It could be American corporations. It could be any other company that invests in this country, or it could be Canadians as well. All corporations have the opportunity to either move forward or not move forward. We will see who has the moxie in their company and who has the wherewithal to do it.
My territory has many multinationals. Some of them come from Australia, from England and from South Africa. They all deal in diamonds. We did not set any standards for them for energy production. They all rely on good old oil to generate their electricity to heat their mines.
We have alternatives in the Northwest Territories. We have demonstrated that. We can provide them all the clean hydroelectric power they want for their facilities. When they are under some pressure to do this, they will do it. If they want the diamonds and the economic activity, they will invest in the clean energy that will make their businesses fit under the Kyoto requirements.
Years ago I had the opportunity, as a mayor in my community, to stand up against the development of the Alberta-Pacific pulp mill in northeastern Alberta. It had proposed a particular setup where it would pollute the river systems, create a lot of damage and affect my community. We fought that and proved our point. The companies were rejected at the environmental assessment. Within two or three months, they came with a solution that reduced the pollution by over 70%.
When I talked to those same companies years later, they said the best thing that happened to them in that process was they were forced to clean up their act. They said that they now had a product with an environmental tag on it. They had a facility that was the best in the world, they were selling their pulp and making money at it.
Sometimes the lesson should be that the fear of progress should never stop one from making progress. Fear does not drive a healthy economy. Fear does not drive nation building. Fear does not create a world of which our children would be proud. The environment minister should not try to scare us. We are not here to be scared. We are here to accomplish something for Canadians.
I hope the environment minister will join with us, bring forward Bill C-30, allow it to debated in the House and show Canadians that when the four parties in this House of Commons work together, we can produce results for Canadians.
The time now is not for timid actions. It is not time to try to scare working Canadians away from what needs to be done. Imagine, in the 1940s, if the minister said that the cost to Canada of fighting the second world war was too much and that it was better to let those fascists have their way. We made a choice to invest in our future.
Like almost 70 years ago, Canada is once again facing a serious threat, a threat to our coastal cities, to our agricultural industry, to the thing that sustains our life, the planet Earth. To deal with this threat, we need cooperative action. We need global action. We cannot turn our backs on the first global treaty that has been signed to initiate a process that will reduce the level of greenhouse gases around the world. We cannot allow the threat of climate change by putting one set of interests ahead of another. We cannot say that because we need to expand the oil and gas industry, we need to use dirtier products to add to our ability to expand. Just like in the second world war, we have to work together on this.
As part of our fight against climate change, we need a national energy strategy as well, which is based on renewable energy and uses an east-west electricity grid to transfer clean energy from one part of Canada to another. At our last convention, the NDP adopted a policy for the creation of a national energy strategy.
Only through cooperative effort and effective planning, such as the development of a national energy strategy, will we be able to successfully meet the challenge of climate change. We cannot simply put into place targets without planning, without telling everyone how are we going to move forward. We have to let them know what are going to invest in to make our future right.
We talk about investing in liquefied natural gas terminals. Choosing to export money and the problem of climate change and bring in another source of fossil fuels for Canadians, is not a solution that should fit for Canadians. We can look at our valuable resources in the tar sands and say that one way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from these tar sands is to export the raw bitumen, export jobs, export economic opportunities and export pollution. That does not make sense either in a world in which we live. We need to work with our people in the tar sands to ensure the product they provide is clean, it works and it has the desirable attributes that we want from an energy product.
It is time for the environment minister and others in the House, who are not ready to face the challenge, to put away their scare tactics, to work with the rest of us, to work with Canadians and to come together, bring Bill C-30 forward, let us debate it in the House of Commons and let us move forward in that regard.