Good afternoon, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon, members of the Committee.
My name is Andréanne Brazeau and I'm a climate policy analyst at Équiterre, one of the country's leading environmental organizations, which this year is celebrating 30 years of environmental and climate action.
Our organization works on four key issues: climate, sustainable mobility, food systems and, finally, the consumer and waste management sector.
Équiterre aims to advance these issues in a way that benefits Canadian families and helps lower the cost of living, while helping to combat the climate crisis and the collapse of life.
Our organization is also a member of the Green Budget Coalition, which includes some twenty Canadian organizations whose mission is to promote a set of recommendations relating to the annual federal budget.
First, Équiterre salutes the various initiatives announced in the latest budget that promote social justice, such as the new Canada Dental Benefit. It also supports all the measures in Bill C-47 that aim to tighten penalties and monitoring to limit environmental damage, as well as measures that encourage the consumption of durable goods.
For example, section 232 of Bill C-47, which amends section 36 of the Customs Tariff Act, proposes to add the General Preferential Tariff Plus to goods originating in a country that complies with international standards relating to sustainable development, labour rights and human rights. Équiterre believes that this is a major step forward in raising the socio-environmental standards of international trade.
Then, more generally, Équiterre believes that the federal government's budget presents several interesting measures for the transformation of our economy, including assistance for the decarbonization of the country's power grids as well as the conditions established for this assistance, particularly with regard to labour and the cost of energy for families. Tax credits in this sector are also good news, especially as they were a key demand of the Green Budget Coalition, of which Équiterre is a member.
The budget announces the government's first steps towards the right to repair, a promising sector given that our economic system needs to be fully transformed to become carbon neutral, circular and more equitable. According to some data, the repair industry's revenues in 2030 could vary between $47 billion and $51 billion and create between 400,000 and 450,000 jobs in Canada.
Équiterre therefore welcomes these first steps, which aim to establish a targeted framework for household appliances and electronics in 2024.
However, as provided for in the Minister of Finance's mandate letter, Équiterre would still have liked to see the immediate introduction of a repair fund or fiscally green measures to encourage the growth of the repair sector, a sector of the future that will enable us to take concrete action to reduce household spending and consumption.
More generally, other items in the budget seem problematic in the context of the climate crisis. First, we feel that investments in the development of carbon capture and storage, an unproven technology, take up an inordinate amount of space in the government's finances this year. These investments divert attention from the real challenge at hand: the just transition to sustainable employment for workers in jobs that are doomed to disappear, at a time when the global economy is in the throes of transformation and Canada is falling behind.
For Équiterre, continuing to invest in the exploration of new hydrocarbon deposits in the Arctic is another inconsistency in the federal budget. Investments in the development of the hydrogen industry, including hydrogen produced from fossil fuels, are also problematic. Hydrogen is a form of energy with limited potential, and a niche product. So we mustn't fall for false solutions to the climate crisis.
On the transport side, it's mainly road transport that is responsible for the sector's greenhouse gas emissions. Équiterre therefore deplores the fact that the latest budget includes no new measures to develop, for example, public transit and active mobility, while the number and size of vehicles on our roads continue to grow.
In short, several elements of Bill C-47 seem interesting to us in terms of facilitating the transition to a carbon-neutral and equitable economy. Nonetheless, much remains to be done to ensure that the industries with the highest emissions contribute to prioritizing their reduction at their source and fostering a more equitable and sustainable society.
Larger sums will certainly have to be disbursed in the future to prepare Canada for the climatic hazards whose effects we are already experiencing from one end of the country to the other, in different, but no less serious ways.
Thank you for your attention and for listening. We'll be happy to answer your questions.