Mr. Speaker, I do not think the hon. member understood what I was talking about in terms of intellectual capacity, although I do not think that this is a theoretical issue any longer. One just has to go to our north to see what is already happening. This is not theory. It is actually in practice. It is what the people in our north are living. It is so important to the future of this planet that the younger people in this country be united on this.
We cannot not act and hand this huge problem on to our children and to our grandchildren. It is not theoretical. It is happening. There is absolutely a real feeling in this country that we are speaking to the flat earth society. This is science. The hundred Nobel laureates are clear this is happening. For people to continue to question whether it is happening is dishonest. They can debate the economic impact with me, but whether climate change is happening, they cannot debate that any longer, they must accept that it is happening.
We have an environmental commissioner in this country to evaluate the performance and internationally we have a good reputation on all of these. We are leading the world on POPs. It is an extraordinarily important thing. However, there is a saying that goes, “If you measure, it gets noticed; if it gets noticed, it gets done”.
We are not afraid of having people come and talk to us about performance. It is the reason that there needs to be an objective audit of performance on all of our files, particularly the environment. It is a special office similar to the auditor general. What we need in government and Parliament is a learning culture where we are not afraid of having a report card and then figuring out what we could do better. That is a good thing.
We must get away from the “gotcha” style of politics, where people are afraid to measure and are afraid to have report cards because they think that the opposition will come. Canadians have matured way beyond that. They want us to be measuring, they want us to be learning, and they want us to be feeding back the changes. We know that climate change is happening and that we must act on it now because failing to act would cause a huge price to be paid by those who follow after.