Their motors are running. CO
2
is being released and carbon energy is being burnt. We have to stop doing that. They need to set an example right out front. Right now we could go out there and count them. There are 20 to 30 cars running out there. They will be running all day. That is the example that is being set.
When I was driving on Highway 401 on Sunday, I was looking at all of the people driving beside me. They were all going at between 120 to 130 kilometres in all kinds of big vehicles. I thought to myself, do these people understand what they are getting committed to in the House of Commons, that they are going to have to stop driving at 130? They are going to have to drive at 80 and have smaller vehicles. They will have to put little Johnny into a tighter vehicle with his hockey equipment when they take him to the game. They will be impacted big time. I do not think they know that.
Certainly people in the audience in Hamilton did not know that. They stood up and said that they did not think it was going to affect them. The guy who worked at the Windstar Ford factory that I passed on my way from Toronto stood up in the audience and said, “I didn't think my job was going to be impacted”. He makes Windstars. That is just one example. There are other big vehicles. They are not going to be saleable in Canada. Let us go back to my graph. Twenty-five per cent of CO
2
emissions comes from transportation, so we have to cut transportation. We have to cut by 23% across the country, and what kind of country do we have? We have a cold country. We have a big country. We have a country without the infrastructure to allow us to get around.
It is fine for the Europeans to say that they can just use their trains more, but here we do not have the trains to use. Today CN announced another 1,000 job cuts. We are getting less trains, not more trains. We are getting less rapid transit, not more rapid transit. The government is just talking. It is not introducing any of these things.
As for landfill gases, they make up 4%. We should not have landfills anymore. They were outlawed in Europe 40 years ago. This 4% is a small amount, whereas 16% of our CO
2
comes from power generation, so let us examine that.
What does this 16% mean? Fifty per cent of the power in Canada comes from the burning of coal. The old, traditional methods of burning coal are among the dirtiest producers of CO
2
. Clean coal technology has been developed in Europe and the U.S., but 2008 is the earliest we will be experimenting with it in Canada. That will be happening in Alberta through TransAlta. In 2008, we will have some new coal technology in operation.
What is the government thinking, then, when it tells Canadians that Kyoto will not affect them? The lights in this place have been dimmed on occasion. I think that maybe the government's next step should be to turn the lights out totally because most of what it does seems like it has them out anyway.
Sixteen per cent of our CO
2
emissions is from power generation and the government is telling Canadians that converting all those coal-powered generating plants to natural gas, nuclear power or whatever, will be cheap, that it will not cost money. We would have to use 23% less power than we are using today and what is the best way to get people to stop using gas and power? The best way, of course, is to raise the price.
At these international meetings I have heard the Europeans say that Canadians should be paying $2.50 per litre of gas. In Ontario, it is 66¢ a litre and in Alberta 72¢. Many economists say that in Canada next year a litre of gas will cost $1. That is a long way from $2.50, but that has to be the trend if we are to live with Kyoto.
One does not have to be a rocket scientist to look at these figures and understand them. Twenty-five per cent of our CO
2
emissions is from transportation. If we want to cut our CO
2
, which is what the government is asking us to commit ourselves to, we have to cut transportation. If we are to sign Kyoto, with its 23% below 1990 levels, we have to cut our use of power.
What else? There is mining and manufacturing. Seventeen per cent of our emissions of CO
2
comes from mining and manufacturing. What does that mean? We must remember that mining and manufacturing use energy. If the price of energy goes up by 23% or the use is reduced by 23%, it will be like what SaskPower announced. SaskPower said that if the government signs Kyoto, power rates in Saskatchewan would go up 25%. A half an hour later, and I happened to be on a talk show while this was happening, the president of IPSCO said that what that meant to IPSCO was that it could not pay 25% more for its power and it would have to move south of the border.
The Prime Minister says that we will not lose any jobs, that this will not cost any more money. How is that possible? Does he think Canadians are a bunch of dummies who cannot look at these figures and figure this out? At every town hall meeting where I have gone through these figures, they have figured it out real quick. They understand it totally and they say, “Yes, that will cost us more money. We're going to lose jobs because of it”. As I said, a person does not have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out.
Eighteen per cent of CO
2
emissions comes from oil and gas. One place most of it comes from is our tar sands development. They have improved their CO
2
emissions by reducing them by 30% and they feel that with technology they can go even further in reducing those emissions, but the bottom line is that the emissions are still there.
Does that mean we are not going to extract any more oil and gas? That is what one would assume. If we have to cut by 23%, that industry has to take that hit as well. If that industry has to take that hit, who is going to pay for it? There are the jobs. There is an investment freeze in the country. I would go to Venezuela or Malaysia to put my money in where I do not have those restrictions, because, we must remember, they are not part of Kyoto. Again I ask, how can the government say it is not going to affect some parts more than others?
When I was in Halifax three weeks ago, I asked a cab driver if he thought Kyoto was a good idea. He said, “I know what Kyoto is. It is about that global warming and it is about health”. I then asked him if he thought it would affect him. He said, “Darn right it will”. He said that Halifax finally has an industry that is giving the city jobs and growth. Halifax is booming. He asked me if I knew why it is booming. He said, “Do you see those oil rigs that are being constructed out in the harbour and that are in for repairs? That is why it is booming”. He said that Halifax finally has an industry that is paying the people money and giving them jobs and, because government is government, he said to me, “You are going to take this away from us at the very time we are about to achieve something ourselves”. That is coming from a cab driver, who is saying that he has it figured out, that the federal government is going to damage his way of life.
I am not saying we should not do anything, and I will come to that, but I need 10 days to talk about the alternatives in technology that we could come up with. I am not going to take 10 days because my voice might not last, but let us think about the figures that we have just gone through. Let us think about what has to get hit for Canadians and how it is going to affect them if we sign on to Kyoto: transportation, power generation, manufacturing and industry, lost jobs, lost opportunity, higher power rates, higher gas prices and a hit on our economy.
I do not understand how the Americans could figure this out, how the Australians could figure this out or how Mexico could figure this out. Brazil figured it out. China and India, in Delhi two weeks ago, said they were never going to be part of Kyoto, that they will not be shutting down their economies. All of these other major producers of CO
2
have it figured out, but we do not have it figured out. We are following along like little puppy dogs behind a Eurocentric plan that is out to get the U.S. That is my definition of Kyoto. I will elaborate on that geopolitical front a bit later when I have the opportunity.
So what is the Kyoto protocol? Let us go back and review that protocol. One of the major questions people ask is, what is the Kyoto protocol? It was signed in 1997. It requires 38 of the industrial countries to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases by an average of 5.2% below 1990 levels. The timeframe is that it must happen between 2008 and 2012. Fifty-five countries representing 55% of the emissions of industrialized countries must ratify Kyoto and then must enter into force in a legally binding agreement.
I have heard some people say that we can sign on to this and not have to live up to it. Let me read to the House from the Kyoto protocol about the penalties. It basically states that, according to the Marrakesh accord, nations that ratify Kyoto but do not meet their targets in round one by 2012 are penalized another 30% in emissions cuts and, in addition, such nations cannot sell carbon credits in round two. That makes it pretty clear that there are penalties associated with Kyoto.
Going on from the Kyoto protocol, it states, “in the case of compliance with emissions targets, annex 1 parties are granted 100 days after the expert review of their final annual emissions inventory has finished to make up any shortfall in compliance mainly through emissions trading”.
For Liberals out there or for Canadians out there who are listening to this, remember there are penalties. Beyond that, the European Union has said that it will introduce WTO action which will affect trade. There are definite penalties around the Kyoto protocol.
To go a little further into the history, because everybody asks what is Kyoto?, the environment minister in Ontario has said, “Kyoto is a Japanese car”. A lot of people are probably at the point where they really think Kyoto will not affect them and that it is some negotiated thing in a far off place, in a beautiful city in Japan. As I said yesterday, I expect that Kyoto probably wishes the meeting had not been there. It probably would have rather had it the Ottawa protocol and then the rest of the world could hate Ottawa. However the meeting was in Kyoto.
Let us go back to 1992. The United Nations framework on the convention of climate change included a legally binding voluntary pledge. I think a legally binding voluntary pledge is an oxymoron, but we signed it to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2000. We said we would freeze them and they would not increase.
Nobody did anything. If we look at most of the text of that, the whole purpose of it was the idea that within the United Nations there was a concept, probably correctly, that the north had developed all its natural resources, had been responsible for the production of CO
2
into the environment and now they should pay the price. They should transfer money from the north to the south. Most countries bought into that.
What they did not understand was that when the money was transferred to a dictatorship someplace else, that money would not be used for environmental cleanup or to help the people of that country. Instead it would be used to buy F-18s or to invest in Swiss bank accounts. That is what corrupt governments do. They do not think about their people and they usually do not think about the environment.
In 1995 everybody realized that no one was living up to these international agreements and by 1997 we went to Kyoto. We signed this protocol. Everybody in the House during that period will remember the questions which were asked in the House. We asked the then environment minister about the plan and what would happen in Kyoto? Would she agree to this agreement on climate change? Was there an economic plan? Had the provinces been consulted? She did that the week before she left in Regina.
These questions were asked and the answer we received in the House was not to worry about it. The Liberals would not sign anything that would affect us negatively. The Liberals would not do anything to the Canadian people, the provinces and industry that would damage the economy or cost any money. It sounded pretty innocent.
The environment minister went off to Kyoto, and it appeared the Prime Minister was in charge of the file. At that time it was made very clear what our plan was.
Our plan was to ensure that whatever the Americans agreed to that we would beat them. Let us think about that for a minute. We had to beat the Americans. The Americans went there with all kinds of doubts, knowing that it was an economic disaster. They said that they would go 5% below 1990 levels. The Europeans did not do as well. Australia went 8% above 1990 levels. Others could not decide on a figure but said that they would come up with it later. Canada said it would go 6% below 1990 levels and beat the Americans. That was then the triumph back in the House in December 1997, when our environment minister returned and stood up in the House and said, “We had a great victory. We beat the Americans”.
Nobody paid much attention at that time because we had signed hundreds of agreements. The Auditor General said that we signed 200 environmental agreements in the last 10 years. She audited 60 of them and we had been a failure in most of them. We had not done anything. Therefore most people thought Kyoto was just another agreement that we would sign and do nothing about it.
We have somewhat of an international reputation now for doing things like that. We even call the President of the country next door, which is one of our best friends and a superpower, names. We are not too bright when it comes to some of these international negotiations.
However we agreed and without a plan, we then put that on the back burner and basically did very little.
In 1998, in Buenos Aires, there was a meeting of all the members who had signed on to Kyoto. Most of them said that they had some real problems with it. They had done some economic planning and would have to cut power production, or cut the use of fuel or cut air service. They said they would have to do a lot to achieve the goals. They left Buenos Aires in 1998 with really little resolve and with little resolution to move forward.
In 2000, there was another meeting at The Hague of the members of this umbrella group. Most of them not only went to the meeting but they went and said that they could not achieve the targets and left. At this point, a number of countries put forward their problems.
Then in February we went to Trieste. It was interesting because at this point some countries were starting to get the idea of this Kyoto thing.
Russia said that it could be a pretty good deal for it. It could sell credits and get billions of dollars from other countries by selling these credits. The developing countries said that it was a good deal for them because they did not have to hit their targets. The other developed countries would have to hit targets but they could sell more things to those countries and that would be good for their economies.
France said that it was okay. It could hit its targets because it was 80% nuclear. As long as it had nuclear power, it could support Kyoto. France thought it was a good deal because it could then start selling energy to other countries because it had clean energy.
Remember that the European Union is made up of 15 countries that can interchange credits, They can take credits from one country to the other. They have an internal credit trading system.
It was interesting that Germany said that it was okay too. It had credits for all the deindustrialized East Bloc countries. Italy said that it was okay because it had a fixed population, 55% were over 65 and its birth rate was .2%. Therefore it did not have a big problem with that.
Europe is in a totally different ball game. It is smaller, has better transportation, is not as cold, et cetera.
The real crunch came after Trieste when Christine Whitman, the environment minister in the U.S., said that she thought the Americans could go along with it and would come up a different plan. The Europeans would have nothing to do with that. Therefore, in March of 2001 the Americans said that they were opting out of Kyoto. That was a major blow to Kyoto at that time. The Americans were out.
I will talk about the American emissions in a few minutes, but their emissions have been dropping. Thirty-nine states will probably beat Kyoto. That just shows that if the people, the industry and the politicians are behind something it can happen. California is a good example. We always like to say that the Americans are not doing anything. They doing way more than we are, and it is not just talk. They are actually accomplishing something.
We then got to Bonn in July 2001. The former deputy prime minister went there on our behalf. He was in a fog a lot of the time, but he said that we had to have sinks and that we had to have energy credits for forest and agriculture.
That was the first time we had heard that sort of thing. That should have been introduced way back in the 1990s. Clean energy credits and sinks were never introduced. As a result of that Canada, said that if it was not given the sink credits we would opt out of Kyoto. That was probably the wisest thing that any government official ever said.
The Europeans were so set on keeping us in that they said they would give us the sinks for 30 megatonnes credit. We did not have to tell them how we would get there or how we would monitor it or anything, they would just give it to us. It was a throw away to keep us in the agreement. Following up on that, and I will talk about sinks in a few minutes, Canada took that as a great victory.
That is some of the history.