and we ask for your support.
Thank you very much for this opportunity.