House of Commons Hansard #14 of the 37th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament's site.) The word of the day was accord.

Topics

SupplyGovernment Orders

5:55 p.m.

Liberal

Clifford Lincoln Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC

Madam Speaker, I have listened to the members' positions. What I have failed to hear in all the speeches relating to figures and percentages and the loss of jobs and the gaining of jobs is the whole question of responsibility of countries.

Does the member agree that Canada, as one of the two champions of energy use per capita and as one of the two champions of gas emissions per capita in the world, has some kind of responsibility within the international context to help countries that are innocent and that are impacted by our pollution, including our own Canadian regions, such as the Arctic, which are polluted by provinces in the south?

I would remind the member that the per capita energy use in Alberta is three times the national average, six times the use in Quebec. Does this not signify there is something we have to do as part of a collective international body to take steps forward and to be part of the international community to change our way of doing things?

SupplyGovernment Orders

6 p.m.

Canadian Alliance

James Rajotte Canadian Alliance Edmonton Southwest, AB

Madam Speaker, we should recognize the fact that the implications of Kyoto go well beyond the oil and gas industry. The majority of the impact will be felt outside the oil and gas producing provinces. As even government ministers have said, 80% of it is through consumption. There is a lot of consumption of greenhouse gases certainly in the central provinces.

In terms of responsibility of countries, we do have a responsibility to address environmental problems but we have a greater responsibility to address issues like SO

2

, as well as nitrous oxide in our air that actually does cause smog. We have a responsibility and we as a nation ought to do what we did on the acid rain accord, which is to approach the Americans and sign a continental agreement to address those two issues. It is clear, and I think any scientist would say that those emissions certainly are more harmful than CO

2

. There is a big debate about what should be done about CO

2

It is incumbent upon us to see what we can do to reduce our own effects and to leave less of a footprint on the environment. That does not happen, in my view, through things like ratifying the Kyoto accord. No one has convinced me that by ratifying the Kyoto accord the footprint that we leave on our own natural environment will be any less than what it is today.

SupplyGovernment Orders

6 p.m.

Liberal

Hedy Fry Liberal Vancouver Centre, BC

Madam Speaker, over the past several months everyone has been debating this issue about what action we should take on greenhouse gas emissions. Across the country a growing number of organizations, jurisdictions and individuals have expressed their views on this issue. We have heard members across the way say that there is not enough scientific evidence, that there is too much scientific evidence, that scientists cannot agree on what the impacts are.

Before I came to the House, I was very involved as chair of the Council on Health Promotion of the British Columbia Medical Association and as a British Columbia member on the Canadian Medical Association Council on Health Care and Promotion. This issue has been one that we have been very concerned about as physicians and as medical organizations for the last 15 years.

We have seen the cause and effect and the impact of the eight very clear components that affect the health and well-being of Canadians as a result of climate change, of global warming and of greenhouse gas emissions. Those have been extremely important to us. I wanted to focus and concentrate on that a little because health impacts are something that we should really think about.

There is no debate on this issue. The Canadian Medical Association has recently reiterated its clear support for the Kyoto protocol and for decreasing greenhouse gas emissions by 20%. This resolution was made in 1997 by the CMA. It is not a recent thing. Five years ago it was already talking about the problem.

If we look at the eight broad health impacts of climate change and variability, we will find that they are related, for instance, to temperature change. There is a very strong morbidity and mortality relationship between temperature change and humans. Cold and heat related illnesses are important for us to consider. For instance, mental health, respiratory and cardiovascular stress, occupational stress are all results of temperature related mortality and morbidity.

We look at the health effects of extreme weather conditions. We look at flooding. We look at the dust bowls that we are now seeing with our neighbours to the south and the drought that we have perceived here within our Prairies. Those not only bring with them a degradation of the actual crops that the farmers grow, but they also bring with them heat and with that extreme heat comes a whole slew of things in their wake.

We notice that there are new vector borne diseases that are going to be influenced by heat. For instance, there is the West Nile virus. No one ever believed that the West Nile virus could really make a difference or have an impact in Canada because of our temperature and climate. We felt it just was not warm enough to sustain the West Nile virus and its ability to cause severe harm to populations. Yet because of that kind of warming we are noticing the shifts that are affecting us further up north.

In fact we are finding vectors such as mosquitoes and certain rats that bring with them certain diseases we have never seen before in Canada. An example is the increased incidence of Lyme disease created by ticks that are living for a longer period of time. That is another health effect brought about by vectors and changes in our ecosystem.

If we look at air pollution, and I do not need to go over this, there is a rapid increase in asthma not only in children but in adults and in fact in seniors. This is an issue we need to really worry about. The increase has been so dramatic it has almost become epidemic proportions.

We are looking at cancer that is caused by an increased amount of heat and a thinning of the ozone layer. We are looking at new skin cancers that are occurring in Canada now that we never believed possible. There is not only an increase in the type of skin cancers but in the incidence of skin cancers and the virulence of those skin cancers.

We are talking about an increase in different allergens that are coming into Canada which are creating brand new allergic responses. The detriment to people who are immunocompromised, such as persons with HIV or people who have very low levels of immunity to some of these allergens, is they are having to deal with new diseases and new allergens that they have never seen before.

Let us look at floods. We do not need to talk about the Winnipeg floods nor the Saguenay floods. When disastrous climate change occur, the risk of flooding increases the amount of E. coli in the water table, so we are finding that an increased amount of water pollution occurs. Water that we are drinking now is increasing in the amount of E. coli content.

I could go on and on about the effects of this kind of change in the climate on our ecosystems, in our ability to sustain certain vector borne diseases, in our ability to sustain certain bacteria, in flooding and all the carnage that it brings in terms of increased mortality and morbidity, but we need to look also at the effects of the stratospheric depletion of ozone. We are finding that cancers are increasing, cataracts are increasing and immune suppression is increasing.

We do not to be a rocket scientist or a physician to understand exactly what that means for the mortality and the morbidity of Canadians and what that means in real costs to the health care system and to the whole concept of having appropriate health care.

We now know that Canadians are living longer and we know that seniors are particularly affected by greenhouse gas emissions, by the increased pollution and by the increased smog that we are seeing, especially in our cities.

The health and socioeconomic impacts of climate change cannot be overlooked and should be of extreme concern to us.

Earlier today one of my colleagues across the way talked about the fact that it was probably a reach for us to suppose that climate change and industrialization were creating huge problems. He went on to talk about BC and that every few thousand years there have been changes, even before the industrialization era.

That may be true, but we know that the world and the sun have an evolving relationship and we are seeing that in fact climate change has been going on ever since the earth has had populations on it. The difference is that some of those climate changes needed millions of years to have an impact.

In the post-industrialized era within the last century we have seen an acceleration of the impact of the emissions on the atmosphere, a climb in the carbon dioxide emissions, et cetera, from all the industrialization that was carried on. It is not that industrialization is causing global change and climate change, industrialization is actually precipitating and accelerating it to a degree.

Let me give an example. In the pre-industrialized era to which my colleague referred, we found that there were 220 parts per million of carbon dioxide by volume. In the last 100 years, in the industrialized era, we found that increased to 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide by volume. What we are seeing is the acceleration of a process. Industrialization is not the simple and only cause but it is accelerating a process that would have taken a fairly long time in human evolution and in the evolution of the world to occur.

We need to consider this, not only from the perspective of whether we have the kind of science that tells us that there is climate change, that ice caps are melting, that polar ice is going and that the number of floods are increasing, these are important but I would like to concentrate on the fact that it is accelerating and that we have seen diseases in the post-industrialized and in the industrialized era that we had never seen before. We never used to see skin cancer until the industrialized era began. We never used to see diseases such as asbestosis and asthma and the amount of lung disease that we now see in the industrialized era.

For instance, when the people in Great Britain used enormous amounts of coal to heat their homes we found that there was a huge increase in the number of chronic respiratory diseases, not only in children but in adults and in seniors, and it increased exponentially during the industrialized era and the coal burning era. As the British Isles moved from coal to cleaner fuels we saw that chronic respiratory diseases, tuberculosis and other related diseases began to drop.

We could even go on to look at some of the evolutionary processes of survival that we have seen. We could look at the black moth and how at one time it was not able to survive.

When coal was burned during the industrialized era in Great Britain and in Europe the coal created soot on all of the buildings. All of a sudden the black moth, which had not evolved to be able to hide itself, was now able to survive longer because of the soot, while the white moth became endangered. This sounds like a silly example but it shows us how changes in the ecosystem come about because of pollution and climate change. Creatures that were not able to live in certain latitudes are now able to exist in different latitudes.

We have to be very careful that we are not looking at a future where over the next 10 years diseases that we believed were subtropical become diseases that are endemic in countries such as Canada where we felt we would never have those diseases.

Human portability, the movement of people around the globe, also increases the chances of infectious diseases spreading, and not only spreading but thriving and growing in our communities.

As a physician I want to stress that the issue of Kyoto, the ratification of Kyoto and the decrease in greenhouse gas emissions by 20% as recommended by the Canadian Medical Association is something we need to consider, not only in terms of the cost to industry but in terms of the cost in human suffering, in human disease, in mortality and in morbidity rates. There is a cost to what we are looking at now as a health care system that is already overburdened with having to deal with an increasing number of diseases and having to deal with new diseases for which we are not prepared and for which we do not have the expertise among our physicians at the moment to even look at subtropical diseases.

We do not have a lot of physicians in this country who are experts in subtropical diseases. We need to start asking ourselves what we are going to do about that.

These are some of the issues that I wanted to highlight because there is a human potential to Kyoto. It is not simply the ecosystem and climate, which are all seeming abstract things sometimes in the minds of some of my colleagues across the way, this is about real human beings. This is about our children. This is about our parents. This is about the increase in morbidity and mortality that we are going to be seeing if we do not ratify Kyoto and if we do not look at what is coming in the wake of the increased amount of climate change, the floods and the water pollution that is going to occur.

I will close by saying that I hope the members across the way have listened and that they are aware that this affects them even closer than they believe. It affects their children, their families and their communities.

SupplyGovernment Orders

6:15 p.m.

The Acting Speaker (Ms. Bakopanos)

It being 6.15 p.m., pursuant to the order made earlier today, every question necessary to dispose of the business of supply is deemed to have been put, and the recorded division is deemed to have been demanded and deferred until Tuesday, October 29, 2002, at 3.00 p.m.

A motion to adjourn the House under Standing Order 38 deemed to have been moved.

SupplyAdjournment Proceedings

6:15 p.m.

Canadian Alliance

David Anderson Canadian Alliance Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK

Madam Speaker, as we have just heard, there is a human cost to Kyoto. There will be a particularly large cost in many of the rural communities, especially some of those I represent.

On October 8, I asked the government two simple questions regarding the impact of Kyoto on agriculture. First, why is the government moving to ratify Kyoto without knowing the effect it will have on Canadian farmers and farm families? Second, why is the government moving to ratify Kyoto when our competitors have determined that it will devastate agricultural economies?

The lack of study in Canada in particular regarding the impact of the proposed implementation of the Kyoto protocol is alarming. We did a lot of work trying to find any Canadian studies that would address this. There were none. One of the few studies available was a 1998 U.S. study that concluded the following:

--compliance with the Kyoto Protocol could increase U.S. farm production expenses by $10 billion to $20 billion annually and depress annual farm income by 24 percent to 48 percent. Higher fuel oil, motor oil, fertilizer, and other farm operating costs would also mean higher consumer food prices, greater demand for public assistance with higher costs, a decline in agricultural exports, and a wave of farm consolidations. In short, the Kyoto Protocol represents the single biggest public policy threat to the agricultural community today.

We know that farmers' number one concern is rising input costs and it is imperative that the federal government provide farmers and farm families with a thorough examination of Kyoto's impact on Canadian agriculture, including answers to several questions.

We have grouped them under three main headings. The first of the three is: What is going to be the impact of higher energy prices on farm families? We know that energy prices and the cost of producing energy will be going up with Kyoto. What will be the impact of higher energy prices? That is one of our questions.

Second, and also important, is this: What would be the impact of non-implementing countries? If we implement the protocol and other countries, particularly Australia and the United States, do not, what is going to be the impact on Canadian agriculture? We will see a decline in competitiveness. We already compete against European subsidization and against the U.S. treasury. It is important that we know what this protocol would do to our competitiveness in agriculture.

Third, we need to ask how the protocol mechanisms are going to impact farmers. If the science and technology regarding carbon sequestration is developed, and it is not right now, will the government commit to having farmers retain ownership of the credits? We have talked to people who know about this and they have assured us that there is no accurate way to measure the credits right now, yet the government seems to be giving the impression that it can do that. The question is, will the government commit to having farmers then retain ownership of these credits? It has talked about the fact that it would like to keep them at the government level. We need to know what is going to happen with those protocol mechanisms.

Other people are asking questions as well. The Grain Growers of Canada are asking how Kyoto will impact agriculture. The Canadian Cattlemen's Association is asking that question. Farmers are asking that question. SEPAC, the Small Explorers and Producers Association of Canada, has determined that Kyoto could push the cost of gasoline to $1 a litre. The Canadian fertilizer industry is concerned.

A paper presented at the International Agricultural Trade Research Consortium noted its concern as well. The American Farm Bureau Federation has found that Kyoto would push up input costs. A U.S. study done by Sparks Companies found that Kyoto would cause agricultural exports to fall and thus result in a loss of profitability.

The Canadian Alliance is concerned about the cavalier attitude the government has taken toward agriculture. When it comes to Kyoto, it does not know what it is doing, why it is doing it, or what the impact will be. It appears to be determined to charge ahead despite the negative impacts on agriculture.

SupplyAdjournment Proceedings

6:20 p.m.

Vancouver Kingsway B.C.

Liberal

Sophia Leung LiberalParliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Revenue

Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his questions and concern regarding Kyoto and agriculture.

Let me be clear, agriculture is very sensitive to climate. Agricultural productivity depends on many interrelated factors, but the importance of the climate change in the agricultural sector cannot be understated.

To not ratify Kyoto would put our agriculture sector in jeopardy. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body created by the respected World Meteorological Organization under the United Nations environment program, warns that severe droughts, such as that in southern Canada in 2001, are expected to become more frequent as the climate warms, perhaps doubling in frequency within the next century. Inaction is not an option. Canada needs to be part of a worldwide effort to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations.

Canada's 247,000 farmers manage 68 million hectares of land and millions of livestock. From my perspective that represents an enormous partnership opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Components of Canada's climate change plan will provide direct economic benefits for Canadian farmers. Ethanol and biodiesel create economic opportunities for agricultural communities. Enabling agricultural participation in emissions trading creates economic opportunity for agricultural and rural communities. This will be a win-win situation. Canadian industry will have access to low cost offsets. Canadian farmers can be financially rewarded by the market for the environmental benefits they provide to society.

More farmers are adopting environment friendly practices which reduce their emissions while increasing their efficiency. For a farmer this means there can be an economic payback for good environmental management, helping to reduce operating expenses and increase productivity.

Canadian farmers, whose strong entrepreneurial and innovative instincts are well known, are well aware of these opportunities and are eager to participate in those efforts. This is just one example of the innovation opportunities that our climate change plan will open for Canadians.

Action on climate change will spur the use of innovative new technologies and greater efficiencies for agriculture and create new farm income opportunities. Those products, technologies and efficiencies will provide new economic opportunities for the agricultural sector.

We are now working with all sectors, provinces and Canadians to finalize a plan for taking the next step toward meeting our target. The agricultural sector will be an important partner in meeting our Kyoto target. The government's--

SupplyAdjournment Proceedings

6:20 p.m.

The Acting Speaker (Ms. Bakopanos)

The hon. member for Cypress Hills--Grasslands.

SupplyAdjournment Proceedings

6:20 p.m.

Canadian Alliance

David Anderson Canadian Alliance Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK

Madam Speaker, I would just like to react to a couple of the things I have heard.

Farmers have done their part for the environment. My neighbours and my friends have changed their farming practices and they are contributing to a good, solid environment. Interestingly enough, this is the first solid commitment I have heard by the government in giving farmers carbon credits and some opportunity to take advantage of them. I look forward to hearing more about that.

The problem is that we are talking about a few dollars an acre. The concern that we have is that through the lowered competitiveness and the rising input costs, those costs will be far more than the benefits farmers will get from the few dollars per acre or less than they will get for carbon credits.

I do not appreciate the fearmongering that we will see more frequent drought and more severe weather. We do not have the information yet that proves that is the case. We are working now with no evidence that climate change is beyond the normal parameters within which it has been predicted, yet we are bringing in an oppressive set of regulations that will devastate Canadian agriculture.

SupplyAdjournment Proceedings

6:25 p.m.

Liberal

Sophia Leung Liberal Vancouver Kingsway, BC

Madam Speaker, we are working with industry, the provinces and Canadian farmers to finalize a plan for taking the next step toward how we will meet our target. The agricultural sector will be a very important partner in working with us toward meeting that target. It is very important for us to be involved with the farmers too.

I also want to mention that the agricultural policy framework is proof of the government's strong commitment to help farmers attain higher levels of economic and environmental performance through innovation.

SupplyAdjournment Proceedings

6:25 p.m.

The Acting Speaker (Ms. Bakopanos)

The motion to adjourn the House is now deemed to have been adopted. Accordingly, this House stands adjourned until tomorrow at 10 o'clock, pursuant to Standing Orders 24(1).

(The House adjourned at 6.26 p.m.)