Mr. Speaker, I thank you for your wise ruling today and ask you to accept our accolades.
The reason this is important for us as parliamentarians is that what took place at the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development is something that all parliamentarians, regardless of political stripe or interest, should resist. The government's unwillingness to accept a private member's piece of legislation meant that it used a tactic that has never been known in the recorded history of this place: that of filibustering, in a sense, a private member's bill.
As was noted in a Speaker's ruling some weeks prior to this, the committees in this place must learn to function and govern themselves in an appropriate way. They must learn to conduct the will of Parliament and the will of Canadians who have sent us to this place to advocate on their behalf for good things to happen.
Bill C-377, with the four amendments that I will be addressing today, does exactly that. For the first time in Canadian law, the targets relating to climate change, the greenhouse gas emissions for this country, will be legislated into law, thereby prohibiting any government, this one or any future government, from resisting the will of Canadians, from resisting the inclination that we must do the right thing when it comes to climate change.
As for these amendments, the irony, I suppose, which my colleagues are well aware of although I am not sure that all government members are, is that when we ran into this impasse in committee, this filibuster presented by the Conservatives, it was around clause 10, which is a clause for accountability and transparency when dealing with greenhouse gases. That is all the clause said. This part of the bill said that the government must tell Canadians what it has done, what the record has been on climate change, where the successes and failures have been, and then also tell Canadians what the plans are and have that accountable to Canadians. That is where we hit the roadblock.
This is obviously ironic coming from the Conservatives, who spent a great deal of time and effort in the last Parliament and then in the lead-up to this one in their campaign, talking about transparency and accountability. When it came to facing a bill on the environment, on climate change, which is top of mind for Canadians, in the very section that says the government must be transparent and accountable the government chose to delay and deny the reality of what we are faced with.
The fact is that Canada as a nation, as an economy, is far off track with our own commitments, our international commitments, but also far off track with what the rest of the developed world is doing, which is to find a way to make our economy more efficient, to produce more green collar jobs, and to allow Canadians to feel assured about our environment's future and not have to continue to face the threat of irreversible climate change, which we are already seeing.
It is a moral question that the government has been unable to face. It is a question of ethics that the government is unwilling to consider. In its two and a half long years in the House, following up on the 13 long years in government of the previous regime--too many--the government has been unable to effectively address the issue of climate change.
New Democrats, under the leadership of the member for Toronto—Danforth, have finally presented a reasonable, considered piece of legislation that will allow the country to move forward on this critical issue.
The actual amendments dealing with this bill are I think quite instructive. This bill, like all bills by the time they reach their final stages and final processes, originated some two years ago. The final four amendments to this bill deal with lessons learned over two years. They are lessons learned at the special legislative committee on the clean air and climate change act. That act was a flawed government bill that the NDP rewrote and for which it presented the best thinking on issues related to the environment at the time.
This was learned from events with respect to Bill C-288, when the government found a way to again try to put the kibosh on what was happening. We learned again from this bill.
Mr. Speaker, please correct me if I am wrong procedurally, but I have just been handed a note about splitting my time with the member for Outremont.