Mr. Speaker, I am concerned with the Alliance member's remarks in trying to make a rural-urban difference in the matter of the Kyoto accord. He said that when people get 100 kilometres outside a city there is no problem or words to that effect. I sincerely would like to persuade him otherwise.
I represent a rural riding that is an hour and a half to two hours outside Toronto. In the last two summers on the worst smog days of the year, the pollution capitals of southern Ontario were Peterborough, which is a small city of 60,000 to 70,000 people, and the village of Omemee, which has a couple of thousand people. Both are well outside the city of Toronto. On those days it was possible to feel the loss of lung capacity. People who went outside and exerted themselves could feel the poison in the air.
The hon. member is quite right that most of the pollution is produced in the cities, but to think that means rural people can forget about it is a mistake. The pollution rises in a plume over the cities and then spreads over the rest of the country and the rest of the world.
The member mentioned his northern riding. I can say there have been poisons found in the breast milk of Inuit women. In the same way that Peterborough is a focus for the plume of pollution from Toronto, the north is the final source of the pollution from the industrialized part of this hemisphere.
This poisoning of the atmosphere affects us all.