Mr. Speaker, I wish to indicate that I will be splitting my time with the member for Winnipeg Centre.
When we look at the motion that is before the House today we must appreciate that behind it are a number of different agendas. What those agendas reflect from the various parts of the House and the various political parties are strategies that have been deployed by all of the parties for some period of time.
I want to go through those strategies from the perspective of the various political parties as I see them. We have the strategy of the mover of the motion and his party which is one of delay, a delay that will allow that party, the Ralph Kleins of the world, following the lead of the Americans, President Bush and his cadre, the fossil fuel industry and frankly a whole bunch of other fearmongerers who are spreading and attempting to expand on the spread of fear across the country of what Kyoto might mean in its implementation. That clearly is their strategy.
Then we have the strategy of the government which, to be fair to it and to be accurate, is a non-strategy. It has been since 1996 when we committed as a country, the first country in the world, that in principle we would adopt and implement Kyoto.
Here we are six years later almost to the day and we still do not have the vote before the House to ratify Kyoto. This is a classic case of bungling on the part of the government that has given the official opposition and its allies all sorts of targets to shoot at.
Then we have a third strategy which is that of the federal New Democrats, a number of the environmental groups, the Bloc Quebecois and a number of members of the business community, which have said that we must ratify Kyoto, we must do it as quickly as possible and we must move on with implementation.
That strategy was being deployed in the early part of this year with a number of coalitions that came together at that time to pressure the government to stop bungling, delaying, and ignoring its responsibilities, and to get on with ratifying Kyoto and get on with the implementation.
It finally culminated in Johannesburg. I was in Johannesburg with a number of other members and listened to the Prime Minister tell the international community clearly and unequivocally that by the end of the year Kyoto would be before the House for ratification. He made the very clear statement as well, although implied but very clear, that the government would be supporting the ratification of Kyoto.
We still have not seen that resolution. We are still expecting the Prime Minister to comply with the statements he made to the international community in Johannesburg and put that resolution before the House before the end of the year and get it passed.
It is obvious from my comments that we will be voting against the opposition motion because it is only for the purpose of delay. We have heard from the Leader of the Opposition that this is not about waiting and seeing what the plan is going to be like. The motion is about delay because the members of the official opposition are absolutely opposed to Kyoto. That has to be clear. They do not want it and they will never change their position. Again, this motion is all about delay.
It does not matter what is in the plan or how extensive, detailed or favourable the implementation plan is to that political party. It will still vote against Kyoto. There can be no doubt about that.
It is rather interesting to listen to some of the commentaries and questions we have had from the Alliance Party, which are clearly questions and commentaries that indicate its opposition to Kyoto. At the same time we have members of that party in British Columbia who are actively involved in opposing what is an integral part of the American energy policy, which is to build over the next decade some 2,000 fossil fuel fired plants in the United States. A number of those will have their air pollution, toxins and smog dumped into Canada because of prevailing winds. British Columbia is one of the areas and my home riding of Windsor, Ontario is the greatest beneficiary of that policy.
Members of the Alliance are out on the streets demonstrating. We do not see that too often with that party. They are organizing their communities against that, yet they are here in the House opposing Kyoto. Let me say to them that if they were serious about concerns for their communities, they should be supporting Kyoto.
The other point I want to make about the delay that is incumbent in this motion is that we have had way too much of that. As a result we have had some serious negative consequences to the economy of the country. As we try to deal with developing some alternative energy sources we buy technology from elsewhere in the world because we have been so slow and laggard in developing our own.
I was in Calgary this summer. The city of Calgary has, for its public mass transit system, done an excellent job of creating a scenario that has all of the energy for that public transit system coming from wind power, with no assistance by the provincial government. This was all done at the municipal level. I was speaking to the representative from the company that supplies the power out of Pincher Creek. He told me that this was costing between 5% and 10% more because we had to buy the windmills and the generators offshore from Denmark and Germany.
It is the same story with regard to solar power. Japan has leapfrogged us and is now the leading country in the world in that technology. In another five years we will have to buy the technology from Japan rather than having developed it here and be able to export that technology to other parts of the world. We are losing our priority with regard to developing a hydrogen economy. We are losing that to the U.S. and other parts of the world, again Japan and Germany.
In terms of ratifying Kyoto, we have a responsibility at the international level in two respects. First, we have made a commitment. The international community is expecting us to do this because we have committed. We have lost a lot of credibility in the international community around environmental matters. We do not need to perpetuate that type of conduct. Second, we owe every other resident of this planet a moral duty to ratify Kyoto and to begin to implement it as rapidly as possible.
We do not live in isolation, not like the Americans who think they can stay away from Kyoto and somehow the rest of the world will not be affected. That is not the case and it will not be the case if we do that. We have a moral responsibility to them. We have promised it to them and we have to go ahead with it with no further delays.
As I said earlier, we definitely will vote against this motion today. We will continue to press the government to get a resolution before the House that will ratify Kyoto.