Obviously. We do not have to be a rocket scientist to know it will make that house cost more. Who does that affect? It affects young Canadians. It affects the family where both parents are working, trying to make a go of it and get a house of their own. That is going to put the price of those houses out of their reach. That single mom is not going to be there. It would affect jobs right across the whole country.
What does the government not understand about this? It says it is going to retrofit 20% of the houses and that is how it will get its credits. If it does that sort of thing, it is going to shut down the housing industry. People will not be rushing out to retrofit their homes.
Should we do something? Yes. We should change our light bulbs. Let us start there. Let us encourage people who can afford it to put in triple pane glass. Yes, we should do it. Yes, we should reinsulate our houses as we have the money to do it. Should we be forced by international law to do it? There are penalties when we sign on to Kyoto and we had better not forget it.
We need to target cooperation. I drive from Red Deer to Calgary and I see all those oil wells flaring. I do not like those flaring oil wells and oil companies do not like me telling them that. They could put a baby cogeneration plant on top of that well, turn that heat into electricity and put it into the power grid. They do not have to flare those emissions into the air. They do not have to release that CO
2
What do we need to do to fix that? The government needs to say, “Look guys. This is bad for your image. It is bad for business. It is bad for the environment. Little Johnny's health could be affected by this. Fix it”.
Should government have no role? No, it should have a role. It should show leadership. It should show a vision, that it wants to fix things. There are examples of how to do that.
When we talk about conservation, our party would be into that. We would be into encouraging adaptation. We would be into encouraging industry to come up with new and better ways to deal with the problems. We certainly would be actively involved in the Fraser Valley saying, “There is no way that you will run your power lines down the centre of Abbotsford. There is no way that you will use our aquifer. There is no way that you will dump your sewage into the Sumas River and if you do, you will pay big time.”
That is not being a bad neighbour. That is just saying that we protect our environment, that we have a health problem and we will fix it. We should be sitting down with the U.S. to deal with this problem. We cannot have these transborder problems the way they exist in terms of pollution. We need solutions to that. Government needs to show leadership there. All Canadians want that. To say that an Alliance government would buy into industry's idea of just pollute or do whatever is totally wrong.
Industry knows that is not smart. Industry knows it is good to be green and it is good to show it cares about the people who work for it and for its neighbourhood. That is why it gives money to all kinds of charities and why it does all kinds of things. If the government provides companies with leadership, then I know those companies will be on side. I know we can encourage that and do a lot for that.
In terms of the three planks of a plan that the Alliance Party would have, yes, we would have conservation there. We would have sensible, common sense conservation. We would have conservation based on working with the provincial governments, with industry and with citizens to improve things.
I was really surprised when I came to Ontario 10 years ago and found out that it did not have things like recycling and that it did not have nearly the programs that I took for granted and that I thought everybody did. Now these programs are coming into effect but they were not there when I first came here. I am really surprised at the amount of salt that is used, salt that runs down the drain and into our rivers. I am really surprised about that. I am really surprised that we do not use alternatives to that.
This country has a lot of environmental problems. I am shocked that we do not know about the water, about our aquifers. That is shocking. I am shocked that we do not have any kind of plan to clean up contaminated sites. I am shocked that we are simply talking about those poor people in northern Saskatchewan with their uranium mines. I am shocked that we are just ignoring them. It is shocking that the Liberals, who supposedly care so much about our native people, have done nothing about the fact that most native reserves have boil water warnings.
It is amazing that the Liberals have such a lousy environmental record. It is amazing that the environmental Auditor General can find so many flaws in what the government has done. The fact is that it has signed 200 agreements. She has audited 60 of them and the government has not lived up to them. It is shocking that it does not deal with contaminated sites.
The government keeps talking about its environmental record and the environment Auditor General said that it is leaving a horrible environmental legacy to our children and our grandchildren.
A member in the House said “Probably the member for Red Deer does not care about his children and his grandchildren”. Anybody who knows me would know that I probably care about them more than anything else in this whole world. That is what this is about. We need to do something. We need to have a plan for dealing with pollution and greenhouse gases, which is why conservation is the way to go.
It is great that the government can talk about it so much, that the whole front row over there can talk about it and leave their cars running all day out front. Just think about that image. If we go out there right now, those cars will be running. Some of them have been there since seven this morning and they are still running. The only reason that the chauffeur leaves is to get a gas refill. Canadians need to have that image of the government and its conservation. That is what it means.
The Liberals would choose not to see that. They may all go out the back door today so they do not have to see that what I am saying is true, but that is conservation.
I heard a member across say that those cars sit there for five or six minutes. Did he help write this report? It sounds like it, because that is the same kind of fictitious statement that is in the report. It is not true that they sit there for five or six minutes. They are sitting there hour after hour. That is the image for Canadians. That is the image that will cause Canadians to say, “Defeat Kyoto”. That is the image that Canadians will have to say, “You guys are not telling us the facts about Kyoto”. That is the image that Canadians will have of the government when it comes to Kyoto.
Do we need a plan on conservation? Yes, we need a definite plan. We need to change our light bulbs. We need to look at efficiencies of energy. That is a major plank in how we go about doing that. We cannot just talk about it. We must do it. That has to be the main thing.
What about transitional fuels? We could spend a lot of hours talking about transitional fuels, and a lot is being done there. Toronto is looking at various types of bio-diesel and at using soy oil and canola oil in our gas. We have to remember, though, that energy is consumed in manufacturing those things, too, turning them into oil that is mixed in with gas. It is not as cut and dried as it sounds. However there are all kinds of possibilities with hybrid vehicles, with bio-diesel, with the use of ethanol and methane, and some interesting technology, which I think TransAlta is probably one of the Canadian leaders in this area, and that is the sequestration of CO
2
The Alberta Research Council has developed a project, which I visited and I think I understand. It pumps CO
2
down into deep coal beds. There are coal beds underneath most of this country. These coal beds have a lot of methane in them. They are deep and not economical to mine but they have methane in them. By pumping CO
2
into these coal seams it forces out methane which is then collected on the other end. Methane burns much cleaner than natural gas. The methane can then be used in power plants in all kinds of ways. The emissions have to be watched at the other end but that can be handled by scrubbers if the company is committed to clean burning energy.
The point is that there is technology that will help us bridge the gap between today and the future. It is not about doing nothing. It is not about status quo.
I am an environmentalist, Mr. Speaker. I could review my past for you but I know you can check the Hansard for that. I care about the environment.
These environmental groups often come up with statements that members of the Alliance Party are flat earth people. That is anything but the truth. The truth is that we are saying the status quo is not good enough. Canadians are saying that the status quo is not good enough. Canadians are saying that they want the environment fixed. They not only want us to fix the air environment but they also want us to fix the water.
Time will be a real problem here but if people really want to read about water, I have an excellent, award winning book that talks about the water around the world. If people really care about the environment, they will take much of what is in the book and realize what the problems are when we do not have our aquifers mapped and when we do not understand about the charge and recharge of those aquifers.
In Canada we do not know whether we are in a positive or negative charge in our various aquifers. We do not even know where most of our aquifers are. We take it for granted that we all have clean water but we do not. We have all kinds of water problems. If we put half the energy that Kyoto will cost us into water, we could purify the water of the world with what will be expended. We have to remember that the government has spent $1.6 billion already on Kyoto and what do we have to show for it?
I will quote some more from this book on water but I will get to that in a bit.
As far as clean coal technology is concerned, a pilot project is scheduled to start in 2008. It is an interesting project. It will clean up the coal that we burn. Most Canadians do not know this, but over 50% of our power comes from the burning of coal. Most people would probably say that hydro was the biggest and that nuclear power was pretty big in Ontario. It is not. Coal is what we use in Canada and it produces a lot of CO
2
We are going to have to start using clean coal technology. One might say that the technology is not there yet, but the only place that it is not available is in Canada. Europe has been using clean coal technology for a long time. Parts of the U.S. are using clean coal technology. Canada is starting to use clean coal technology but we have a long way to go. We have to stop approving conventional coal power plants. We are still approving those. I know some provinces will not like to hear us say that but that is common sense and it shows that we will deal with the problem.
Exploring the area of transitional fuels of various hybrid vehicles using propane or natural gas will help us get through the next 10, 15 or 20 years until we have the real answer. The real answer and the most exciting answer is in the area of alternate energy.
There are a lot of skeptics of alternate energy. I call them that because some of them have a vested interest and some of them do not want this technology to develop too quickly. We should recognize that. It will be a major change in the way we do business when we go to alternate energy.
Let us explore the kind of alternate energy we might have and what we might use. The fastest growing alternate energy source is wind power. No matter what we know or do not know about wind power, it does have its limitations at present, but it is one of many solutions. It is part of the mix. If we went to a country like Germany, for example, we would see three or four windmills in a quarter section of land. Those windmills generate a lot of power into its grid. In countries like Denmark, windmills make up 20% of its power grid today. Ireland is building major wind farms.