Madam Speaker, I will just review Bonn, just to pick up on that, because I think some of the members were distracted.
In Bonn we got our sinks. The Europeans felt that there was no real science there and that there was no real way to monitor that, but we got them. We said that we really had something, we had 30 megatonnes of which were taken care.
However remember that our gap is 240 megatonnes. We talked a bit about where we would find that 240 megatonnes. I will review that for every member, because I know every member wonders from where we will get those kinds of numbers. Obviously we know now, and everyone will have written this down, that 30 megatonnes is from our sinks.
In November 2001 our government went to Marrakesh keen on Kyoto and the rules were set. This would be the enforcement rule setting. There was a lot of squabbling and late nights by our negotiators, but they came up with some penalties. These penalties are outlined very clearly. Any Liberal who thinks there are no penalties associated with ratification of Kyoto should hear this from the Kyoto accord. These were agreed to in Marrakesh and whoever might be the prime minister in the future will have to know that there are penalties associated with the ratification of Kyoto. It will not be good enough to say that was done by another prime minister and it will will not work. There are penalties to an international agreement.
The ratification in the Kyoto protocol says, “According to the Marrakesh accords, nations who 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”.
It goes on to state, “In the case of compliance with emissions targets, Annex 1 parties--us--are granted 100 days after the expert review of their finding annual emissions inventory as finished to make up any shortfall in compliance mainly through emissions trading”.
What that says is we can buy the credits if we have not achieved our targets. That would be hundreds of billions of dollars to do that. Members in the House who think they may be prime minister in the future should read the Kyoto protocol. They should understand that there are penalties and they are definite penalties. For members who go out and say that we can ratify Kyoto and nullify it later, they are wrong.
Maybe we should read this again so that it is understood that there are penalties associated with the ratification of Kyoto. Therefore, when the members vote and if they vote in all conscience for the good of the Canadian people, they can never say again in public that they were not told there were penalties because there are definitely penalties.
Also articles from the European Union are being worked on legally to bring World Trade Organization claims against the U.S. We can get caught in that crossfire and those trade restrictions can be put on us when we have not lived up to our commitment. There is no way we will achieve our Kyoto credits.
Again this has to be emphasized in the House and there is no place else to do it. The media that keeps track of this needs to understand that anybody who plans to be prime minister of this country must understand that once Kyoto is ratified, by the end of this year according to the present Prime Minister, there will be penalties. The clock starts ticking then.
As soon as we are one of those countries representing 55% of the emissions, even though we have only 2% of the emissions, we are going to be subject to a 30% penalty that we have to buy our way out of if we do not live up to those commitments. By the year 2012 that commitment could be as much as 30% to 40% below 1990 levels. We will have to turn out all the lights. We will have to stop driving everything. It will bring wreckage on the economy.
I am starting to sound like the environment minister saying that the sky is falling. I do not like that because we have a better way, a better solution, a solution that anyone wanting to be prime minister of this country would want to hear. We have a better way, a made in Canada way, a way that does not trap us into this kind of European quagmire where they are out to get the Americans through the WTO. That is what it is all about. It says it clearly here.
I have heard members in the House who have said out on the public campaign trail that we have no penalties, that we are not going to do anything to hurt our country, and that if we cannot live up to Kyoto, we will not. To say that we will not when it is an international agreement is totally impossible. We cannot do that. That is a total piece of deceit. I would certainly hope that any members who are here now will be voting against that ratification until we know what the costs are, until we know what the plan is, and until we have an implementation.
The member for LaSalle--Émard made it very clear that he must have a plan, that he must have the costs, that he must know how it is going to impact the Canadian people. He cares, I think, about the mom and dad and their two kids. He cares about the people out there. That is why I know he is going to oppose the ratification of Kyoto until we have the costs, the implementation plan and the effect on our economy. It just has to be that way because we certainly would believe that the Prime Minister and future prime ministers are honourable men and know the facts before they do something.
Let me carry on because there are penalties associated with Kyoto and we must all know them. We must constantly quote from the Kyoto accord that the Prime Minister wants to sign.
We are at Marrakesh. The Russians are now getting some steam. They are saying that they want to double their forest credits, that Canada was given them in Bonn and they want them for themselves. They agreed and they doubled Russian credits for forests. That is fine. By the time we got to Johannesburg they really had a head of steam and were saying, “Hey, you thought that carbon credits were going to be millions? We want billions”. That is a whole other issue that we will talk about in a minute.
Because sinks are important and because they are part of this, if we talked to our agriculture critic he would say that is great, that these sinks might be a good thing, we have them as credits. That means that farmers are going to have a source of income from their methods of farming. If they change to direct seeding, do not use so much diesel fuel, do not work their crops under in the same way and so on, they are going to get credits. That is probably good for farmers.
The provinces would say it would be good because they would get those credits. Their farmers would not ask for any help because they would already have a source of income, so that should be good. Obviously agriculture and forestry are provincial matters so that should be clear. I do not think there would be any argument, but what has happened? In the government plan all of the credits for sinks are going to the federal government, which is using those credits. They are not going to the provinces, not to the farmers, not to the foresters, but to the federal government.
Today a premier is going before the courts to say it is a total infringement on their constitutional rights. There is not a Bloc member who should be able to vote for this because of the tearing away of those rights from the provinces. They should be totally opposed to this just because this is a grab of power, a grab of the resources of the Canadian provinces, let alone the farmers and the foresters.
Are sinks an important issue? We better believe they are an important issue. We better believe that the millions of dollars that will be spent in court challenges is a waste of money that should be going into new technology, making Canada a leader. We should not be wasting it on constitutional challenges. We should not be providing farmers and foresters with some hope and then tearing it away from them, but I guess that is the Liberal way of handling Kyoto.
What we will do with sinks is try to get more credit for them. How will we do that? First of all we have to establish what they are. Then we have to realize that different aged trees have different amounts of CO
2
absorption. An old tree does not absorb as much CO
2
as a young tree. That is a biological fact.
Obviously someone will have to go out and age all of our forests. That should be a really good bureaucratic job. When the person gets home and tells his mom what he does, he is measuring trees to see how old they are. That should take a while. I can see our endangered species police driving down one road, our species at risk police driving down another road, our forest counters driving down another road and our DFO officers with their flak jackets and machine guns driving down another road. Will everybody become a civil servant in order to handle all this administration?
We will have to go out to farms and tell farmers they did not direct seed this year, they plowed the field or they lit a little fire out there and burnt some of the stubble and we will have to charge them for that. We will have to put them in jail probably. We have put farmers in jail for lesser things than that. Burning a stubble field could be almost capital punishment or something, because we do not really care about our farmers or our foresters. I think this whole sinks issue is an example that we do not care about the provinces either. Again, it is an example is how they have been treated in this whole negotiation.
Where are we with sinks? We are in a big mess. There is a court challenge already started. The Bloc should be pretty upset about it. Already eight of the 10 provinces are totally opposed to it. Farmers and foresters should be really opposed to this.
The number of friends the government will have will be pretty small. The Liberals may find themselves to be like the Conservatives. I have often said that there are legacies. Certainly a former prime minister, Mr. Trudeau, has a legacy. In western Canada his legacy is the national energy program. No one has forgotten that. Bilingualism and multiculturalism programs are all legacies of Mr. Trudeau which people remember.
Mr. Mulroney certainly has a legacy. His legacy was increasing the debt many times as well as the GST. I do not think many Canadians have forgotten whose legacy that was.
I am totally convinced that the legacy of the present Prime Minister will be Kyoto. That legacy will be very similar to the legacy of those other guys. How many other Canadians have the same view?
I could not be any more convinced that Kyoto is the wrong way to go. I would not be doing town hall meetings across the country if I did not believe that. I would not be working seven days a week on this file or talking so long in the House if I did not believe that this is the worst treaty the country could ever sign. It will have the biggest impact on most Canadians than anything we have ever done in the House.
As this presentation goes on I see a lot of people on the other side taking notes and wondering about all of this. It is good that they are because this is stuff they can take home for their town hall meetings. I know they will want to inform their constituents. They will want to talk to the average person who will be affected by CO
2
Let me talk about the developing countries. They are definitely taking a stand right now, most notably India and China.
Where is China in this whole picture? Basically it has a huge supply of brown coal. It needs energy desperately. The Three Gorges dam will provide 10% of that energy. It has two nuclear power plants where no environmental assessment was done by the government but that is fine because it is just in China. Those nuclear power plants came on stream this month and are providing China with energy but it still has a huge shortage of energy. It will have to burn the soft coal unless Canada is innovative enough to come up with technologies.
Clean coal technology has been developed in Europe and the U.S. The first trial plant will be in Alberta in 2008 by TransAlta. We are not leaders. We cannot transfer this technology to China. We have guys lined up to transfer this technology.
Those countries made it very clear in Delhi that they will not handicap their economies by signing on to an agreement that will damage their economies beyond repair. They are growing and developing countries and they are going to stay that way. If Canada wants to help them be cleaner they will go with that, but if we are telling them to reduce their CO
2
and sign on to Kyoto in 2012 we can forget it. Those negotiations were to begin in 2005. They have said they will not be there. Is that significant or not? Yes it is.
Let us look at China. China on a graph is going straight up with CO
2
emissions because it is a huge developing country. It is now the number two producer of CO
2
in the world. The U.S. has gone from 30% CO
2
to 23% and in 2012 it will be 18%. China is 17% today. China doubles its CO
2
output every 12 years. In five years China will pass the U.S. and will become the number one emitter of CO
2
The government says it will cut the use of carbon by all Canadians by 20%. Is that not wonderful. We are 2% of the world. We are going to put ourselves in a tunnel and it will not make a bit of difference to the environment, but China is not going to be part of it and we do not care.
India is a huge developing country with over one billion people. That country is now number five in the production of CO
2
. India is growing; its industries are growing.
India and China say they are not going to be signing on to Kyoto any time in the future. They are not going to be annex II countries. They are not going to be coming to the table in 2005. How can the government sit here and say it is going to sign it?
I have heard, “We will sign it, but we do not have to implement it,” wink, wink, nod, nod. Need I say this again, there are penalties, there are penalties, there are penalties. We will come back to those penalties again. I hope that any future prime minister has gotten the message.
India is increasing dramatically. I know I cannot use props, but I have graphs that show what India and China are doing. I know I cannot use them but there are graphs that show all this and show the exact numbers.
Brazil and Mexico have no targets at all. They have no intention of signing on to this. The government says that Canada will show leadership and that those countries will follow us.
For most of my life I have travelled. I have been in every country in the world pretty well. I know that the status of Canada due to the present government and previous governments is falling. There is not a whole bunch of people out there who will follow us just because we are such wonderful, good, liberal people and we care about the environment.
Tell the people of Fraser Valley how much the government cares about the air. Tell them. There are thousands of people out there who know the government does not care. Talk to the people about the sewage outlets in the three major cities in Canada. Tell the people that the government really cares. Tell the people at the tar ponds. Tell the people in northern Saskatchewan. Tell the native people who have hundreds of boil water orders. Tell all of them how much the government cares about the environment. The Liberals care; if they keep saying it and pounding their chests often enough, they might start believing it.
Let us talk about CO
2
emissions. I will talk about these figures and I know for all the members taking notes it is hard to do. If they call my office I will give them a hard copy of this.
I am talking about world emissions of CO
2
starting with 1995. I will say right now that the developing world in 1995 represented 27% of the CO
2
emissions. In the developed world it was 73% of the emissions. The breakdown is the U.S., 22%; western Europe, 17%; eastern Europe and some other countries in that area, 27%; Asia, 7%; the Mideast, 3%; Africa, 3%; Latin America, 4%; China, 11%; and the other parts of Asia other than China, 6%.
We have 27% from the developing world and 73% from the developed world in 1995. Let us look at the figures for 2035. We will move those forward 40 years and see where it will be. This will be with Kyoto in place and people living up to Kyoto claims. Remember that there are penalties if countries do not live up to Kyoto.
We will assume that they all do. Where would we be then? The developing world will be at 50% of CO
2
emissions. The developed world will now be down to 50%. The developing world has gone from 27% to 50%. The developed world has gone from 73% to 50%.
That is the trend line that carries on in the models of the IPCC which I will get to later. For those models that is the figure being used. They are now projecting to the year 2100. I have chosen the year 2035 as a reasonable length of time down the road.
At that point, the other parts of Asia will be 14%, China, 17%; Latin America, 6%; Africa, 8%; the Mideast, 5%; eastern Europe, 19%; western Europe, 12%; and the U.S., 15%. The U.S. has dropped down to fifth or sixth spot and the developing countries have come up. China will be the leader in the production of CO
2
It is interesting that western Europe is going to improve by only 5% simply because it did not agree to the targets that everybody else did. This was a European developed way to get at the U.S. and that is exactly how it is developing.
We see the facts. Those are from the models. How can the government deceive people into believing that this is not so? This is from the environment group. This is from the United Nations, the IPCC, the scientists who say they know and who the government quotes as experts all the time. Are they telling Canadians these things? I have not heard it. All I have seen are the ads on television saying that little Johnny is going to die, that little Johnny has asthma, that the forests are dying.
That is not even the truth. CO
2
is used for photosynthesis. It is to help plants.
Should we deal with pollution? We sure should. Pollution is a terrible problem. The person on the environment committee from the Windsor area in southern Ontario has told me about the terrible air in that community. We should do something about it. The Fraser Valley has the second worst air shed. Something should be done about that. We should deal with it. We should put in scrubbers. We should go after industry to fix it, but that is not what Kyoto is about.
Kyoto is about CO
2
. Kyoto is about an international agreement. It appears the government does not understand that.
Let me review again where Europe is. Europe can ratify this thing easily. The 15 countries are together on this. They can interchange credits and they think they are going to be fine. They have the advantage of the deindustrialization of eastern Europe which resulted in all those credits. The European Union can transfer credits from EU country to EU country. They have a bloc of 15 countries in which to transfer credits around.
We are a country of one. We cannot transfer credits. It does not matter if we transfer among the provinces. We cannot transfer to the U.S., Mexico, Brazil or other countries in the Americas. If we are going to have a plan at all, why is it not a made in the Americas plan which involves North America and South America? That would work a lot better.