Europe would probably like that. Certainly Russia is keen on this idea. Again, how does it help the environment by allowing some other country with dirty technology, way dirtier than ours, produce that CO
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and then we buy credits from them and transfer money? What is that? We must remember that this is only the beginning of the plan. We will see how it is perfected later on, but that is the start.
Then we say that there will be credits and penalties for emissions. The plan has not really evolved much since March. The first thing I would do if I were a businessman is to ask what the credits are and what the penalties are? They are not spelled out anywhere. There is no implementation plan. I do not know what it is going to cost. Am I going to invest money into a country where I do not know what the rules of the game are? Obviously, what the government does not understand is the investment freeze that results from this kind of activity.
The most important thing that Canada recognized in March 2002 is that there will be no credit for the export of clean fuel to the U.S. We are going to be penalized for producing energy in Canada that we sell to the U.S. Why did the Canadian government not realize that back in 1992? Why did the Canadian government not say, when it signed Kyoto in 1997, that it would not sign on unless it was given clean energy credits for what it sells to the U.S.?
I want to explain those clean energy credits. We extract the gas and oil out of the ground and that takes a lot of energy. It represents 17% of our emissions. When we take the tar sands, which are a bigger reserve of oil than Saudi Arabia, it is not small potatoes. It will be the future of this country's GDP for a long time. When we take that oil out of the tar sands or out of the ground that costs energy. We then ship it in a pipeline down to the U.S. where it is burned as a clean fuel, particularly in the case of natural gas.
We want credit for that. How did we blow that? We only started talking about that in 2002. We did not think of it before then. The Europeans and the Russians did but we did not. The government totally blew it if it had ever hoped to get that.
Now, as I explained earlier, there is no way the Europeans will agree to that. If they gave Canada clean energy credits, they would have to give Russia clean energy credits for natural gas. What the Liberals do not seem to understand as well, when they argue this point, is that the U.S. is not part of Kyoto. How are we going to get credits from a country that is not even in the game?
It is one thing for Russia to ask for credits from European Union countries that are part of the same game, but it is like saying that I am going to buy this company from this guy over here but I am going to talk to that person over there who does not even know the name of the company. That is about the same thing. That is a total mishandling of this file. This file has been mishandled since 1992. How it has been handled is a total disaster.
Most Canadians are starting to realize that. Companies have been telling us that for months. We just have to listen to the provinces on every TV station today telling us how the government has mishandled the whole negotiations around Kyoto. They are not part of it. They have been excluded. The meeting on Friday has been cancelled, which should tell us enough about the cooperation between the provinces.
We are going to get to review the government's plan later on. The first words say, “cooperation, consultation are the key to making this work”. This powder-puff PowerPoint presentation, which is not a plan, just will not work.
The next point in the government's plan of March 2002 is a scary one. It says “we are going to have targeted measures”. We are going to explore that a little bit further, but these targeted emissions are going to be on residential buildings, on commercial buildings, on transportation, on forestry and on agriculture. The Liberals singled those out as early as March.
If I were to read into that, I would be pretty concerned if I were a contractor building new homes. I would be pretty concerned if I owned commercial buildings. I would be pretty concerned if I were in the transportation industry, in forestry or in agriculture. They have been targeted to try to achieve the 240 megatonnes that are the gap of what we cannot go to.
We are going to follow up on each one of those industries. If we were to go industry by industry across the country, we could show that each industry will be targeted a little differently. We are assuming that is the case because the government has not told them yet how they are going to be targeted. However the government does say in its first discussion of this that is what it is going to target. We should keep that in mind and, for the Liberals taking notes, they should highlight it with a star.
Mr. Speaker, to bring you up to date, I could go back to yesterday so you will feel part of this, but I will just carry on from where I was and not start from the beginning.