Madam Speaker, I would like to begin by congratulating the member for Beauharnois—Salaberry on her comments and her speech this evening. I would also like to congratulate her on having brought this motion before the House.
This remains an extremely important subject, despite the parliamentary secretary's ridiculous comments about the Conservative government's position and performance over the past three years.
First, Canada led the fight for the inclusion of market mechanisms like a cap and trade system in the Kyoto protocol and the international agreement called the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It was the Liberal government that fought hard with an American administration before the arrival of the far right Republican movement in Washington, under President Clinton. We fought for the inclusion of this market mechanism because we knew from the experience in the United States, under the U.S. clean air act, that it was less expensive to achieve reductions of greenhouse gases by using a market mechanism like a cap and trade system.
That was the genesis of the reason for all three countries pushing so hard during the negotiations backstopping the Kyoto protocol to include the market mechanism called cap and trade.
As my colleague from Beauharnois—Salaberry said, it is a system that has proven to be successful in achieving reductions of air pollution from coal-fired electrical stations in the United States under the U.S. clean air act.
Therefore, it is important to support the notion of cap and trade. It is important to be prudent with taxpayer money, Canadian industry money and other moneys as we seek the best and most efficient way to reduce greenhouse gases. It is why I am so personally supportive of the notion of a cap and trade system.
It also, as the member who proposed the motion suggests, creates a massive market for carbon trading. I asked the minister in question period this week whether he had any idea how we would capture what Deutsche Bank now describes as the trillion dollar carbon market, which will be up and running planet wide by 2020.
The government has no plan, and it is important for us to step back and be honest about this, so it cannot answer the question about how much we will take in Canada of the global environmental technologies marketplace, which is rapidly increasing, what part we will take of the global carbon market, which is rapidly increasing, while the Germans, Americans, French, Dutch and 10 or 20 other countries rapidly position not just their trading systems and their securities and exchange commissions, but their economies as well to go forward and capture so much of the wealth that is there for us to have.
My colleague is right: the Conservatives do not have a plan. Eleven groups analyzed the proposals. They all said that the targets were not realistic. She was also right in saying that the Conservatives are still going for intensity targets rather than absolute targets.
Intensity targets are completely out of sync with the notion of a cap and trade system. To have a cap and trade system, we need to have a real, hard cap so industry can trade within that cap, know exactly what it can or cannot emit into the atmosphere, trade away surpluses and create the marketplace by putting a value on the right to emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
There is no hard cap when one talks the nonsense talk of intensity targets. No matter how many times the Prime Minister stands beside the President of the United States and repeats that intensity targets are fungible and can be connected with real, absolute targets, it is not believable and no one believes it. It is not really responsible for our Prime Minister to speak in that kind of tone. He knows he is not disclosing the reality of the situation.
No other country has abandoned the only international treaty to deal with greenhouse gas emissions and atmospheric concentrations. No other country is pursuing a so-called cap and trade system, using intensity targets. No other country is now so utterly dependent on another country to develop a plan for the climate change crisis. This motion is extremely important, but I fear for the motion because we now completely know that many things are happening beyond the sovereign control of this nation-state called Canada.
It has happened deliberately on the watch of this particular Conservative-Republican regime for historical reasons that we do not have time to get into. However, here is the net effect of three and a half years of pretending and window-dressing that they are dealing with the climate change crisis. Canada will now be taking a price from the United States on how much we will value carbon emissions at. Canada will now be taking its design for a cap and trade system from the United States. I predict the government will be reeled out of the corner like salmon at the end of a fishing line and it will be forced to back away from the nonsensical talk of intensity targets. It will adapt and adopt absolute cuts because it will be forced to do so by an American administration, which is not in line with the particular ideology of the government.
Canadians must remember that for all the time this regime and the Republican administration were in power in Washington, they worked hand in glove to first deny the existence of climate change, then to delay the implementation of a climate change crisis plan and then to deceive the Canadian and American peoples respectively about what they were or were not doing on climate change.
I think I counted the parliamentary secretary saying that we needed to get it right three times. He even quoted his good friend the Minister of Transport, Infrastructure and Communities, who said, “We need to get it right”. Here is the problem. We have had three plans and three ministers in three years. Have they got it right? There is no plan. The Conservatives are running cap in hand to Washington, asking it to provide us cover because they have no domestic plan. They have not prepared our industries. They are going to punish our industries.
It is so bad that the first minister of the environment did not even understand the concept of cap and trade. Then the Minister of Finance was asked point blank in the House whether he knew the carbon market was coming. He did not know what the carbon market was. Then the second minister of the environment said in the House that we could not trade internationally to achieve our greenhouse gas reductions. Then he changed his mind and said that we could trade, but we would cap the percentage of trade. Then he backtracked yet again. He said something else and he was yanked from his position.
Now we have a third minister who is in the United States this week telling the Americans and 16 other nation-states that Canada has an intensity-based cap and trade system. Really? Where is the cap and trade system for Canada? Where are the regulations? What is the price on carbon? Nobody in the government's caucus has an idea because the Conservatives do not even know what this design looks like.
Instead, we have a situation where theMinister of the Environment is skating with the sharpest blades he could possibly put at the bottom of his skates, pretending among the G17, led by the Chinese and Americans today, that Canada is ready to go with a climate change crisis plan.
There is no plan and no price on carbon, but it gets worse. Now we find out, because our domestic market is so small, that a cap and trade system, which would be just exclusive to Canada, would drive the price of carbon through the roof. It would cause so much pain because the market is so small and so liquid. Using the unfortunate words of the Conservative ideological leaders, it would simply increase the price of everything.
What I would like to hear from the government now, instead of nonsense and fairytales, is this. When will we see a price on carbon, what effect will it have on Canadian industries and their competitive practices and how high will the prices of energy in all their forms go?