Mr. Speaker, I am very aware of all the figures in the budget. The problem is the back-loading, as I mentioned. The problem is also whether we will ever see some of that. We have had so much money allocated that never gets spent because there is no vision. There is no game plan of how we are going to get there.
Let me address the issue of the large emitters. I believe in cooperating with provinces and with these large emitters. By doing so, we can achieve even better targets than what the Kyoto protocol is all about. But what if we buy carbon credits from somewhere else?
Let us take a company in my riding. Its charge is going to be $6 million a year. That $6 million is going to be transferred to buy a piece of paper in the Ukraine. How are we going to monitor that?
Would it not be better for that company to invest that $6 million into new technology or into developing a technology, into CO
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sequestering, which is really possible now, or into some clean coal technology or some of these new innovative things, these alternate energies? There is the wind power process, and I agree very much with that process. We have biodiesel, biomass and all those things. Would it not be better to invest the $6 million there and then be in a position to transfer that technology to China, India, Mexico and Brazil, the countries that are the big emitters now because they are using old technology?
For us to simply penalize Canadian companies makes absolutely no sense to me. Let us use that money domestically. Let us develop these processes here. Let us clean up our environment here but then make the technology available to those other developing countries. That is the way to go, not with a European carbon trading system. Carbon has gone from $3 on January 1 to $11.80 as of last Monday. The Russians hope it is going to go to $35. The Canadian government has guaranteed a price of $15 for heavy emitters. We can just imagine if it goes to $20. That $5 commitment has to be picked up by the Canadian taxpayers and we are talking about billions and billions of dollars. It is not the way to go.
The way to go is through technological development here. It will help our environment, but more important, it will go to the really big emitters in the other countries, in China and so on. If we do not have them on side we will go nowhere.