Madam Speaker, I will be dividing my time this afternoon with the hon. member for Edmonton Southwest.
I would like to start by talking a bit about provincial opposition to the Kyoto accord. I think we are all aware of the fact that eight of the ten provincial governments in the country oppose the ratification of the Kyoto accord, each for its own reason. If we look at the reasons, we would find they are very sound. The different reasons are the fact that there are a wide variety of different interests geographically spaced across the country which will be negatively affected by the Kyoto accord. The premier of Newfoundland is opposed to it, the premier of British Columbia is opposed to it and so are most of the premiers in between.
I want to begin my comments today by reading the observations of the premiers of Newfoundland and Alberta. The premier of Newfoundland, Roger Grimes, says the following, “I am at a loss as to what the Prime Minister means when he says we are going to sign on to the Kyoto accord. There are just too many questions”.
The premier of Alberta has said, along the same lines, signing the Kyoto accord is like “signing a mortgage for a property you have never seen and for a price that you have never discussed”. He goes on to say, “At the very least, the federal government must first evaluate costs, create a realistic implementation plan and then consult with the provinces, including a meeting with the first ministers”.
Yesterday the Ontario legislative assembly, my province, voted to reject the Kyoto accord as well. That now means that a substantial majority of the provinces in Canada, representing a substantial majority of our population, are opposed to the Kyoto accord.
This is significant, not really because it represents a wide variety of interests across the country and a wide cross section of the Canadian people, but also because of the fact that the Canadian constitution is written in such a way that it is not possible to implement an international treaty that affects areas of provincial jurisdiction, as this treaty does, without having provincial consent.
There was a very important court case in 1937 in which our then supreme court, the judicial committee of the Privy Council, ruled that Canadian provincial jurisdictions must be regarded for treaty making purposes as being water tight compartments. They are not within the jurisdiction of the federal government. The federal Crown cannot sign treaties on behalf of each of the provincial crowns.
As things stand now, eight of the ten provincial crowns are not on side and therefore it is simply impossible to implement a plan in a coherent and efficient manner, if such a thing is even possible under the parameters of the Kyoto accord, because of that provincial refusal to sign on.
Notwithstanding the bravado of the Prime Minister about ratifying the treaty by the end of the year and in advance of any meaningful and substantive work on a deal that would include the provinces, the fact is that this simply cannot go forward.
It is possible for the government to ratify the accord with an implementation plan that ignores provincial jurisdictions but it would likely be struck down piece by piece in the courts as being an infringement of provincial jurisdictions. It would certainly be unjust, inequitable and it would inevitably involve transfers of wealth from certain sectors of the economy to certain other sectors and from certain regions of the country to certain others. We can only guess the ways in which this might occur. However we already are getting a taste before we even know what the details of any federal implementation plan would be when we watch the battling back and forth. We are starting to see the war of words developing between some of the different provincial governments as they jostle for position.
The kind of non-consultative, unilateralism that the federal government is employing of course encourages this sort of thing. Rather than bringing the premiers in to negotiate with each other on our behalf in some form of conclave where we have a sense of where the federal government is going, it has put us in a position where the premiers are forced to try to raise the stakes of offending their region to create pressures on us in this House so that the federal government will wind up adjusting the implementation plan to suit their region at the expense of some other particular region. It strikes me that this is highly divisive and highly destructive of our national unity and of our unity of purpose as a country. All this is without saying anything about the merits of the accord itself.
Looking at the accord itself, I want to point out some of the problems with it. These have been addressed to some degree already today but they are worth stating again.
The Kyoto accord and the way in which we might deal with through the purchase and trading of emission credits is treated as if it were some version of the emission credits that exist within some jurisdictions or the trading of pollutants among producers of certain types of pollutants.
When there is a single country or perhaps a single province in which pollutants can be traded, a cap is set and the amount of pollutants produced by each producer is determined. Low cost producers, those who can reduce their pollutants easily and at a low cost, proceed to lower their amounts of pollutants below the amount that would be legally required. They take additional credits accumulated and sell them to those to whom the cost of producing their pollutants would be greater, thereby producing the maximum possible gain for the least possible amount of dollars.
That is a great model when it is done domestically. However internationally and under the Kyoto treaty what is produced in fact is a farce because everybody negotiated their own level ahead of time. Canada did not participate nor did it fight hard to get a generous cap set on its emissions of CO
2
. While the negotiations for Kyoto were underway, the Australians negotiated to have an increase permitted in the level of CO
2
that they could produce. Canada did not. Instead we are to reduce our level of emissions to 6% below what they were in 1990, notwithstanding the fact that our current level of emissions is now 20% higher than it was in 1990.
Other countries in the developing world managed to negotiate a deal where they were excluded from the targets. Countries in the so-called transitional world, the ex-communist countries of eastern Europe, were excluded because they were in the position of transforming themselves from having dirty coal fired and very inefficient factories and mines.
The countries of the European Union took advantage of the fact that without any population growth, in fact in some cases with the expectation of population decreases, their emissions would basically flatten out on their own. The Americans simply refused to go along.
Canada finds itself in the position of being the only country in the world that is actually forced to reduce its emissions to any great number. The target of 240 megatonnes of reductions that Canada faces is virtually unique in the world. There are a wide variety of countries that have negotiated their own special deals and to whom we would now turn to buy our credits, perhaps Russia for example, or perhaps from a country that produces far more CO
2
than Canada does. If one leaves CO
2
aside and talks about actual pollutants, Russia is a far worse polluter than we are, yet it negotiated a better deal for itself.
We are not talking about transferring within some cap in order to reduce worldwide CO
2
levels. We are talking about something that will have no impact on CO
2
levels produced either worldwide or even in Canada. We are talking about purchasing a piece of paper that says, for example, that Russia, which has negotiated a better deal with us, is transferring some of the benefit to us at a great cost to our economy in paying the money to it for these credits.
We are really not talking about pollution. We are not talking about reducing CO
2
. We are not talking about climate change. The Kyoto accord in practice has the effect of creating a new kind of foreign aid program whereby we are not giving to those who are most needy or those who could make the best use of our foreign aid dollars. We are in fact transferring money from Canada to those countries that have managed to negotiate the best deals for themselves in the original Kyoto negotiations.
This does nothing for the environment. This is unfortunately a joke. Should this treaty come before the House for ratification, I hope members will decide not to ratify it.