Madam Speaker, in 1987, when I was Quebec's minister of the environment, I went to the United Nations for the launch of Ms. Brundtland's project, “Our Common Future”.
After Mrs. Brundtland tabled her famous report, which created sustainable development, there came to the roster a person nobody had heard of. His name was Abdul Gayoom. He is the president of the Maldive Islands. The Maldives are a string of 1,190 islands south of India, of which 200 are inhabited. When he started to speak I can assure everyone that people could have heard a pin drop. He explained that his island had been a peaceful, peace-loving country without any problems at all. Then he described it in the words of the great Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl. He said “My island, in the words of Thor Heyerdahl, is like a string of pearls on a cushion of velvet blue. Suddenly our peace was destroyed”. In the 1980s, he said, tidal waves started to wash along the shore, creating damage and destruction. A year after they were worse, until the time when he spoke, saying that the last tidal wave had washed over the shore of the main island, causing tremendous destruction as well as death.
He said “Scientists tell us that the seas are rising faster in the last hundred years than they have risen 1,000 years before. They tell us the seas might rise between one and three metres in the next century. If it is anywhere up to two metres my whole island state will disappear under the sea”. He asked questions of those of us from the rich industrial world. He said “Tell me, you who have created plants and carbon-emitting plants, what have we, the people of the Maldives, done to deserve this?”
In 1997, ten years later, I was in Kyoto as a member of the Canadian delegation. The opening of the conference was received by two speeches, one by Vice-President Al Gore of the United States and another one by the president of the small island state of Nauru. The president of the island of Nauru said “My fellow citizens are watching the seas rise with fear and trepidation. They see the coral reef disappear. They see the seas continuing to rise and wash along the coast. We ask whether you are going to wait until we are washed under the sea before you start to do something about it”, at which time he turned to Vice-President Gore.
I strongly believe that far beyond the figures that we exchange here, like the jobs that are supposed to be lost and all the costs to this person and that person, it is a matter of equity and fairness first, because we of this rich world, we of this country, which is almost unlimited in the bounty of its natural resources, in the skill of its people, in its infrastructures, in universities galore, four in my own city alone, we have a duty to the others whom we are polluting. This is something that our friends from the Alliance never mention. It is something we never hear from Premier Klein and the Premier of Ontario.
What about the people who are being polluted by us? Some talk about 2% of pollution being from Canada, but what they do not say is that Canada and the United States are per capita the greatest users of energy. They are the greatest emitters of carbon gases per capita worldwide. Surely as the champions of energy use, as the champions of gas emissions, we have a duty to those who do not produce these gases. We have a duty to the innocent countries around the world and this is what Kyoto is all about. Kyoto is not for us. It is not for Alberta, Quebec, Ontario or the Maritimes. We can survive ourselves.
When I hear, in the coziness of living rooms in Alberta or elsewhere, people saying that we should have a made in Canada program, a made in Alberta program or a made in Ontario program, it makes me sick to my stomach. Because it does not respond to President Gayoom. It does not respond to the President of Nauru. It does not respond to Bangladesh, which is being flooded time and again. It does not respond to all the countries that are suffering from our pollution. It certainly does not respond to our own regions.
I would defy any member of the Alliance Party to speak to Senator Charlie Watt, an Inuit representative in our Senate, to speak to his sister Sheila Watt-Cloutier, or to speak to the chief of the Dene there, whom I have heard speak about the tremendous changes in the Arctic. Members can say it is cyclical, that it is not happening, but these people think it is happening. They see it happening. The ice cover is diminishing with great rapidity. The ice floes are breaking up. The glaciers are breaking up. The polar bears cannot find their prey because the ice floes are breaking up.
Charlie Watt has told me that polar bears are going way down, way east in Quebec, ravenous, looking for food. For the first time in the Arctic they are seeing dragonflies that they have never seen before. For the first time they are seeing plants growing in the Arctic that they have never seen before. For the last two summers they have had the hottest weather in the Arctic ever.
Reputable scientists from the Arctic Council have shown me, with graphs to back them up, that by 2070 the Arctic Sea will have no ice at all. It will be an open sea. Is that what we want? Is that what the people there want? They tell me that is not what they want. They want to live the way they have lived for thousands of years. They do not want to be impacted by the pollution that we create in southern Canada or in the United States.
I heard the MP for Calgary--Nose Hill say that the United States and Australia have not ratified. So what? Does Mr. Bush live in the Arctic? Does he live in Nauru? Does he live in the Maldives? He is ensconced in his beautiful White House and he can make pronouncements that affect the rest of the world for better or for worse, and this time it is for the worse. She did not mention that France has ratified, that Germany has ratified, that Sweden has ratified, that Norway has ratified, that Denmark has ratified, that Finland has ratified, that 93 countries, including Japan, have ratified. What about them?