Mr. Speaker, it is with great pride that I rise to represent the people of St. Paul's in this very important debate.
St. Paul's is a pretty wonderful riding. It may not have the rocks and trees of other ridings but it has, without a doubt, the most educated population in Canada. Most important, when we talk about this debate, 50% of my riding is under the age of 35. These people have seriously thought about the future. It may be that 100 Nobel Laureates have decided that it is extraordinarily important that we ratify the Kyoto agreement but 80% of the people of St. Paul's have made it very clear that this is what they want us to do.
Democracy between elections in St. Paul's is a very special thing to me. We have everything from town hall meetings to neighbourhood checkups, online polling and the contact desk section on the website. The people of St. Paul's have thought a great deal about the issue of Kyoto.
I remember in 1997, my first time out on the street as a federal candidate, being accosted by many young people asking me what we were going to do about Kyoto and whether we were going to actually act on climate change.
In the year 2000 and even in the summer before the election, I remember being stopped by English tourists asking why our gas was so cheap in Canada and why were we not worried that people should be taking the bus.
I also remember a constituent coming to see me and showing me a lot of newspaper clippings about the new hybrid cars. He wanted to know if I thought that any company buying fleets of cars should have to be persuaded to buy fleets of hybrid cars. That goes to what we have seen here on the Hill, in terms of those fabulous little RCMP vehicles actually being hybrids. We also have our exemplary Minister of the Environment with his fantastic hybrid car.
I am proud to say that during the last election in 2000, for which we had to rent a car for the campaign, I was persuaded to drive one of the impressive hybrid vehicles. I have to say that I do not know quite why we would not convince Canadians to do so.
The next piece in this equation has to be what it means for Canada to take a leadership on this in the world. With our magnificent north, Canadians must understand what it means, and for those of us who were in Cambridge Bay last summer, to see all of a sudden a boat tied up at the dock in Cambridge Bay, a place where the Northwest Passage has always been frozen. For the first year, all of a sudden there was a yacht from Seattle there and then a 53 foot tin sailing ship from Ireland just tying up at the dock. What does this change in the country mean to our sovereignty and to our protection in terms of the way we see ourselves as a country in terms of sea to sea to sea? I think we want the third sea to be frozen as much as it used to be and we do not want to see palm trees.
It is extraordinarily important. It is like having a debate with the flat earth society. This is happening. The Inuit people know this is happening. We need to talk to them to understand what it means when the polar bears have no place to cross over, when their land has changed in a way that they could never have expected and for which we, as a society, have to take a huge responsibility on what we have done to date. We have to make sure that the damage we have done to date does not go forward for our children and their grandchildren.
Last spring I had a fantastic town hall meeting in my riding. We had the Toronto Renewable Energy Coalition as well as a past executive of Imperial Oil. We ended up having an amazing debate about our responsibilities as Canadians in Kyoto. Virtually everyone at that town hall meeting thought we should get on and ratify the accord.
What has been very interesting to me in this last little chapter, when the debate has become much more visible, is how even the letters coming from constituents have become very persuasive in terms of what they see as Canada's role in the world, where they want Canada to be in terms of leadership on this file and how impressed they are.
I think the most poignant letter that I received was from a young resident of St. Paul's. It states:
I am writing to encourage the Canadian government to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and to stand up to the pressures to do otherwise. The Canadian government should not be influenced by the oil industries, Ralph Klein, the U.S. government and big business interests.
The claims that abiding by the Kyoto Protocol would hurt the economy are false. The claim that the deal with cost the economy $30-$40 billion is grossly exaggerated but is likely to cost closer to $300 million to $3.3 billion. Also, large amounts of taxpayers' money would be saved because lowering the level of pollution in the air would reduce illness and deaths. If Canada does not ratify the agreement, the economy could suffer because agricultural production and fisheries are affected and harmed by rising temperatures. These two areas could cost our country more money than the losses associated with committing to the agreement.
As a former doctor I hope you will understand the impact global warming will have on people's health and its cost to society. Once again, I am requesting that the Canadian government ratify the Kyoto Protocol for the well being of us all.
Sincerely,
Moe Luksenberg.
P.S. You delivered me in 1986 and three years later your office diagnosed me with asthma.
I think we have to understand from Moe' s point of view and all of the children his age that the effects of air pollution and climate change and the measures to reduce them both are not unrelated.
When I graduated from medical school the incidence of childhood asthma was at 2.5%. The incidence of childhood asthma is now at 12%. My young Moe is one of those people. We must understand that the things that we would do to reduce climate change will also have an extraordinarily positive effect on the quality of air in our lives and particularly for those of us who live in Toronto.
In the last householder in our riding we asked a question that, as everyone will see from some of the responses, perhaps was not the best worded question. It asked, “Do you think we should ratify Kyoto regardless of the economic impact?” It was an interesting question that we thought would separate the wheat from the chaff. I think it mainly created some concerns about the wording of the question. Nonetheless, even with that wording, 80% of the people of St. Paul's who responded to this poll were in favour of the ratification regardless of economic impacts.
I will give some examples of some of the answers. One person said:
Dear Dr. Bennett:
I am writing to express my complete support and appreciation for your position on ratifying the Kyoto protocol. The reality of global warming is the single most important issue--environmentally, politically and economically--confronting us today. The consequences of further inaction will almost certainly be catastrophic and certainly outweigh any short-term sacrifices that might be required.
Another person said:
As a resident of your constituency, I just wanted to express my satisfaction in your commitment to ratify the Kyoto Accord... From what I understand, there is nothing but positive environmental impacts coming from the Kyoto accord.
Another person said:
I am writing to support the ratification in Canada of the Kyoto Protocol before the end of the year.
Another person said:
My family and I truly feel that Canada should implement the Kyoto Protocol. Of course, there will be costs, but there will be greater costs if we do nothing, like the U.S. is doing.
One of the answers made me most uncomfortable. It read:
Hi, Carolyn. If you are concerned about Kyoto, I would be interested to know whether you have bought shares in the Windmill project that was discussed at your community meeting about the environment earlier this year.
I have to confess that I had thought many times that I was about to do that and have still not yet done that. Maybe it will be a Christmas gift for everyone I know.
There have been some concerns and I cannot say that there cannot be an 80:20 vote in the riding without understanding that some people do have some concerns.
One constituent wrote:
I am sorry but I happen not to agree with you on ratifying the Kyoto agreement. This requires a lot more study on what the impact will be on all Canadians, particularly those like me who are retired and depend on investment income from resource companies which will be impacted by the effects of this agreement.
Another constituent said:
It would have been a better idea to poll the constituents in your riding on this issue before jumping on the bandwagon with your 95 other Liberal colleagues.
I have to say to that constituent that there are some issues in which I feel obligated to lead and I am now thrilled that I am in the good company of 80% of the people who have talked to me.
Another person said:
We absolutely have to ratify Kyoto and go beyond it. We must look at the entire picture, which includes the health costs of bad air, the impact of global warming, the destruction of natural environment, etc. I am often embarrassed by our track record on environmental issues when talking to Europeans.
One of the things that was clear to some of the people who were unsure was that they did want to know the estimated costs of ratifying Kyoto and the impact on the Canadian economy. It was this constituent who wanted to know what the economic impact would be and would not support ratifying the accord.
One of the most articulate responses was again a criticism of the question that we posed on the householder. The constituent wrote:
I didn't feel entirely comfortable with the question you posed. Obviously if the economic impacts are too great, we will not ratify. But the point seems to be that we will not know what the impacts may be, although the odds are that they will not be very great. I became convinced about Kyoto when I read the hysterical nonsense generated by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, an utterly disgraceful position, bankrupt intellectually as well as morally. It seems to me that the arguments advanced by the opponents of Kyoto closely resemble those produced by the friends of Big Tobacco in the 1960s and 1970s. However, Carolyn,as a historian of our external policy, I have to say that the shadows of the Columbia River treaty affair of 1961-3 are ominous. Because of the bifurcated nature of jurisdiction over aspects of foreign relations, I have my doubts as to when this particular effort is going to make it to the statute books, or stay there if it does make it. I'm not happy about this, but I don't think we should kid ourselves about the ability of provincial governments, however misguided and dim-witted, to frustrate good public policy. I suspect you will agree with that proposition.
One of the others said:
As our MP, we urge you and the Government to support the Kyoto Protocol and put the planet's ecosystem on which we all depend ahead of short term economic goals.
It is without a doubt that these were the inflow of reports from the constituents like the one who wrote:
I urge the federal government to enforce fully the Kyoto agreement and environment protocols, and not to capitulate to industry pressure and right-wing reactionaries like Ralph Klein...It is the role of government to protect its citizens--it's time people realized that pollution costs everyone; through spiralling health care costs; through lost productivity due to pollution-induced illnesses, and so on.
Another constituent writes:
Ratify it already! The naysayers have known about it, as we all have, since 1997. To complain about the need for more consultation at this point is just silly.
It is impressive to hear the kind of thoughtful dialogue in terms of what we should be doing with the Toronto Transit Commission and what we should be doing on SUVs. It was in the year 2000, when we did our green householder, when we actually polled constituents on what they themselves were prepared to do in order to help us make our environment better.
In our green newsletter of 2000 it was interesting to see the number of constituents who agreed that they would be prepared to understand incentives that would affect their lifestyles, such as requiring an annual $25 licence to operate a gasoline powered lawnmower, or a separate fee for two stroke engines, or no licence for electric mowers.
In my riding last month the people in Wells Hill had a rake and bake sale where they were proposing to get rid of leaf blowers in their neighbourhood.
It leads to an important point. The Canadian government needs to show leadership by encouraging environmentally responsible activities through proper incentives. Brenda Zimmerman, a professor of management at the Schulich School says when she quotes an old paper, “The folly of rewarding A while hoping for B”. That is what we hope to see now. We need to align Canada's fiscal policies with our social, health and environmental policies. We should lower taxes on things that we agree we want and increase taxes on things we have decided we do not want to support.
Some new initiatives that we need to consider would include the elimination of taxes on renewable energy sources and lowering taxes on cleaner fuels such as natural gas and premium unleaded gasoline. Conversely we would raise taxes on the dirtier fuels such as coal and diesel fuel. It would be interesting for people to go to the gas pump and make a decision based on the cleaner fuel being cheaper in a revenue neutral way than the dirtier fuel. Even the provincial governments could help by perhaps putting the annual licence fee on an SUV at $1,000 a year and the fee on a hybrid at zero.
There are all kinds of other ways that corporate Canada would look at the issue. How can we, sector by sector, do things like the Dutch government has done by creating agreements with sectors called covenants? The Dutch covenant says that it is better for a company's facility to produce in the most efficient way possible in the Netherlands than elsewhere. We want each sector to decide that it can be as good as it can be in its own sector. It is sort of like best in class, and those people can actually move in that way.
Now is Canada's moment to show world leadership in the movement toward a less carbon intensive economy. Tony Marcil, one of my most engaged citizens in St. Paul's, the former president and CEO of the World Environment Centre, reminds us of the important point that the Kyoto protocol is providing us. It is an opportunity for future economic growth as well as environmental sustainability. He states that the Kyoto protocol represents a huge opportunity to strengthen Canada's economic future. He adds that judiciously setting new greenhouse gas emission reduction targets for all Canadians, accompanied by rational fiscal and other incentives, would serve as new challenges to the ingenuity of Canadians in the areas of technology and management.
The fact is that Canada is up to the task. We are well positioned to build on our expertise and the results would be more energy efficient industries, cities and households.
Canada must not pass on this opportunity to gain ground in the field of international economic efficiency. Canada's industry leaders should be lobbying intensely for Kyoto because in the end it would keep them in the international trade race. Without it they would continue to lose ground to Asian and European firms that have lowered the energy intensity of their products due to higher energy costs and are now doing so, again due to Kyoto goals.
Ninety-five colleagues and I wrote a letter to the Prime Minister encouraging that we ratify Kyoto without the clean energy credits. We feel that there should not be any asterisk on the deal. Let us just do it. We cannot afford not to.