Madam Speaker, I want to congratulate you on your position which is well deserved. I also want to tell you that I will be sharing my time with the member for Macleod.
I want to start by thanking the people of the riding of Red Deer for again having confidence in me and electing me with an increased majority. I certainly appreciate all those people, all the workers and all the campaign people. It is an honour and a privilege.
It is a little different this time in that now we are the government in waiting. It feels that it will not be very long until we will achieve our goals that we started some 11 years ago in the House. That is a very different feeling than has been.
In listening to this throne speech, and I have heard a great many here, this has to be probably one of the dullest, weakest pieces of regurgitation that I have heard. There is absolutely no vision for the country. If anything, as we travel around the world, we know that Canada is losing its position because of a lack of vision, a ho-hum kind of government which we have had for the past 10 years.
There is no mention of agriculture. There are recycled environmental promises. There is no help for the military. There is no help for low and middle class taxpayers. There is no parliamentary reform, no substance, no accountability and no consultation. The government should be ashamed of this throne speech more than any that it has given prior to this.
We need to add some vision and substance. That is what our leader's amendments have done. To say that this is a non-confidence vote is only in the minds of people who are living in the past, as the member for Glengarry—Prescott—Russell quite does. It is not a confidence motion. It is simply trying to make it better so that there is some substance.
The throne speech is full of platitudes. As the senior environment critic, I want to deal with that part of it. We talk about the platitudes of how we will fix the Great Lakes. That was 1993 and long before that. We will fix our oceans, yet a million birds are dying in Newfoundland every year because of oil spills. That is because of weak legislation.
We talk about procurement for the federal government in 2006. We asked Canadians to do the one time challenge in 2003, and the government only now is saying that it will start doing it. When the cabinet ministers were asked to drive fuel efficient cars, only one of them did that and that was the environment minister.
Environmental integrity in our national parks, what does that mean? They are nice words. Are we going to fix the infrastructure? Are we going to fix what is so wrong with our national parks?
Kyoto is a great one. We simply stamp on that we are for all the international treaties and go along with it even though every year we increase our CO
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output. We have no plan and cost to Canadians. Basically we will be part of a carbon trading system which is all about bureaucracy and transfer of money, and nothing to do with the environment.
I spent time in Europe this past summer visiting wind projects, garbage recycling and all kinds of things. My wife really enjoyed the holiday as we visited all the sites. I will have a lot more to say about that in years to come. We talk about quadrupling the wind credits. Germany, where people became committed, added 10,000 megawatts in five years because it had that vision. It put in targets and money and said that it would do it.
In our next throne speech we will show a long term vision. Environment cannot be planned in four year segments, or in this case the government's one year segment. It must be planned in much longer terms. It is a 50 year project, and developing technology. It is by showing investors that they should invest in a country that knows where it is going, that has a vision.
The OECD says that we are last in the industrialized world in terms of living up to environmental standards. That is where we are because of the commitment of the government. This throne speech simply shows that further. We need a commitment to the air. We need to have a clean energy plan. We need to take garbage, deal with it and help municipalities, cities, and provinces by providing the technology that is there.
I was in a recycling plant where nothing comes out of the stack. It makes money from garbage. It is a resource. It buys garbage because it cannot get enough to generate heat and electricity, and recycle all the products.
We need to take care of our brownfields and have an inventory of our aquifers. That is what a government with a vision for the environment would have had in the throne speech.
We talk about looking at the Great Lakes and studying them. Sixteen million Canadians live and depend on the Great Lakes. We already have an international commission that is toothless. It cannot do anything. A former member of the House, Mr. Gray, has attempted but has not accomplished very much because of the structure of that organization.
Energy is a most important issue today as fuel, heating, electricity and transportation costs go up. We also need a vision for that. We need to emphasize conservation. There is much more we can do in that area. We need to talk about transitional fuels and what we can do there.
Finally, we need to look at alternate energy. I was impressed with the wind projects and farms that I was privileged to see around the world. I went to the universities in Denmark. I listened to 150 engineers working on R and D for that country to become a world leader in wind energy and generation. It is pretty exciting stuff.
Wind energy is growing by 30% a year. I have to congratulate the Quebec government for taking the biggest plunge most recently with its announcement of a $3 billion, 2,000 megawatt project.
How about our agriculture community? How can it be helped? The municipality of Pincher Creek, Alberta, gets $900,000 in increased tax revenue from windmills. I have talked to the farmers in that community who get income from the windmills on their properties. Many of them say that they would have lost their farms because of the BSE issue if it were not for the revenue from the windmills. That was the sort of exciting vision for the environment that we needed to see in the throne speech but we did not. There was no excitement at all.
In Copenhagen I visited the solar city project. There is also a project in Amsterdam. They are rebuilding downtown dilapidated communities and are using solar cells. The street lights are run by solar and batteries. There were no elevators in the old buildings. They have put solar collectors on three sides, and the electricity for elevators and heat for the buildings is provided by solar.
There is so much vision and technology out there, but I do not believe the government is prepared to look at it or invest in it. It is kind of a status quo; do what it has always done. That is not what the country needs at this time.
There are all kinds of restrictions that cause investment to shy away from Canada. There are all kinds of interprovincial grid problems and environmental impact problems. We at least have a promise from the government to try to streamline it.
The federal government can provide some leadership on so much and do something about it. I encourage the government to take a look at the amendments that we have put forward. We just want a further accounting. We want some more vision for the country.
As well the Bloc wants more vision on provincial and federal jurisdictions. We need to really talk about that, not shy away from it or fight over it. We need to work together to achieve that kind of cooperation. That will be the vision for the country. That kind of throne speech would get credit from everyone, and everyone in the House would be able to vote for it.