Mr. Speaker, I also listened to the member's speech with interest. We of course have a lot of respect for the member and the community she represents.
She mentioned that hunters cannot rely on their traditional knowledge because of changes in climate. We certainly appreciate that. Climate change is affecting everybody.
The question really is about the fact of Kyoto dealing with CO
2
when only 5% of it is man-made and 95% is natural. The contaminants that the member mentioned, like the POPs that arrive in cold communities, come down in the snowpack all over the world. In the Alps, in the Arctic and in the Rocky Mountains, we are seeing that contaminants come from hundreds of miles away. Sadly, Kyoto is not going to address these issues.
The member surely should be aware, more than anybody, that Canada has a large land mass. We have a very cold country. We have heating costs for our homes. We are an underdeveloped country. We expect to see our population grow. How can we realistically expect to go back to levels below 1990's when we have huge transportation costs and huge heating costs for our homes?
Really, the question is this: Is this Kyoto agreement going to help us with the objectives we are trying to achieve?
The member who spoke previously mentioned that there are 33 million people in California and they have low transportation costs. There are as many people jammed into California as we have in the whole country. They can afford to have lower transportation costs and shared transportation costs, like public transit. That is very difficult to achieve in Canada with our numbers so spread out.
Is this effort actually going to achieve the objectives that we all want to see? We want to see a reduction. Surely it should be a made in Canada approach that does not bind us into buying credits in other countries and sending money out of the country in order to achieve unrealistic objectives. Would that not be a more reasoned approach for Canadians, to find our own plan and deal with this in a responsible way?