Mr. Speaker, in talking about the Arctic and the protection of the Arctic, it cannot be extricated from the notion of climate change. We have seen this time and again. In fact, studies that had been done in Canada's Arctic were one of the first and earliest warning signs of the effects of climate change and what they could possibly be.
Despite those warnings, despite the alarm bells sounding year after year, we have seen successive Canadian governments choose to look away. We have seen successive Canadian governments put the very fabric of the Arctic's ecosystem at risk by simply not making decisions that were required to wrestle to the ground this challenge around greenhouse gas emissions.
During the recent visit of the President of the United States to Canada, in the one public moment that the president and Prime Minister had, the Prime Minister alluded to the idea that a cap and trade system was equal if we were to measure greenhouse gas emissions both by intensity, which is being suggested here and only here in Canada by the government, and a hard cap, that those were somehow interchangeable and that the market could operate together, that the Canadian system, the Conservative system of intensity targets, which, frankly, nobody in the world uses that we have been able to find, were somehow interchangeable and we could now allow Canadian companies access to the market that will be established in the U.S.
In the real case of the legislation working its way through congress right now, it uses an entirely different system of measuring greenhouse gas emissions and proposes an entirely different system of actually dealing with investments around climate change. One is actually in sync with the European Union, with the Kyoto process and our partner countries.
I wonder if the member could comment on this strange dysfunction that our Prime Minister seems to have when trying to get the idea of how this thing will work and how we will deal with climate change.