Madam Speaker, one of the problems is that the whole Kyoto accord is essentially an accounting shell game. The response of the government in trying to deal with the Kyoto accord has been to engage in its own accounting tricks and games. It is talking about the credits it might get for natural gas exports. It can get supposedly 70 megatonnes of credits, except that the Kyoto accord will not allow it. Therefore, the argument is all nonsense.
There was a discussion of getting credits for forests and for clean farming which the federal government would take. Those are under provincial jurisdictions. It has no right to make that assertion. The first thing that would happen if the accord were ratified here and we attempted to claim these credits for the federal government is that the provincial governments would say that those were their credits. They would take the federal government to court. In my opinion they would win. Crown land in Canada is provincial Crown land, outside of the territories.
There has been talk of credits for clean agricultural practices that form carbon sinks. Farming is a joint jurisdiction so it is not clear exactly who gets the credits. Certainly the federal government does not get them all so there would be a battle over that. Not only are the interests of the provinces at stake versus the federal government. Farmers would very much have a legitimate interest if we were to ratify the Kyoto accord. It would result, as many people believe, in higher prices for fertilizer and for the fossil fuels that are used for tractors and for transportation of farm goods, which would generally drive up farming costs and drive down farming incomes.
We can expect that farmers would have a very legitimate interest as well as having some kind of credit for their farming practices and for the benefits that are produced with those carbon sinks. Those are some of the kinds of problems we would run into. Frankly this thing would be tied up in litigation for a very long time.