Mr. Speaker, having listened to that from a Liberal is really quite amazing considering the 13 years that I have been here listening to the promises.
Climate change was identified in 1992. Nothing was done.
In 1997, we signed on to Kyoto. Nothing was done.
In 2002, in Johannesburg, again we identified the problem. Nothing was done.
Here we are in 2006 and that member has the nerve to stand and lecture about what the Liberals have done, when in fact we are 35% above 1990 levels and Canada had agreed to be 6% below 1990 levels. What he cannot possibly imagine is how we could ever achieve that. If he looked at reality, he would see that this is 195 megatonnes of carbon that we would have to remove from the environment. It is not achievable. What does he not understand? We had to start in 1993 and we had to have an aggressive plan to deal with this climate change problem. The previous government did nothing.
Fortunately, at least there are countries that are trying to come up with solutions. I have attended the COP meetings, the meetings of the Conference of the Parties to Kyoto. Those meetings consist of 190 countries. Each of those countries has its own problems, its own social problems, climate problems, et cetera, and we are supposed to come to some sort of agreement on how to solve climate change. It is not happening. It is a dream. It is just a dream.
Fortunately, the G-8 plus five, consisting of the G-8 members plus India, China, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa, are coming up with solutions. Fortunately, the Asia-Pacific partnership is looking at solutions. At least, hopefully, someone is going to deal with climate change, but certainly 190 countries are not going to come up with consensus in time and they are not going to achieve their targets.
Why do we have to oppose this bill? We have a number of reasons.
Obviously, this bill would place a huge drain on the administrative part of the government without allowing the government to focus on the actual reductions that are necessary. This bill would oblige the Minister of the Environment to establish an annual climate change plan and to make regulations and would also oblige the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development to review the plan and the proposed regulations and submit a report to Parliament.
Obviously the previous government did not do any of those things. There were no reports. There was no record. Nothing ever happened. There was just a lot of talk.
While this bill would be totally cumbersome and would obviously take a huge amount of resources of the government, we should spend the money on an actual plan, on actually doing things, not dreaming about buying credits from some foreign country and sending them off. No one has been able to explain to me how buying credits from a foreign country is in fact going to help the global environment.
What they do not seem to understand is that air is shared by everyone and that the 556 coal-fired power plants being built in China using soft coal are a huge environmental problem. Let us help them with the technology so they can change. That would make a difference. That would really have some impact. Let us develop that gasification technology here in Canada and then transfer that technology to the developing countries where we could really make a difference. That is positive. That is the sort of positive thing we can do.
We have a bill in front of us that wants us to have more regulations, more government reports and more government planning. I do not have that much faith in government. I have a lot more faith in working with the provinces, in working with industry and in looking to the future and having a long term vision for where we want to go and how we want to deal with the climate change problem. I think that is obviously what Canadians expect us to do.
We need to reduce by 195 megatonnes to get to our target. Most people do not understand what a megatonne is, but basically, as the minister has said in the House, it would mean shutting down transportation, shutting off the lights and stopping everything if we were to achieve that target. It is not possible. Canadians do not want that.
Canadians want a plan from us. They want a plan that will deal with pollution and climate change and with the soil, the water, the land and everything that we do. That is the direction in which we need to go.
We hear from the other side of the House that we need to go after the oil and gas industry but that is not true. We need to rely on the capture and sequestering of CO2. We need to get into the gasification of everything from garbage to coal, and it is already happening. In some countries they have been doing that for a long time. Norway has been sequestering CO2 in the caverns underneath the North Sea for 10 years. This is not new technology. It does not need to be developed further. We just need to do it.
The former government did not do it when it was in power. It did not listen to advisers. It finally got down to the desperation $10 billion, which probably could have been $80 billion, and said that it would buy foreign carbon credits. Maybe that made the previous government feel better but it is like talking to the city council which says that it recycles plastic, which is wonderful, but where does the plastic go? It gets bundled, sent by ships through the Panama Canal and ends up going to a landfill in China. How does that make everyone feel? That is not really recycling. That is phony and it is not telling Canadians the truth. Let us get on with telling Canadians truthfully how we can deal with this.
We should be pretty excited about the green plan that is coming and that we will be able to implement. In some of the research Mark Jaccard has done, he says that it could cost Canadians up to $80 billion to start right now to try to achieve those targets. That is not feasible. It cannot be done so let us get on with the green plan. We do not need to be lectured about what should have happened because, again, we have sat here and watched but nothing has happened.
I was embarrassed at COP 10 in Argentina when the former minister of the environment stood and reported for this country and said that we had the one tonne challenge and that we would hit our targets. The one tonne challenge was designed to take care of 20 megatonnes if it worked. That was all we had to brag about. It was embarrassing when we were listening to other countries say that they were developing wind technology, alternate energies of different kinds, looking at wave technology and so on. We are not leaders in those areas and we should be. The jobs that are related, what we can do for our environment and for the global environment, it is pretty phenomenal.
As a Canadian and a member of Parliament in 2006, the legacy I want to leave is that we took action and we did something about the air, the water and the land. We can do it. Whether it is sequestering or whatever we want to do, we can be leaders and that is what we should aim for.
What we will be getting in the House is a real plan and we will carry it out. It will happen and Canadians will understand that, rather than buying carbon credits from some foreign country, we will be doing things here in Canada that will make a difference and will be transferable to other parts of the world.
We cannot support the bill. We do not think that more regulation and more planning is necessary. We need to take action and that is what we plan to do.