Madam Speaker, I stand tonight with regard to the issue of the environment and the fact that the government continues to say that it found religion and suddenly now they are concerned about climate change and that they have a plan. Clearly, they have not found religion and they have no plan.
In the three years that the Conservatives have been in office, they have not brought in one regulation to deal with the issue of climate change. In fact, when President Obama was here, we thought we heard from the third environment minister that somehow they were being tough on the environment, that they would have caps. They say that they will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by the year 2020 but they have no baseline.
The Conservatives ask what the Liberals did. In November, Environment Canada said that between 2003-08 emissions were actually down by 2.8%. The government does not mention that during our time we had the greenest budget in history, $10 billion in 2005, the most aggressive plan of the G8. The fact is that the government has not been serious on climate change. I do not even know if its members can even spell the word. It concerns me when the government talks about caps when it does not come clean on the baseline, on what it intends to do and on how it will achieve it.
It is all well and good to say that we want to have an agreement with the United States, but during the time when the United States had not signed Kyoto, 43 American states were very aggressive on the issue of climate change. The Conservatives, however, and the science deniers on that side of the House said that they did not even think that climate change was a real issue. They thought it was a socialist plot, as we all remember.
There really is a hard cap and trade system. In his very first budget, President Obama was very clear on caps and on what he would do in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, something the Conservative government has failed to enunciate. President Obama clearly indicated that his government might bring in $3 billion in revenue in dealing with the cap and trade.
As a member of GLOBE International G8+5, we have made a series of recommendations each year to the leaders of the G8. In response, the Prime Minister has not been very forthcoming in support, but suddenly he hears President Obama's footsteps and decides that maybe this could be an issue. Over 57% of Canadians said that even if we had to go into deeper debt, they would support strong action when it came to climate change.
However, again we have the failure of a real plan. The Conservatives announced cutbacks dealing with retrofits. The first thing they did was to cut back. They cut back with people doing energy work on their houses and environmental audits. People who were in the system were cut out simply because an announcement was made in the middle of the night saying that they were sorry but that they were not going to go ahead with that. That is not leadership.
It is not leadership to say that we will follow what everyone else does. Leadership is standing and saying that we will do this because it is the right thing to do for Canadians. It is good for health and it is good for our children and our grandchildren.
I know what I am talking about because I was parliamentary secretary to the former minister of the environment. Under his leadership, the member for Saint-Laurent—Cartierville, we were able to get the greenest budget in history because we had finance on board. We picked the allies around the cabinet table. I have not seen any allies supporting the current Minister of the Environment. Until the Conservatives do that, they cannot talk about caps when in fact they have no plan.