Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Winnipeg North Centre.
We have made it clear as a party that we are in favour of ratifying Kyoto and that the government should do so as quickly as possible, and by that I mean about a year ago.
The real issue is not about ratifying. It is a given that we should do that. We committed internationally five years ago to ratify Kyoto. Our international reputation is being affected by the fact that we are moving so slowly on this, when we were the very first country in the world in 1997 to signal that we were in favour of the protocol and that we would carry through on our responsibilities under that protocol. The history since then has not been very good and our reputation has been badly affected by the meanderings that we have seen from the government.
We need to do this and we need to get on with the job. We need to move as rapidly as we can to finalize what in fact is the implementation process and then put it into place.
We have had a great deal of argument in the House, I would say particularly from the members of the Alliance Party, about the risks and the costs. It is interesting that they never talk about the costs of not doing it. Equally, the government has never done an assessment of what it will cost us if we do not proceed to implement Kyoto and meet our targets within the timeframes. I have never seen those from the Alliance or the government.
It was interesting to hear the member from LaSalle speaking the other day about Kyoto and raising certain concerns around the costs and that everyone be treated fairly as we implement it. It is interesting to compare that with his own position as he made very severe cutbacks in the budget in the mid-1990s. The effect of those cutbacks was to reduce the GDP in this country by a full 4%. By the government's own estimates, at the very worst, Kyoto might have the impact of reducing our GDP by 2% over a very extended period of time, probably 10 years minimum. That 4% cut that he caused in the mid-1990s was over a two year period.
He also argued, and we heard it from other government members, that we could not have any Kyoto costs applied disproportionately. Alberta, for instance, even though it is the heaviest polluter and creator of greenhouse gases, should not be treated unfairly or unequally. They use those types of terms.
However, in the same period of time, 1995 to 1997, as he slashed the budget, which had the impact of reducing the GDP by about 4%, that 4% reduction was much more greatly served against the Maritime provinces and the province of Quebec.
When we are looking at what the impact will be of Kyoto, we have to keep that in mind. We recognize that there will be a significant shift in the way we plan the economy and in the way the economy develops but from everything we do know, particularly from the European experience, we can offset those costs by new development.
I always use the example of Denmark. It moved into alternative energy and now leads in the world, with Germany close behind. Denmark has a small population of roughly 3.5 million people but it has created, in a very short period of time, in two to three years, 12,500 new jobs building the windmills and turbines that are now being exported to countries all over the world. Canada is one of the recipients of that technology because we did not develop it here. We have fallen behind. It is another reason that we need to ratify now to get on with it. As the years go by, other countries are outpacing us quite dramatically in that technology. The Japanese have taken over the lead quite significantly with regard to solar power. We need to catch up. We actually need to get into the race. When we are talking about the need to ratify within a certain timeframe, we need to keep technological development in mind.
With regard to some of the other reasons that we should be moving ahead, I would draw to the attention of the House the argument that we hear so often from the Alliance, that Kyoto is not a health issue. We have heard from any number of sources that of course that is not accurate.
I want to address the ignorance in the comments that I am hearing from the Alliance members once again. The reality is that there is a solution. I probably live, in terms of the metropolitan area, in the most heavily polluted area in the country from the perspective of air pollution. The solution that we will find to that is to reduce the use of coal-fired plants in both Ontario and, more specifically, in some of the states in the U.S. If we do not move ahead with Kyoto, if the U.S. states, which are much further ahead than the U.S. federal government, do not move ahead, those emissions, the greenhouse gases and things like mercury and benzine, which come from the burning of coal, will continue to float into my constituency and we will continue to have, as various medical associations have documented, a significant increase in premature deaths and all the other health factors.
The implementation of Kyoto and the reduction of the greenhouse gases will coincide, as we reduce the consumption of fossil fuels, coal in particular, but not alone, with the reduction in a number of toxins, mercury and benzine, just to name a couple of them.
It is interesting as well to listen to the members of the Alliance and Premier Klein in Alberta talk about a made in Canada solution. It is nothing of the kind, of course. It is simply that party and the Conservative government in Alberta toeing the American line. It is a made in America solution and it is no solution at all, because that solution, as we have seen from the model that the vice-president enunciated a year and a half ago, is simply to do less and to do it over a longer period of time. We know by those models that greenhouse gas emissions will continue to go up, not be reduced.
Just last week the Bush administration watered down the environmental protection act and the protection it gave or was about to give requiring the clean up of coal-fired plants in the United States. That is the kind of policy and plan that the Alliance would have us follow as opposed to implementing Kyoto, a plan, I would add, that was heavily opposed, including lawsuits, by a number of the northeastern states opposing the watering down of those provisions, those provisions that would have done something about the health of my constituents by reducing the emissions that were coming from those plants all over the mid-western United States that eventually flowed into my riding.
As much as the government wants to take credit for Kyoto, I wish to say to it and to the Canadian people that we just cannot watch the ratification become the end of the process. We very much have to keep after it to see that the implementation is done properly, to the terms of the protocol that we are now committing ourselves to, finally, at the international level.