Madam Speaker, I would to tell the hon. member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley why the Government of Canada obviously cannot support this motion as an adjunct to the excellent speech by the hon. Minister of Natural Resources.
The first reason is that we are somewhat surprised the opposition did not present a motion congratulating not only the Government of Canada, but also the entire country of Canada, on hosting the most important international conference in the field of climate change, that is the 11th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which will also be the first Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto protocol.
I think the hon. member should have asked his leader, who was with me in Buenos Aires, as was the Conservative critic, why Canada was approached to take on this conference. Perhaps then he would have learned that, as the Minister of Natural Resources said, the world is impressed by the fact that the Canadian economy, while growing strongly, has been able to begin to break the link between economic growth and greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, while greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 20% since 1990, the economy has grown by 40%. That is the first stage.
The second stage will be to reduce—