Mr. Speaker, I was very interested to hear a member of Parliament stand in this House of Commons and brag about his party's five different plans to deal with climate change. Of those five different plans, he claims that all of them supported the Kyoto accord.
It is interesting that he himself has been a noted opponent of the Kyoto accord. I will read what he said in the Globe and Mail on January 29, 2002. He said, “If Canada does ratify Kyoto...the cost...would be as much as $40-billion a year”.
He then said, “But when people see the costs, they are going to scream!” He said that in Canadian Speeches, January 1, 2003, volume 16, issue 6, if anyone wants to look at that.
His brother also promised to close Ontario's coal-fired plants by 2007. Of course we all know that to this day roughly 30% of Ontario's electrical generation comes from coal fire, so that promise has not been kept and those coal-fired plants continue to emit greenhouse gases into our atmosphere.
It is interesting that he is taking a different position now that he is the Liberal spokesman on the environment. I could go through quote after quote of evidence that he was a lifelong skeptic of the Kyoto accord. As soon as it came into the public lexicon around the environment, he said that it was impossible to meet and that it would cost billions of unaffordable dollars to make it happen. Even in 2002, while his own party was in power, he said that Canada had a huge job ahead to meet Kyoto, a job that his party did not get done, according to his own deputy leader.
I have another quote from the National Post by the Liberal environment critic on the Liberal Party. He said, “the [Liberal] party was involved in a 'medium-sized car crash' during the recent federal election”.
That member is a man who has become the high priest of hypocrisy on the environment. He has said one thing for his entire professional life and performed a spectacular backflip since taking this position in order to take advantage of political opportunities.
I wonder it the member would indicate whether he was telling the truth then or telling the truth now.