Mr. Speaker, I begin on a positive note by welcoming the hon. member's support of the 12th point in our plan which calls for parliamentary and electoral reform. I have had an opportunity to work with him and others over the years to try to secure various forms of parliamentary reform.
Although we have not had an opportunity as parliamentarians to seriously look at electoral reform, I hope that someday we will. I recall asking the Prime Minister a year or two ago if he would consider forming an all party committee to look at electoral reform and he rejected the matter out of hand. There is a great desire on the part of Canadians to think differently about how our electoral system works and whether or not if it was reformed it could create parliaments which were more representative of the views of the Canadian people both nationally and regionally.
I was interested in the member's remarks on Kyoto. I can understand the concern to know what the costs of implementing the Kyoto accord would be. What I do not understand is this one-sided fixation on what the costs of implementing Kyoto would be and why there is no complementary attention being paid to the costs both nationally and globally of not implementing and ratifying Kyoto.
The member is not an unintelligent member of parliament. Surely he does not belong to that camp which rejects the whole theory of global warming and climate change. If he is, then it is a whole different conversation.
However if he regards that as a fact and something we should be concerned about, why is he not on his feet like we are, calling on the government to produce the studies that show the costs of not implementing and ratifying Kyoto? It would seem to me that ultimately in a global sense, not necessarily in a national sense, the price of not dealing with climate change could be greater than anything we could measure in terms of traditional economic indicators.
Would the member join with us in asking the government to produce the figures as to what not ratifying Kyoto would cost?