Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Niagara Falls.
Before I address the environment parts of this budget, because after all, this was a green budget, I would like to quickly summarize the Liberal record.
First of all, on the environment, earlier we heard mention by a member of the opposition that the OECD does a different rating for child poverty. I have checked its rating for the environment and we are rated 24 out of the 24 countries in terms of environmental integrity. It used a whole bunch of criteria which are accepted internationally, have been peer reviewed by a number of scientists, and basically agree that in terms of environmental integrity we are lacking dramatically.
We have over 300 boil water warnings at any given time. We have increased smog days in our major cities. We have more and more contaminated sites and brownfields right across the country. I do not think that the members over there should be bragging too much, certainly not on the environment.
We also have a $500 billion debt. That amounts to about $40,000 per man, woman and child in this country. To hear the government members speaking about this, they talk as if, “We have three credit cards. They are all at the max, but we have $20 in our pocket so we have lots of money. We have a surplus to spend”. Actually our country has a $500 billion debt for our future generations.
We have a justice system that becomes weaker and weaker. Day by day more and more offenders are released, who everybody says will reoffend. We have less influence in the world because of poor leadership. We have an EI fund that overcollected $43 billion and basically less than 40% can collect that.
We have an immigration system that is close to collapse. A friend of mine who works in Qatar says that a person can go to an office building there, have a guaranteed Canadian passport within one year and have an apartment in either Toronto or Montreal given to him or her. He knows of families who have received their Canadian passports simply by going to an office in Qatar.
We have a gun registry that was estimated to cost $2 million but it has gone to $2 billion. That is our first black hole. The second black hole was announced today where there will be $10 billion instead of the $5 billion that was estimated for Kyoto. It will probably be 10 times that and will be our second deepest black hole that we could have.
There is the sponsorship scandal where organized crime is involved with a political party in this country.
When I first came here in 1993 we had a budget of $140 billion. This budget is $210 billion. Think of the spending increase. How many Canadian families have been able to increase their spending by that kind of percentage?
We have higher taxes. They keep going up. Our tax free day occurs later and later. We have a back-loaded budget. We have a defence that has collapsed. We have, as I say, an environmental record that we really cannot say very much about.
What about this budget? Let us talk about the government's lack of planning. In 1992 we went to Rio and said, “Clean air is a major problem. Climate change is a major problem. We recognize it in Canada and we are going to do something about it”. Well, it took from 1993 to 1997 before anything was done. No planning, no budgeting, nothing was done.
In 1997 we went over to Kyoto, we signed something, no planning, no idea of what it was going to cost, no economic projections, no understanding of what that even meant, and we signed on. Then we did nothing.
In 2002, because the whole international community was putting pressure on us, we came up with a plan. The plan of today is a quarter as big as the plan of 2002. It has less detail. It does not even attempt to be a plan. It does not tell where anything is going to come from. It does not tell us how we are going to achieve any of our targets, but it says we are going to spend $10 billion doing nothing. Ten billion dollars is an awful lot of money for Canadians to absorb.
How are Canadians going to absorb that? The only way is by doubling the cost of their electricity, doubling the cost of heating their houses, and probably doubling the cost of driving their cars. That affects everyone. Whether we buy lettuce, the trucking costs will be more, whether we heat our home, whether we are a senior citizen on a fixed income, it means we are going to pay.
What are we paying for? We are going to pay for something that is not going to achieve any targets. What should we be doing? I will get to that in a few minutes. Obviously there is an answer to this, but the government is not going to find it.
If we examine the budget, we would find that part 13 talks about a climate fund. What is it? It is basically $1 billion, only $1 billion. The Liberals are going to take this money and buy emission credits. What the minister said was that we are not going to buy emission credits in Canada probably because they would be too expensive. We would not want to give farmers something for their sinks for agriculture practices. We would not want to give the forester something because of his forestry practices. That would be too expensive. We would not want to do that.
We would rather go to Zimbabwe, Africa and tell them, “You guys never industrialize. We will keep you poor and we will buy your credits and you can give them to us cheap”. We are going to get them for $2 or $3 for a tonne of carbon because after all, the European market is at $30 and we do not want to pay that, so we are just going to boot some of the poor guys, maybe Mexico, Africa or whomever. That is a real Liberal way of dealing with the climate change problem; let us buy cheap credits because after all we are a powerful nation.
I do not know about the buying of emissions credits. It is full of holes. How are we going to administer it? We say to the people of Ukraine, “We will send you about $100 million and you will do an environmentally clean project and we will get credits for it and we will monitor you”. Yes, we are going to monitor them. How can we monitor things that are happening in Canada? We know $100 million goes missing in Canada pretty easily; just imagine in Ukraine or Zimbabwe or Mexico. It just does not make any sense.
Obviously we are going to have a clean fund. I think the name has changed but I have a hard time keeping up with the names because they change every week. We are going to buy these credits and most of them by the minister's admission will be international. I would like to see that in the budget. I hope Canadians ask a lot of questions during the next election about the climate fund and where it is going.
Part 14 is about greenhouse gas technology investment, which sounds good until we look at it. Twelve Liberals are being appointed to a board to take money from one company and distribute it to another company which develops clean technology. That is a great idea too. It is really good to develop new technology, but imagine the Transaltas of this world which are working on clean coal technology. They are the second heaviest emitters in Canada and we are telling them that they will pay millions of dollars into a fund, that 12 Liberals are going to sit on a board in Ottawa and are going to distribute it to new technology funds. Who are they going to be? They are going to be Liberal friendly firms. It is shocking that they would even consider doing that, but they just might.
On the CEPA clause, the Liberals took it out of the budget. They are going to give us a win. Where does it appear? They are going to administer this new plan using CEPA, a carbon tax on Canadians. That is what it will be. That is how it will end up. It is a blank cheque for them so now they have snuck it into that plan out of the budget.
In conclusion, we do have a better way. We have a solution to this problem. We would have a clean air plan, a clean water plan, a soil plan, an energy plan involving conservation, transitional fuels and alternate energy. It will be a long term plan that will achieve the goals and we will have a clean environment for Canadians.