Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my hon. colleague, the member for Victoria.
Members of the Liberal Party have been waving around a five year old letter from the Prime Minister when he was leader of the Alliance Party. In this letter the Prime Minister made statements about Kyoto being a socialist plan to export Canadian wealth. Yesterday it was the only question the Liberals could ask in the House, but both the Prime Minister and the Liberals are wrong. Shipping Canadian dollars to other countries as the Liberals would have done to meet Kyoto is actually a capitalist plan. It is a plan to ensure that corporations can continue to expand their markets and find a way to deal with Kyoto at the lowest possible cost without any worry about the effect on the global environment.
All around the world the successful countries that have dealt with climate change are social democratic countries which have values which the NDP also has. We have a plan to meet Kyoto and it is a plan based on social democratic principles which will build the Canadian economy, create jobs for average Canadians and save working families money on their energy bills.
One of the key elements in the NDP plan is to change how we deal with energy. Canada needs an energy strategy. We need to ensure there is clean energy available not just for today but for our children and grandchildren, not a plan that allows a laissez-faire system to exist in this country to recklessly produce and sell off our fossil fuel resources.
What would a strategy look like? The primary goal of an energy strategy must be to provide a secure energy supply sufficient to meet our needs. However, these needs primarily must be reduced. By reducing the needs it will enable the most rapid transition as possible to an energy regime based on conservation and the sustainable use of renewable energy.
The goal of an energy policy must definitely not be merely to produce as much energy as possible to meet a growing global demand with no regard for social and environmental impacts. Conservation and reduction of energy consumption must be one of the pillars of an energy strategy. Consuming less energy will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce air pollution and save ordinary Canadians money. Those are all laudable goals.
The second pillar of an energy strategy is to replace non-renewable energy sources with renewable ones. To do this our strategy would include actions to develop a thriving renewable energy industry in Canada, particularly wind, small hydro, solar and biomass. All of these are possible. All of these are important and all of these can happen in our system.
We need the creation of a crown corporation to assist communities, commercial and industrial interests at the community level, to help create these kinds of energy which are not transported mainly by pipes or transmission lines but really deal with how we use energy at home and in the community.
We need to install 100,000 solar roofs to get our solar energy program going. We are falling behind the rest of the world. Our country has an abysmal record of supporting solar energy.
We need to invest in cogeneration. One of the simplest and most fundamental ways that northern countries save energy is cogeneration; use the waste heat that is produced in industrial and electrical processes.
We need investment in sustainable public transport.
We need to provide funding to support the development of community groups and non-profit organizations to promote activities which have these values and put these values in front of Canadians which allow small businesses, individuals and community governments to make the best of the energy systems that are available to them.
A gradual transition to a sustainable renewable energy regime allowing maximum use of attrition and ensuring planned decreases in production can be accomplished and can save jobs, and can provide a reasonable transition to a new economy.
However, any strategy for Canada would be incomplete if it did not address fossil fuels. When we talk about addressing fossil fuels, I do not think we only want to talk about bringing liquefied natural gas into this country to replace a rapidly declining resource that was so mishandled through the 1980s and 1990s by successive Liberal governments.
The NDP strategy would conduct a complete assessment of federal subsidies and incentives to the energy sector, with input from relevant stakeholders, accompanied by the establishment of a specific timetable for the rapid elimination of environmentally harmful subsidies and incentives, particularly those associated with the oil and gas industry.
In order to share my time with my hon. colleague from Victoria, I will bring my debate to a conclusion.
Finally, an energy strategy for Canada must put Canada's energy needs first, not those of the United States, not made in Washington with the North American energy working group giving direction to this country. We need our own energy strategy. We need it in conjunction with the Kyoto plan. Without that energy strategy, we will not get to Kyoto.