The provinces do not get it. The farmers do not get it. The foresters do not get it. What does the government not get about this? The government then is into a grab in the area of the provinces.
The members from Quebec have to realize that the feds are lying. Once we ratify there will be penalties. The member from the Bloc is a good friend of mine. I respect him. He cares about the environment. He is on our environment committee. He does a great job on that committee. However he has to understand that the federal government is grabbing something that belongs to the provinces.
By going ahead with the ratification, we are giving the government a blank cheque, which it will cash. When it cashes it, we will never get an implementation plan that will consider the provinces. That is why the premiers are not meeting and that is why the environment ministers are not meeting with the federal government on Friday. It is because it is a grab. The members from Quebec have to understand that.
The next point is investment in renewable energy and innovative technology. The government has finally come to something that perhaps makes some sense. Let us examine that and see what it means by that. First, it says it is doing 12 megatonnes already. It says it is already doing something, and that is 12 megatonnes.
It says that it will target 10% of new electricity generation from green sources. It is saying that 10% of our power in this country has to come from green energy. Alberta and Quebec are the only two provinces moving toward that goal, and, of course, they are doing that by introducing wind power and electricity generated from water, hydroelectricity. All those things are achieving that green energy.
However the government says that any new projects must be 10% green. The provinces that do not have hydro will be hit pretty hard by that. It will be pretty hard on some provinces that may not have the economics to make it happen. It will be hard on Saskatchewan when SaskPower is saying that it cannot convert its coal generation plants that quickly to some other form. What will we do, turn the lights out? It is already having economic problems.
It also hits Atlantic Canada pretty hard because it is just about to have a huge resource base in the area of oil and gas and mining.
I will go back to that cab driver in Halifax who said to me that Atlantic Canadians were just finally getting on their feet and the federal government was going to whack them again. This time it will be Kyoto. This is another lost promise and a lost opportunity for Atlantic Canada.
Yes, we can achieve that. We can achieve much better than that but we need to have a plan. We need to have a plan that has worked, that is in the right time and that will work as the technology develops.
We are going to partner in clean coal technology projects. That is interesting because one clean coal technology project, a pilot plant, which has been in the planning for 10 years, will be coming on stream in 2008. This does not happen very fast. It takes 10 years from the time the government decides to go ahead with a project until it actually comes on stream.
Clean coal technology is there. It is in Europe and in the U.S. and, yes, Canada should use clean coal technology. The government is saying that could save us 4.5 megatonnes.
The government says that we should partner in a proposal for a CO
2
pipeline system. I think that refers to the taking of CO
2
and sequestering it in the ground. A lot of research is being done on that. It is being done in Texas and in other parts of the world. Russia even tried a project of sequestration of CO
2
. Canada is getting into that and that is good; that is 2.2 megatonnes. Look at how much we have to do to save megatonnes. It is not that easy. When we have to hit 260 megatonnes it is not that easy to all of a sudden get rid of those 240 megatonnes. How do we do it? That is the very point.
I did not mention that clean coal technology would save 4.5 megatonnes. If 10% of our energy was from green sources we could save 3.9 megatonnes. Even if it were 50% it is still not very much. If members will remember, we were getting 30 megatonnes for our sinks even though we did not know what they were.
I must again remind the members from Quebec that just having green energy is not the whole solution to the megatonne problem. There are a whole bunch of other things. People give off CO
2
through driving cars, riding in trains, riding in buses, and all kinds of manufacturing. Manufacturers produce a lot of CO
2
. What the people in Ontario must understand is that they will get hit because they will have to reduce their output of CO
2
by 20%. It is just that simple.
The government says that we must consider investment in the next generation technology for low cost nuclear power. Did that one sneak through somewhere? I do not know what people think about that, but the Canadian government has always been committed to nuclear power. We in fact have kept that industry alive for a long time.
Yes, I have met with people from the nuclear industry and they feel they can cut costs. Right now, however, the nuclear industry is about eight times more expensive than the coal fired generation plant. Now we have another cost. Maybe the nuclear industry can improve on that. Maybe it can be brought down closer to conventional. However the industry does not think it can do that right away.
What about the issue of waste from nuclear power plants? What about building nuclear power plants on faults? What about all the environmental problems. I would really like to know if the Suzuki Foundation, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and the World Wildlife Fund all support nuclear energy. I assume that they do because they support Kyoto and they support the government's plan. I think from now on we must assume that those agencies all support nuclear power.
I am not aware that our party supports holus-bolus nuclear power plants. I know the government does because it finances it. I guess all the environmental groups support nuclear power. I wonder if they will be cut off from their international roots because Greenpeace and the Sierra Club certainly oppose it in the U.S. and Europe.
The Canadian groups support it because they support the government and the ratification of Kyoto. What other assumption could we draw? I have to assume that. We could ask them about old growth forests. They do not absorb as much CO
2
. The environmental groups cannot have it both ways.
I repeat for those who were not here yesterday that I am an environmentalist. I am proud to be an environmentalist. I want to preserve the environment. That is what my training would show.
Let us talk about the other actions. I think we hit a pretty important one there. It is an awfully important thing to look at when we discuss it with these various groups.
What about other actions? One would be to expand Canadian industry programs for energy conservation, 0.7 tonnes. We will have industry programs. I am not sure what they are. We will reduce flaring and venting of waste gases on a voluntary basis by four megatonnes.
I would like to see us stop all venting and burning of waste gases. I talked earlier about how it bothers me to see those flares burning into the air, hundreds of them, when I know there is technology that is being used around the world. Little tiny plants are put beside the wells to capture the energy. They are cogeneration plants. That electricity is fed into the grid. It works, so let us use it. How much does it cost? I am not sure of the figures, but I have been told it costs $30,000 to $50,000 for one of these units. That would probably be made back in a matter of months, not years, from selling power into the grid.
Why is it not done? I do not know. Maybe more government pressure is needed to do it, but they are doing a lot of that now on a voluntary basis.
The Canadian government will purchase a minimum of 10 megatonnes of credits from the international market. That keeps sneaking in here.
We discussed this earlier. That means the government is going to buy them and serve as banker. It is going to distribute them among Canadian companies, I assume for sale. Think of the bureaucracy that would be needed to handle that item. Why are we doing that? Why would we want to set up an international agency to buy credits to redistribute through the country? How would that benefit Canadians?
The next point is really important. It is why this debate is important and why we should be here until Christmas. The government challenges individual Canadians to reduce emissions by one tonne per person and encourages them to operate their homes more efficiently, buy more fuel efficient vehicles, reduce car usage by 10% and retrofit their homes.