Mr. Speaker, I am saying that consultation must occur and that the provinces must be brought on side.
I have a number of items that I would like to cover today. One of them has to do with the IPCC modelling that has been done; that the government has chosen to nitpick and cherry-pick the good stuff and leave out the bad stuff. I also want to talk about the analysis of the second report.
Unfortunately, I only analyzed the first report into about four or five pages. The second report I thought we should do in a little more detail. I have about half of it completed at this point. I would like to do a clause by clause discussion of that. I will try to abbreviate it as much as I can but we really need to do a pretty major analysis of it, which is what no one else has done, and certainly the government has not done. It certainly has never been sent to a committee where a committee could call witnesses and try to analyze what exactly Kyoto is all about and its impacts. Obviously if it had been sent to a committee it could have done this clause by clause study and analyzed this protocol.
However it has been thrown into the House and we are told it will be ratified, whether we like it or not, and that it will happen before Christmas and tough luck. None of the provinces agree. Nobody agrees but it will happen to us.
I guess if there is one purpose of my standing here it is to let the government know that we do not agree with the way it is handling this file. It should have been dealing with this file in a committee in a proper and democratic way in the House.
Obviously there are many things we could say as we get into this. The major thing is that the government says that Kyoto will only cost pennies. Only 3¢ will be added to a barrel of oil and only 13¢ will be added to a barrel of oil for its extraction, which is an additional cost from the tar sands.
We have to remember the importance of the tar sands. They represent a supply of oil bigger than Saudi Arabia, that it is a major part of Canada's economy and that 60% of the dollars spent on the tar sands are spent in the province of Ontario; 60% of that money will go to manufacturing jobs in Ontario.
I received a call from a truck driver who owns five trucks. He had a contract to haul pipe from Hamilton to Alberta as part of the oil industry. All of a sudden he was given 30 days notice that his contract was over, that he would stop hauling pipe. He asked, “Is it because I have done the job poorly or is it because I have not delivered on time? I thought everything was fine”. The company said that everything was fine and that he was doing a great job. Everything was right on time. However the uncertainty of Kyoto has resulted in an investment freeze in that industry and the company will not take that pipe any more. The owner of those trucks here in Ontario said that he had to lay off four of his drivers because of that.
I am sure the people producing the pipe also had to lay people off because that pipe was not in demand any more.
For people to think that Kyoto will not have an impact across this country, they are totally wrong. Anybody who says that it will not have an impact is simply not telling the truth.
Obviously there have been all kinds of reports. I want to talk about the modelling. We see headlines that state that Kyoto could push the cost of gasoline to $1 a litre. I think if the Europeans had their way they would probably like to see it at $2 a litre.
The only person who will benefit, certainly in the cabinet over there, will be the environment minister who drives an energy efficient car. However when he tried to encourage the other ministers to drive energy efficient cars, none of them responded. Now we only have two. We also will have a check soon on how many cars are outside and how many are running, just to keep everyone posted.
There was a recent report done by an economist here in Ontario about the costs. There have been many reports, and I do not want to say that this one is the most accurate, but this is just one example of the costs. The report came to the conclusion that we should go with a middle of the road model. We must remember that the government cherry-picked the bottom end model, but going with sort of the middle of the road model, this is the report's findings.
The report states that to get to 6% below 1990 levels under a fully implemented Kyoto, which is what we are talking about, we would need to have a natural gas price increase of 90%. We would need to have a gasoline price increase of 50% as a minimum or between 30¢ to 35¢ per litre. The average household would expect to pay $2,700 per year. The Kyoto plan will do nothing to reduce global warming.
The government talks about all this voluntary stuff. I have driven on the highways in Ontario. If people would slow down to 100 kilometres per hour, that would be a huge saving. The speed limit of course is 100 kilometres per hour, but the government is talking about reducing the speed limit, putting tolls on roads and having people drive smaller cars. Will Canadians do that when they do not see the benefits, when they do not see the results, when they have not bought into the plan and when the provinces are not being consulted? I do not think so.
We can go on to talk about the effects of GDP. We can talk about the industry minister's officials who did their research and said that the government was underestimating in its modelling by at least 30%. If one government department is saying that it is under by 30%, who knows what that might be? When has anyone found government to be accurate in its estimate of costs?
Many of us will remember Bill C-68, one of the most famous bills, where the government estimated $87 million and now it has been estimated at $1.53 billion for the next couple of years. That is how inaccurate government estimates usually are.
Again I come back to the point that every single member in the House, every one of us, you and me included, Mr. Speaker, will have to tell that fixed income person, that mom and dad with two kids, that lady driving her son to the hockey game right now, before we knew the costs, before we knew how it would be implemented and before we knew the plan, why we agreed and how we could possibly vote to ratify something like that. How does one justify that? I really do not have any idea.
I have heard the minister often say that there was no investment freeze and nothing was happening. However we have headline after headline. This one involves EnCana, which says that it has shifted investment out of Canada for the fourth quarter because of the uncertainty of what ratification will do. That is a large company. The article is dated November 20. It is pretty recent stuff. That is exactly what is happening in company after company after company. They are sending--