Madam Speaker, in 1999, the Toronto and Montreal stock exchanges signed an agreement to divide their functions. The Toronto exchange committed to take over the cash market and the Montreal exchange decided to develop a new sector, derivative products. In 1999, a number of people in English Canada were of the opinion that Quebec would run into problems and that Toronto had kept the right part of the market, the larger part. On the contrary, Quebec business leaders mobilized and decided to develop the derivative products, carbon products in particular. Today the Montreal Stock Exchange has launched the Montreal climate exchange, has signed an agreement with the Chicago Stock Exchange, and is in the process of signing an exchange of greenhouse gas emissions quotas with the United States.
Many people in Toronto felt that the Montreal business community was going to run into problems by planning to specialize in derivative products. On the contrary, that market expanded, not only within North America, but also in Europe and the rest of the world. Perhaps then we will see the establishment of this North American carbon exchange, and it could be based in Montreal if the Conservatives do not insist on adopting intensity targets, which constitutes an obvious hindrance to the creation and viability of a carbon exchange.
Absolute targets will not only allow a carbon exchange to be created, but will also allow Quebec businesses that have reduced their emissions to sell their credits on external markets, in Europe for instance. If the federal government insists, however, on establishing a regulatory program based on intensity targets, this will have negative effects on Quebec businesses, which will unfortunately then not be able to sell greenhouse gas emission reductions on foreign markets.
That brings to mind an industrial sector in Quebec, the aluminum sector, which has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions to 15% below 1990 levels. Smelters would like a regulatory system that does not necessarily give them an advantage over other industries, but is fair. Canada signed the international convention on climate change and the Kyoto protocol in 1997, and businesses in a province like Quebec that decided to implement plans to fight climate change should not be penalized. Quebec should not be penalized. The federal government is just trying to play to its economic base in the west.
Secondly, the motion refers to scientific knowledge. With just a few months to go before the climate change conference in Copenhagen, we need an accord that limits the rise in global temperature to 2oC above that of the pre-industrial period. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that is the only way to avoid disaster. How can we reach those targets? By setting absolute greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets for Canada so that Canadian companies are forced to reduce their emissions to 20% to 25% below 1990 levels, as the motion states, not 2005 levels, as the government would have it. A 20% reduction below 1990 levels in 2020 is the only way to avert disaster.
But the government is not listening. This morning, I was reading an article that said that if we want to avoid the worst-case scenario in the coming years, corporations will have to limit consumption of petroleum and fossil fuels to just one quarter of global reserves.
What do the message and the study published in the scientific journal Nature mean? They mean that the policy proposed by the Bloc Québécois—in the economic plan it put forward this morning to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels—is the best policy put forward to date.
Finally, rather than help Canada's petroleum and natural gas industries, the government should support this motion by adopting absolute reduction targets based on scientific knowledge, using 1990 as the base year.