Yes. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Members of the Standing Committee on Finance, thank you for having me here today. My name is Marc‑André Viau. I'm the director of government relations at Équiterre, an environmental NGO with over 150,000 members and supporters. The organization focuses on agriculture, light and heavy transportation, consumption, energy and climate change in general. Last August, it submitted a brief on agriculture, energy and mobility as part of the pre‑budget consultations. I'll outline the recommendations from that brief, some of which have been updated.
Climate change is affecting Canadian production resources and crops. Last summer's drought in Canada resulted in food supply shortages for retail, which are currently being exacerbated by the border barricades in Alberta, as well as yield losses for canola and wheat. As they say, when it rains, it pours. After the fires came the floods, especially on the agricultural plains of the Abbotsford area. Flood damage in British Columbia is estimated at $450 million.
We welcome the new guidance provided by the federal government and its provincial and territorial partners. In both the Guelph statement and the mandate letter of the Minister of Agriculture and Agri‑Food, climate risk management is a key issue. We want to see the government invest in solutions that will help farmers adapt to better manage climate risks, while using agriculture as a tool to fight climate change.
We believe that investment in soil health is needed to unlock the full potential of carbon sequestration by ensuring the resilience of our agri‑food sector. To this end, we support the creation of a dedicated climate risk management program. We also recommend funding for the development of a pan‑Canadian strategy to study best practices in soil health.
Now that we've talked about climate impacts on agriculture, I want to turn to energy. After years of promises with no real follow‑through, we expect fossil fuel subsidies to end by 2023. However, we're also concerned that the repealed subsidies will be replaced by other subsidies. As over 400 experts recently stated, we're concerned that an investment tax credit will be proposed for carbon capture, use and storage, or CCUS. This could undermine our efforts to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. Despite decades of research, CCUS is neither economically viable nor proven on a large scale. It has a poor environmental record and limited potential for significant and cost‑effective emissions reductions. If the industry wants to tap into this area, so be it. That said, taxpayers are already saddled with the bill for orphan wells, for example.
We recommend that the government release its roadmap for phasing out fossil fuel subsidies in the next budget framework and avoid subsidizing carbon capture. All this, of course, goes hand in hand with the passage of legislation and a fair transition plan. There won't be any transition without workers and communities.
There's a great deal of movement in the mobility sector. In 2021, Canada moved up the ban on the sale of new gasoline‑powered vehicles to 2035. However, zero‑emission vehicles, or ZEVs, account for only 5% of new vehicle sales. Meanwhile, light trucks accounted for a record 81% of sales. We're talking about the type of trucks that you keep seeing on the streets of Ottawa right now. This is driving up the transportation sector's GHG emissions record, despite the fuel efficiency of the vehicles. When we look at the sales figures in Quebec and British Columbia, we understand that we need a ZEV standard at the federal level to speed up the transition, which is currently being studied.
However, our organization believes that purchase incentive programs have run their course, and aren't sustainable in terms of funding the replacement of millions of vehicles. Not every vehicle should be replaced. Moreover, electrification must be accompanied by a modal shift to active and collective transportation, and also to shared mobility.
Since we're feeling very generous, we're proposing that the government save both money and GHGs in one program. It's time to transition to a self‑funding program of feebates to turn a portion of the sale of polluting vehicles into a contribution to financial incentives for the purchase of electric vehicles. This means reforming the green levy program to make it proportional to energy performance and vehicle weight. This green levy will be used to replenish the coffers of the purchase incentive program.
In closing, I want to remind you that section 23 of the act respecting transparency and accountability in Canada's efforts to achieve net‑zero greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2050 carries obligations for the Minister of Finance.
Under the legislation, the Minister of Finance must, in co‑operation with the Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, prepare an annual report respecting key measures that the federal public administration has taken to manage its financial risks and opportunities related to climate change. We recommend that the Minister of Finance begin this accountability exercise with the 2022 budget.
Thank you for listening. I can answer your questions during the upcoming discussions.