Mr. Speaker, while I listened with interest to my colleague's speech, I still do not feel much comfort. This past Christmas, we had an unprecedented situation in Timmins: no snow. In January, people went through the ice and drowned, which is an unprecedented situation. Trucks could not travel up the ice road until middle to late January, and then only pickup trucks because there was not enough ice on the James Bay frontier, again completely unprecedented.
People in my riding asked me how it was possible that the government could talk about dealing with greenhouse gas emissions when the Prime Minister in his end of year address referred to them as “so-called greenhouse gases”. The sense I have from people in my riding is that the Prime Minister simply does not believe it. By calling them “so-called greenhouse gases”, how much clearer can he be in his skepticism?
Through the entire last Parliament, we sat and listened to the Conservative Party come up with every crackpot theory under the sun about climate change, whether it was the flatulence from the dinosaurs still up in the clouds to the rain patterns over the Pacific. We have not heard the government clearly say that climate change is a direct and dire threat. The former minister spoke strictly of smog.
Will the member stand up and say that the Prime Minister does believe in the science of climate change? We have not heard that and people back home simply do not believe the government.