Mr. Speaker, my colleague opposite made a comment about the government's abdication of leadership on climate change. As a young Canadian who sits here now as a government member, I am shocked that my colleague would list weather events and talk about all of these things when her party, when it was in government, patently failed the Canadian people with its failure in leadership on climate change.
In the original question she put to the House, she asked about a real plan to manage climate change, which is the subject of this adjournment proceeding. I would not consider a real plan to do things like signing on to the Kyoto protocol which, at the time, only included 30% of global greenhouse gas emitters. How can we have a global reduction in greenhouse gas emissions when we do not have an agreement on which all major emitters sign on to binding targets?
Failure number one. After the Liberal government signed on to the Kyoto protocol, it had no plan to implement it. In fact, during its tenure, greenhouse gas emissions increased between 27% and 33% over the Kyoto targets, an inconvenient truth to be sure. In fact, Canada's CO2 emissions rose between 1997 and 2005. That was abdication of leadership to be sure.
In 2008, the Liberals came up with a plan to talk about climate change and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. They said that they wanted to implement a carbon tax, a tax on everything, which would fail Canadians in a major way by increasing prices and we could not really be sure about the results that would produce. This is the type of action we see from the Liberal Party.
Nine years of inaction later, the former Liberal leader summed up the Liberal's record on climate change by saying, “We did not get it done”. I would like to contrast that with our government's leadership with regard to climate change.
First, we have taken a strong, bold, sector-by-sector regulatory approach that will see real reduction in greenhouse gas emissions looking at targeted sectors, including transportation, which we have already looked at. We are looking at the coal fire sector right now. We will be seeing reductions in greenhouses gases by 17% of 2005 levels by 2020. This is real action.
We have invested millions of dollars into climate change research and adaptation. These are investments that my colleague has voted against. We had over $870 million over two years in our clean air agenda, $252 million to support regulatory activities to address climate change and air quality and $86 million to support clean energy regulatory action. Those were budgetary measures to see real action.
Moreover, now that we are seeing progress, we are seeing this plan work, including the oil sands monitoring network that my colleague talked about.
We heard from the International Institute for Sustainable Development. In a recent report, it noted that Canada was moving in the right direction on greenhouse gas policy and was establishing the policy architecture to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Finally we have a government is that doing something for greenhouse gas emissions and it is doing that by balancing the need for economic growth with environmental stewardship. This is a plan we can be proud of.