Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Jonquière for bringing forward this motion, which is not a new request.
The Canadian Urban Transit Association and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities have been exerting pressure for years in support of this change.
Moreover, Mr. Riis, a former colleague and member of parliament for Kamloops from 1980 to 2000, also supported this initiative.
It is expected that between 1991 and 2020 emissions caused by vehicles will increase by 52%. If we really want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we must find a way to promote public transportation.
A tax exemption for public transportation passes provided by employers would be a very good first step.
We support this motion. As I indicated it has a history within the NDP. The former member from Kamloops, Mr. Riis, was a great advocate of this measure, as have been other New Democrats over the years. We would go further to allow businesses to write off the expense of providing public transit passes to employees.
These are some small steps that the government could take toward trying to encourage Canadians to use public transportation. They could be small parts of an overall strategy to meet our commitments as far as Kyoto is concerned and as far as the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is concerned.
That is why I was very disappointed a member on the government side rose and did the usual thing. He trashed the idea by saying that it was not good enough. It is a whole lot better than nothing. It is a whole lot better than what we get from the government when it comes to real policy changes to encourage people to use public transportation.
If the hon. member has a better idea maybe he should say so, instead of just pouring cold water on every suggestion members come up with for trying to help our society to save the planet so that someday our grandchildren will not inherit from us an environment in which they cannot breathe the air or drink the water as a result of the disposition on the part of the government to find fault with every proposal that is made but then not come up with any of its own.
So far all I can see on the part of the government is that it wants to get credit for trees when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. This is the Liberal strategy: count the trees, count them as carbon sinks. In that way they do not have to do anything. They can just be involved in a sort of global bean counting, global manipulation of the figures so that Canada does not have to actually reduce any greenhouse gas emissions at all. Is that not wonderful? Will that not make the air a lot better?
I do not get it. Yet the Minister of the Environment and the government seem fascinated by this approach.
We think there are a number of measures, and this private member's business is only one aspect of what could be done. Certainly I would have thought that anybody in their right environmental mind would support a motion like this designed to encourage people to use public transportation.
I do not know where the hon. member is from, but I sure hope he is not from Toronto. If one has ever been to Toronto, Montreal, or for that matter Winnipeg or any of our bigger cities, one of the things we have to do is to get more people out of their cars and into public transportation, walking, cycling or whatever. Those things are not always possible, particularly in Winnipeg in the winter. We have to find ways to encourage people to use public transportation and here is a way we could do it.
The member from the Alliance was very eloquent as to the growing incidence of pulmonary and respiratory diseases, the growing incidence of asthma among young people. This is not a coincidence. It is not like this generation is somehow genetically inferior over the last generation when it comes to their lungs. It has to do with their exposure to air pollution.
If we cannot read the writing on the wall, how long do we have to ask our children who are coming down with asthma and these other respiratory diseases to be the canaries in the mines for us? The canaries have asthma. The canaries have other conditions. They are telling us something. They are telling the Liberal government to act, to not count the trees and see what kind of credit it can get for that in some kind of global statistical game, but to do something about air quality in this country.
One of the things the government could do and one of the things backbenchers could do, even if their government were not willing to do it, would be not to get up and recite the latest departmental argument against this but to actually show some courage and be for something that parliament could do. We should be giving instructions to the departments on how we will solve our problems and not the other way around.
In the long term the savings to our health care system would be incredible if we could deal with some of these problems, but no, we want to keep all the accounting separate and have walls between all the separate books we keep on health, the environment, transport, et cetera.
These things are all related to each other. The time has come for us to do a different kind of accounting here and take into account all the costs of the way we do things. If we did that and took into account all the savings that would come from encouraging people to use public transport, we would have an entirely different set of books and a set of books that would justify us taking these kinds of environmental measures.
In case I have not made myself clear, I am in favour of the motion. I hope other members can see their way to being en faveur de cette motion également.
While I have a few minutes left I would just like to say that there is a comparable public policy issue, a favourite of mine. I cannot resist the temptation to insert it here because it runs parallel with this. The concern to get people out of their cars and into public transportation, particularly in an urban context, is, in my mind, very much like the concern I and other members have to get freight out of the trucks, off the highways and back onto the rails where it belongs.
Here again we have exactly the same situation. We have more greenhouse gases being emitted than need be. There are trains that are about 10,000 feet long, which is too long in my view but nevertheless they are there. Can anyone imagine how many trucks that would equal? Yet they are all being pulled by one diesel unit. The same comparison would be to take all the people off a bus and put them in individual cars.
If the government is serious about its greenhouse gas emission strategy, that is to say the reduction of the gases, it should stop counting trees, making up stuff about carbon sinks and get with it. It should devise a transportation policy that will encourage people to use public transportation, that will create incentives for people to ship by rail and, for that matter, disincentives for people to ship by truck where there is no real justification for doing so.
