Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to this very important issue, an issue that is crucial to our common future.
We will need to tell our children what we did about this issue while we still have the opportunity. We have seen today how difficult it is to get past this appalling partisan debate, this ping-pong back and forth.
Eminent scientists, like climatologist Dr. Andrew Weaver, have sounded the alarm and have called for immediate action if we are to prevent the feedback loop that is inherent in the climate change process.
Mr. John Robinson from UBC has said that the barriers to moving forward are not technological. He said that the fundamental things we need to do are policy changes that focus on the rules of the game with regulatory mechanisms.
I would like to try to deal with the motion at hand and what can be done to combat climate change. The issue of CEPA as a tool against climate change versus having legislation that would enforce action of the government has been raised several times by members of the Liberal Party. We have heard that CEPA allows government to act, and that is precisely the problem. It only enables government action. To actually get the action, we need to trust the government to act behind closed doors to do something.
I once heard a former environment minister lament that he could not get his cabinet colleagues to act on climate change, as he put it, to act in the public interest. That is what happens if we leave the process behind closed doors. To say that CEPA could be used to tackle climate change is asking Canadians to accept that the fight against climate change happens at the whim of government behind closed doors in cabinet. We need legislation to set concrete objectives on absolute reductions of our greenhouse gas emissions. We need legislatively binding targets.
Instead of talking about who is worse on the environment, let us talk about what needs to happen because, frankly, we have done a poor job. We need to look primarily at how we produce and how we consume energy. We cannot gloss over just intensity based targets or even look, as the Minister of Natural Resources seems to, at ways to clean up the dirty energy. He seems to have boundless enthusiasm for nuclear energy.
We need to look at absolute reductions of our energy production and consumption and we need to decouple economic growth from the consumption of fossil fuels, as both Liberals and Conservative seem reluctant to do in reining in the accelerated exploration of the tar sands. When we do get honest answers about why the Liberals have not acted on climate change in an effective way, they confess that they did not want to hurt the economy.
We need to take a lead on new technologies, look at solutions toward the bioeconomy and look at green technology, green energy. Thanks to the loud voice of Canadians, the government is finally starting to get it. While the government talks about taking action, we have proposed a legislative committee and invited all parties to bring their best solutions to allow us to come away from this Parliament having taken action.
I invite my colleagues to think seriously about what they will tell their children if we miss this opportunity.