The Prime Minister thinks Italy is in the western hemisphere too. He may even think it is in the Americas, I do not know, but he sort of implied that the other day.
We need something that will work and we need it to be in the Americas. We need to involve our number one trading partner, the U.S. We need to involve our NAFTA partner, Mexico. We need to involve the developing countries of South America. We need all of them on side with this plan. What does the government not understand about that?
In Europe most of the coal generation has been replaced by gas. We could examine how that was done. There are two conclusions I came up with when I researched this. One is that it was getting very hard to get coal inexpensively. That was one of the first things.
The second thing was that Maggie Thatcher wanted to break the coal unions in Britain and she did it by turning all of Britain's energy generation to natural gas. It worked perfectly. She got rid of a real political problem. She had later ones but it worked at that point in time.
As well, Europe is a much smaller place. It has a dense population. Members of my family who live in Europe find it easy to get from point to point by rail. In fact many people there do not even own a car because they can get on a train every 15 minutes and get to the next city. I do not know, Madam Speaker, if you have tried taking the train in most parts of Canada, but in many parts there are not even tracks let alone trains, so we cannot use that as an argument.
Of course, Europe is warmer. The Europeans have more nuclear energy. All of those are reasons. A country like France which is 80% nuclear can easily say it can hit its Kyoto targets.
It is very interesting that in Brussels in October the European Union had a presentation from a group of economists. The economists told the European Union at the European parliament that the European Union cannot hit its targets without damaging the economy of its countries. That is the European Union which has very limited targets with all those advantages and it will have trouble hitting its targets. If it will have trouble hitting its targets and many of those countries are already near 1990 levels and we are at 20% above 1990 levels, going to 30% above 1990 levels, if it cannot hit its targets without damaging its economy, how are we going to do it?
That is what the question is, what is it going to do to Canadians? What will it do to the person on a fixed income? What will it do to the mom and dad with their kids, to that single mom, to the people whom the Liberals--hold our hands over our hearts--care about so much? What will it do to them? It will destroy them. They will have higher fuel bills. They will have higher power bills. They will have more costly transportation. A number of them will lose their jobs.
Why would we sign something? Remember, and let me repeat, for those people who say, “I can vote for the ratification of Kyoto, but boy we are going to go slow on the implementation”, we do not have to do this. For any future prime minister who says that there are not penalties from Kyoto, let me repeat that according to the Marrakesh accords, nations who ratify Kyoto but do not meet their targets in round one by 2012 will be penalized another 30% in emissions cuts. In addition, such nations cannot sell carbon credits in round two.
At the end of this period, if a party's emissions are still greater than its assigned amount, it must make up the difference in the second commitment period, plus a penalty of 30%. It will also be barred from selling under emissions credits and within three months it must develop a compliance action plan detailing the action it will take and it can buy credits to buy itself out of its inability to hit those targets.
If I were going to be a future prime minister, and I do not intend to be, I would certainly want to know that there were penalties. I would certainly not in a speech ever again say, “We can ratify Kyoto just to make the Prime Minister happy and then we can forget about it and we will not do anything to hurt our economy. We will do nothing to hurt Canadians and our economy will not be hurt by this because if we cannot comply, we will not comply and that is it”. How could any prime minister, present or future, ever say that? They cannot. They would be dishonest to the Canadian people if they said that. They would be dishonest to the provinces. They would be dishonest to every single Canadian.
Let us go on with the presentation--