I apologize if I may have offended the Speaker in some manner.
If I may continue, the article continued:
Worse. The Stelmach government's policy calls for a 14 per cent Alberta reduction by 2050, whereas the [Conservatives'] government national target for 2050 is 50 to 60 per cent. It's the square peg into the round hole again.
There is a problem here. The government is promising one thing, but it will not delve into the details. It will not explain to Canadians that what it is proposing cannot be achieved.
The government is forgetting another detail. The Auditor General said last week that perhaps we should be looking, as a liability, at some of the costs to the government of not reaching the Kyoto target. We should do perhaps like what the government of New Zealand has done. It expects that by 2012 it will probably have to purchase some carbon credits on the international market and this foreseen cost should be somehow factored into the government's balance sheet. Somehow the government does not care about those details. It only cares about details when they are to its benefit.
When there are major national challenges facing governments, whichever government we are speaking about, whichever country we are speaking about, it is important to set targets, long term targets if need be. If we worry about crossing every t and dotting every i before we start to act, we will never progress. We will be stuck in neutral forever. I will use an example that I have used before.
Back in 1960, when the United States knew that it had to accelerate the pace of its space program, it set an objective 10 years hence. The objective, of course, was to go to the moon by 1970. The scientists at NASA did not know specifically in detail about how the US was going to get there, but they were inspired. They knew they could do it. They had faith and they moved forward.
This bill attempts to set targets, even though it has not laid out the specific road map for getting there. Unless the government starts taking targets seriously and starts to put together a credible plan, not a plan that is going to be contradicted by the actions of the Alberta government but a credible plan for reaching some targets that have obtained consensus at the international level, then we are never going to solve this problem.
In the final analysis, maybe the government has no real intention of making progress on climate change.