Thank you, and thank you very much for this invitation.
I'm joining you from the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations and from a province where major fossil fuel pipeline projects, the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and the Coastal GasLink pipeline, one owned by the federal government outright and one where Export Development Canada has a major stake, are being built over the objections of indigenous titleholders and in clear violation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Honourable members, we have a problem. Your deliberations cut to the root of how serious we are as a country when it comes to confronting the existential threat of our time. We pride ourselves on being climate leaders, yet we have been highly resistant to tackling our role as global producers of fossil fuels. Our governments have persisted in peddling a fundamental falsehood, namely, that we can significantly lower our GHG emissions while doubling down on the extraction and export of oil and gas.
As a country, for the last 20 years, despite all of our pledges and commitments, the best we have managed to do is plateau our emissions at a historic high. We have failed to bend the curve. Why is that? In fact, many sectors of the economy and most provincial jurisdictions have managed to lower their emissions, but all their good work has been undone by the expansion of production and emissions from the oil and gas sector. The combined impact is a wash.
For years, the 26% of our emissions that derive from this sector have been the elephant in the room, so it is of great significance and very welcome that the governing party has finally named this and recognized the need for a declining emissions cap on the oil and gas sector, but, in the absence of strong action from the federal government, the trends show little sign of abating. Canada is on track to produce more oil and gas this year than ever before.
Here in my province of British Columbia, plans continue to build LNG Canada, aided by a huge federal subsidy which, if completed, will become the largest point source of emissions in this province.
Off Newfoundland, the proposed Bay du Nord project would be another carbon bomb, one that the federal government will hopefully reject. Yet, according to the UN's 2021 “Production Gap” report, “Governments' planned fossil fuel production remains dangerously out of sync with Paris Agreement limits.” They place us on a path to produce more than twice the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than is compatible with limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. Within those global production plans, Canada's expansion plans rank sixth.
We are on a collision course with what our children require for a safe future.
You have heard testimony that what Canada exports is not our concern and that our task need merely be to achieve net-zero emissions from our domestic extraction and production processes, but this view is untenable. As one Forbes columnist recently put it, “It is like Philip Morris International promising that none of its workers will smoke while manufacturing cigarettes.”
In the end, who cares? The greatest concern isn't the production emissions, it's what happens when that product successfully gets to market and is burned. Those scope 3 emissions account for 85% of the GHGs from fossil fuels. As you've also heard, the GHG emissions embedded in the fossil fuels Canada exports now exceed our domestic emissions. To ignore these scope 3 emissions is a moral abdication.
I invite you to follow this argument that our exports don't matter to its logical conclusion. Ultimately, it is a deeply cynical take. It is cynical because only two outcomes are possible. Either a market will persist for our expanding fossil fuel exports because the Paris Agreement will fail and global demand will continue to grow, consigning our children and grandchildren to a hellscape. Conversely, global demand will in fact start to collapse, as it must, consigning fossil fuel workers and their communities, many of whom you represent, to an unplanned period of profound tumult and disruption. In either case, the outcome is bleak.
Real hope rests in a thoughtful, planned wind-down of the industry, paired with an audacious, compelling, just transition plan, one that puts on the table billions of dollars for real climate action infrastructure. This needs to be understood as the essential flip side of the emissions cap. This is where significant federal support money should be going.
Am I saying that we should reopen the Constitution? No, but the federal government can and should use every tool within its authority to drive down emissions and to effectively ramp down production, and those tools are many. Exports are under federal jurisdiction, and if the federal government can ban coal exports, so, too, can it begin to limit oil and gas exports. Interprovincial transport, like the pipelines I just mentioned, is under federal jurisdiction. Offshore production comes under federal jurisdiction.
The federal government can implement a carbon test on new fossil fuel projects and require that they comply with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Of course, in the absence of federal subsidies, many fossil fuel projects simply become economic. We are now obliged to ensure that our practices align with the international commitments we've made under Paris. The Supreme Court of Canada in its decision last year has recognized the imperative of this moment and the right of Parliament to act at a national level.