Mr. Speaker, as the senior environment critic it certainly is my privilege to stand in this prebudget debate to talk about what we would like to see in the budget regarding the environment.
My background is as a biologist. My involvement has gone a long way back with speeches in the 1970s on the conserver society and what we should do with landfill, rivers, streams, soil and all kinds of management issues.
When I tried to think of what I wanted to talk about on the government's upcoming budget, I thought I could turn it into somewhat of a fairy tale, but then I thought that might be making light of the issue too much. I could say that once upon a time in 1992 at the Rio accord when climate change was first identified and the present Prime Minister was there as the senior environment critic along with his cohort and white knight Maurice Strong, they basically signed on as they have signed on to some 100 other international agreements on the environment. The environment commissioner has told us that we have not lived up to very many of those. That is largely because we seldom if ever have a plan when we proceed on environmental issues.
In 1997 it was not much different. We met with the premiers in Regina and then rushed off to Kyoto. The whole purpose was to sign something and to look better than the Americans. The Americans said that they would agree to 5% below 1990 levels, so we went with 6%. There was no plan. There was no consideration that this is a very large country, that this is a very cold country, that we have few people relative to many other countries and that we have very little infrastructure for transportation that would allow us to make some of the savings that we might want to make. The U.S. obviously came to the same conclusions and made the decision that it could not live up to this, particularly without having countries like China, India, Mexico, Brazil and other developing countries as part of it. Again the government had no plan.
We went through the period of 1997 to 2002 and still the government had no plan. It is now 10 years since agreeing that climate change is a major issue. There were closed door consultations. The government talks about prebudget consultations. I hope they were not anything like the ones that went ahead on the Kyoto protocol. There were 14 meetings in 14 cities. There was an invited guest list. The media was not invited. Members of the opposition were not invited; we had to literally crash the meetings. No one was allowed to speak unless of course the person agreed with the government's position. If that is consultation in Liberal terms, I can see why there is no plan.
In Johannesburg in 2002 again our Prime Minister was present. I was there. I spoke to him prior to his making the announcement that we would ratify the protocol. I said, “Mr. Prime Minister, where is the plan?” He said, “It is going to come”. We are still waiting. It is now two weeks before the whole implementation and we understand that in this budget there may be up to $3 billion in more spending, but where is the plan? I think everyone can understand the degree of frustration for many of us who really would like to see something happen.
By 2004 we were 25% above where we were in 1990. The bureaucrats have announced that we will be 30% above our 1990 levels within the next two or three years. We are going the wrong way. We have committed $3.7 billion. In this budget we understand through leaked documents that we are about to commit another $3 billion. That will be a total of $6.7 billion. That makes it at least three times the gun registry. Do we have another such program being rolled out by the government in this budget that will end up like that?
On the plane last night I read Rex Murphy's comment about the one tonne challenge and the big advertising scheme that is going on right now by Rick Mercer. He said, “I'd say Rick has about as much credibility on the one tonne challenge as Céline Dion has selling us the virtues of Air Canada”. There is a lot to be learned from yesterday's article. That is where the government is at. It is interesting to note that a comedian was hired to promote what it is about to do.
We have known for a long time that the heavy emitters could not achieve 55 megatonnes. We understand it is going to be 37 megatonnes. If we all reduced our use of carbon it would only make up 20 megatonnes of the now 300 megatonne commitment. If the heavy emitters are down to 37 megatonnes and Canadians at a maximum are expected to account for 20 megatonnes, where is the rest going to come from? Obviously we hope to learn that from the budget, but I doubt very much that we are going to.
Instead we are going to see the government allocating more money, another $3 billion to a whole bunch of programs. That is exactly what we do not need. We need to commit directly to Canadians that we are going to give them the incentives to do something about the carbon that is being released. We do not need a bunch of programs. We do not need more bureaucracy. What has plagued Kyoto all along is program after program after program.
The Europeans are going through the same thing. We learned that in Buenos Aires in December. They are setting up programs. Their big scheme is carbon trading. If that is not one of the biggest hoaxes and biggest non-environmental ways to deal with the problem I do not know what is.
The government has no plan, but we have a plan. We have a long term plan, one that involves air and the sequestering of CO
2
. It involves the removal of sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxide, particulate matter, those things which cause real pollution. The Conservative Party has a plan that involves clean water, that involves mapping our aquifers and understanding the positive and negative charge of those aquifers. The Conservative Party has a plan for soil, for brownfields, for clean up, for all of the issues that affect every municipality throughout the whole country.
We have an energy plan based around conservation. There is much we could do there. The government has some good ideas, but its method of implementing them I do not believe will work.
We also want to talk about transitional fuels, about alternate energy, and about the many ways we could provide for the development of new technology. There is lots of new technology out there that could deal with our environmental problems.
There is no vision from the government. There is no plan from the government. The government simply wants to throw money at the problem and hope it will go away. That is not the way to deal with environmental issues. They are dealt with through cooperation with municipalities, through cooperation with the provinces, and by giving Canadians a vision of where we want to go regarding the environment.
We have to reward industry for the new technologies. We have to develop those new technologies so we can transfer them to other countries, so we can help India, China, and the developing world that is not part of the Kyoto plan.
We need to provide incentives to consumers. We need to provide incentives for wind energy, solar energy, tidal biomass, geothermal and all of those other things.
As the environment commissioner said, there is a lot of talk across there but very little action has been taken over the last 11 years of Liberal government. The Conservative Party will commit to doing that through a solid plan, not this make believe plan and this fairy tale that the Liberals have been living.