Mr. Speaker, what an excellent choice in this wall of conservatism that we have to jump over in order to enter this debate and talk about the things that people actually care about.
For many years the Conservatives rallied in the House and said that money must not simply be assigned without a plan for that money. They said it was bad fiscal prudence, bad for Canadians, and bad for the economy because it would send unclear signals. Lo and behold, the Conservatives now break tradition with their allocation of $2 billion supposedly for climate change initiatives while at the same time cutting and gutting other programs that actually benefit Canadians such as the home retrofit program.
At the international meeting in Bonn, non-signatories like China and India produced plans to close the gap on their greenhouse gas emissions and increase the amount of green energy and green technology in their economies. Yet Canada, as the chair, was unable to produce a plan. Canada's only statement was that we were not going to meet our targets and to even attempt to meet such targets would absolutely shut down the Canadian economy. We would have to take every car off the road and every plane out of the sky was what was said by our so-called Minister of the Environment. I wonder if he could comment on that.