Mr. Speaker, this is truly an interesting debate on which the nation needs to get as much information as it possibly can as we proceed further. The only thing that is clear about the national debate on Kyoto is that day by day Canadians are losing confidence in a government that has no ability at all to educate itself on the important issues and no capacity to make good policy decisions.
I would like to thank the member for Red Deer, because last week he spent over 11 hours in the House trying to explain this to all hon. colleagues and members in this chamber in a very thoughtful and thorough way as he analyzed what the Prime Minister's Kyoto commitment will mean to the economy and how the Prime Minister has sold out the protection of the environment for the sake of an international photo op.
In the Prime Minister's haste to commit Canada to an international agreement, he set out CO
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targets that we do not know if we can ever even meet, or even if we can afford them. He has missed one very important thing, which is that if Canada is to make any real gains in protecting the environment, it will take every province and every Canadian to buy into the strategy. We will have to do much more in the whole area of reducing pollutants in this country.
Herein lies the root problem, because the Liberal government has no plan for Canadians to buy into. They are being asked to buy into this Kyoto accord, an international agreement, but there are no targets there. They cannot grab hold of something and say that this is the plan, this is what it will cost, these are the timelines and this is what will happen. All we know is that there is a vague number, a percentage by the year 2012. Canadians do not know how it will impact them. They do not know if the targets are there and they do not know if this will ever have any impact on the environment. In fact, most scientists are saying it will not.
Since the Prime Minister first pulled the targets out of thin air in 1997, the government has done virtually nothing. It has missed an opportunity to inform Canadians about what the agreement really means and what it really means to them. It has failed to educate Canadians on what they can do to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. All that the Liberal government has achieved is to create one more battle with the provinces and send a chill of uncertainty throughout this country and throughout the economy.
I appreciate the valuable information and the feedback that I have received from my constituents in Yellowhead, who have expressed to me a broad spectrum of concerns on this issue over the last number of weeks and months.
There are a couple of things that have become very clear. First, we are all in agreement that something should be done to protect the environment. That is a motherhood statement. None of us want to leave our land, our air or our water in worse shape than we found it. We know that we have problems there and we know that something needs to be done. Second, there are many unanswered questions about how to implement Kyoto. What will it cost to implement? What is the government's implementation plan? Is this the most effective way to reduce energy consumption and pollution?
I am proud to represent the constituents of Yellowhead. I can say without reservation that ours is the most beautiful constituency and riding in Canada. We are known for our clean air, our rolling hills, our abundant wildlife, our breathtaking mountain scenery and our breathtaking mountains. We are also a major source of energy for the nation's cars and for our homes. Many of our communities are dependent on the energy sector for their existence. It would be irresponsible for me to support any legislation or motion without first knowing the effect it would have on those communities. That is why I am here this evening.
For five years the Canadian Alliance has been asking the government to table a Kyoto implementation plan so that Canadians could review it. Five years and 2,000 other dust-gathering international environmental agreements later, we have nothing to show for it. First we were told not to worry, that the Canadian economy would not suffer because of Kyoto. Now we have received a hastily prepared PowerPoint presentation, glossy documents and $10 million worth of slick, taxpayer funded ad campaigns proclaiming that Kyoto is the only way.
For Canadians, the absence of figures on the effect on the economy should raise all kinds of alarms. How it will affect our jobs should also raise many alarms for us, and the absence of any effort in an environmental plan to deal with the 45 smog warning days in Toronto should be absolutely alarming to us.
Right now the Prime Minister is asking Parliament for a blank cheque to implement the Kyoto accord. Since signing the original accord in 1997, the Prime Minister has had five years to inform Canadians and Parliament on how the government would implement a plan to reduce 6% of the CO
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emissions from 1990 levels. We are actually currently 26% over the target that the Prime Minister has committed us to.
I cannot support Kyoto unless there is a plan to ensure that the interests of Canadians are protected, and there should be no one in the House who is prepared to do that. While the intentions of Kyoto are good, we cannot afford to sign a blank cheque without knowing the costs to the economy and the benefits to the environment. That does not mean that we should just sit back and do nothing. Canada has an opportunity to re-establish its role as an international leader by offering the world a plan to reduce humans' negative impact on the environment.
I support a made in Canada plan, a plan that addresses not only CO
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but other pollutants such as smog and acid rain. I support the investment for research and development in alternative fuels and the cleaner use of existing energy sources. I support the educating of Canadians on how to reduce the energy that we use, on how to be much more effective and efficient in how we do that.
A made in Canada plan must include consultation with the provinces and discussion with our trading partners. That is sadly lacking in the Kyoto accord. I am sorry to have to tell the Prime Minister that trading carbon credits, as Kyoto calls for, is not the answer. That would do nothing to help the environment.
The Kyoto accord is bad for Canada because it will kill jobs and it will have a devastating effect on the economy. It is damaging to Canada's international competitiveness. It is divisive. It is useless for the environment and diverts Canada from the right strategy to address climate change.
The Kyoto accord will affect between 250,000 and 450,000 manufacturing jobs. They will be lost by the year 2010. The accord will cost $3 billion a year in international credits. Even taking into account the benefits to the conservation and renewable energy sectors, the cost would be well over $1,000 per man, woman and child in the country. These are not just simple numbers; they are actual lives of real Canadians that the Prime Minister is playing with. We are not talking just simple dollars and cents. The effect will be devastating.
Europe and the third world countries know that we will be legally bound to pay them billions to buy the credits to meet our emission targets. No wonder they are pressuring Canada to ratify the accord. Five billion of the world's six billion people are not subject to the Kyoto accord at all. Some of the world's worst polluters, such as Mexico, China and India, will not be bound at all by the Kyoto accord or the targets.
Recent studies done by Canadian manufacturers and exporters indicate that Canadians would have to pay up to 100% more for their electricity, 60% more for their natural gas and up to 80% more for gasoline if we were to implement the accord. We can imagine the devastating effects on a nation as large as ours. Let us take just one of those figures and say it is right, with a 100% price increase for gasoline. Or let us say that is stretched a little bit. Maybe it would be only a 50% increase. We can imagine, with the size of our nation, how that would impact air traffic, travel and the transportation of goods across the country. We can imagine how it would affect individual Canadians as they move across the country. Just this impact alone would be devastating, but we are talking about all of those other impacts and more.
The average Canadian household could face costs of up to $30,000 just to refurbish their house to meet Kyoto's stringent restrictions. Even the Kyoto-friendly figures from the David Suzuki Foundation show that the average Canadian family would have to pay $12,000 to retrofit their house to be able to conserve the amount of energy required to meet the efficiency standards set out by the Kyoto accord. Twelve thousand dollars may not be much to the Prime Minister and it may not be much to the environment minister, but to the hardworking, overtaxed people of Yellowhead it is a significant amount of money. They are seniors on fixed incomes in Mayerthorpe, struggling farmers in Evansburg and hospitality workers in Jasper who hold down three jobs. Retrofitting their houses or having to pay increased rents will push more Canadians into Liberal government imposed poverty.
Leading economists say that Kyoto could lead to a recession in Canada and, as in every recession, existing environmental programs would be seriously compromised. Efforts to protect our rivers, our lakes, our soil, our air and our endangered species would have to all be put on the back burner because of the effect of Kyoto and the devastation of the nation's finances. Kyoto would have a devastating effect on the entire Canadian economy. Manufacturing in Ontario would be scaled back or would move overseas or to a more competitive nation such as the United States. Oil and gas exploration in the Maritimes would likely dry up.
While I am concerned about the national economy, I am fearful of what effects my riding of Yellowhead would see. Meeting with constituents this past weekend, I noted that the uncertainty has already set in. Energy based projects have been put on hold in my riding. That is the reality. Jobs are being lost because of the reckless handling of this file by the Prime Minister and the environment minister.
The constituents of Yellowhead have seen this before, in the bundle of energy laws in the 1980s designed to nationalize the energy industry, artificially fix the price of oil and raise billions of dollars for the Liberals to spend on programs.
A key component of Prime Minister Trudeau's grand legacy, the national energy policy, devastated industries, communities and families throughout Yellowhead riding. New bureaucracies sprouted up and managed another resounding failure of state controlled involvement in the economy.
As parliamentarians, we know that Kyoto and the national energy policy are very different, but to the constituents of Yellowhead and to thousands of business leaders who lost everything when the current Prime Minister was the energy minister in the 1980s and was tasked with implementing the national energy policy, this is the only thing that they have to compare with what we are going through at this present time. They remember all too clearly losing their businesses and their homes.
During debate earlier this afternoon, the government side attempted to accuse the official opposition of fearmongering. In its fantasy world, it blames the economic uncertainty we currently are facing on our questions about how any plan would be implemented and what it would mean for investment in Canada.
I think that those kinds of remarks took debate in this place to an all time low. We are still asking these questions because we have not received any answers from the government. These are the questions we are hearing in the coffee shops in our ridings and in boardrooms across the country. It is a ridiculous line of logic: Do not ask the government about its blatant non-compliance because it might bring attention to its blatant non-compliance and lead to an economic slowdown.
Getting back to the lives of the people in Yellowhead, the member for Red Deer gave a list last week of the industries that would be the first casualties of the Prime Minister's faulty environmental policy. He might as well have been describing the entire economy of the Yellowhead riding. He talked about coal, oil, gas, mining, forestry, pulp and paper.
When the environment minister talked about the slowing economy, he was really pointing his finger at my constituency. For hundreds of bureaucrats and tax credit funded environmentalists fighting the possibility of implementing such a grand government scheme must make them just salivate. I can imagine it now: an army of hundreds of Kyoto-crats scurrying around the federal bureaucracy and around the country implementing Chrétien's Kyoto cutbacks.
Yellowhead was fortunate--