Thank you, Mr. Chairman and honourable committee members. Thank you for inviting the Green Budget Coalition to speak to you today.
The Green Budget Coalition, or GBC, is unique in bringing together the expertise of 17 of Canada's leading environmental organizations, collectively representing over 600,000 Canadians and ranging from Ducks Unlimited to Greenpeace. Our mission is to present an analysis of the most pressing issues regarding environmental sustainability in Canada and to make a consolidated annual set of recommendations to the federal government regarding strategic fiscal and budgetary opportunities.
The GBC appreciated the funding in budget 2016 for many of its priorities, including the low-carbon economy fund, marine protected areas, green infrastructure, first nations communities, and tax benefits for electricity storage technologies. However, much more is still needed to put Canada on a solid path towards environmental sustainability and to play a responsible role in addressing climate change.
I would like to highlight the Green Budget Coalition's key recommendations for budget 2017. They include a suite of measures to achieve Canada's climate change mitigation and adaptation objectives, related nature conservation objectives, and freshwater programs.
In particular, the Green Budget Coalition recommends taking action to implement a well-designed, pan-Canadian carbon price starting at a price level that respects the social cost of carbon with appreciable annual increases for several years and with revenues directed towards compensating low-income and other vulnerable individuals and families, supporting emission reductions, clean economic growth, and adaptation to climate change, including natural solutions.
We welcome the Prime Minister's announcement regarding a carbon price as an important step forward. We have two key concerns, one being that it will be many years before the price level is significant enough to significantly reduce emissions, and the second being that we would have preferred an incremental $10 per tonne increase until 2030 with annual reviews every five years so that we not get stuck in inertia, which seems to be happening in British Columbia.
The GBC also recommends phasing out exploration and development subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, which effectively work against the effectiveness of a carbon price and have strong public support.
We recommend directing 30% of green infrastructure funding to natural infrastructure options such as wetlands and coastal strengthening, and 10% of annual funding from the pan-Canadian framework on clean growth and climate change to help Canada's ecosystems adapt to climate change.
We recommend taking strategic, nationwide, multi-year conservation action in three areas: expanding and better protecting our terrestrial protected area system, expanding measures to conserve unique and ecologically significant wildlife habitat and to ensure ecological connectivity, and fulfilling Canada's commitments to reach and exceed international marine protection targets and to ensure ocean health and sustainable fisheries.
In this area, we're also supportive of the guardians proposal from the indigenous leadership initiative. We also support renewing important freshwater programs that are sunsetting in March 2017, regarding Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay and investing in the quality, comprehensiveness, and accessibility of freshwater monitoring data.
We've been engaged in a series of meetings over the past month with deputy ministers and finance officials regarding our preliminary recommendations for next year's budget. We will be issuing a final version in mid-November and would welcome the opportunity to meet with you then.
Our final document will include a number of complementary recommendations across issues of climate change mitigation and adaptation, energy, transit, nature conservation, radon mitigation, and measuring ecological goods and services.
We are also supportive of the Assembly of First Nations' proposals for reducing diesel use in indigenous communities and for clean energy funds.
Thank you very much for your time and attention, and I look forward to your questions.