Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin this evening's adjournment proceedings a little unusually. As I look across the way, I see that when I finish my four minutes on the subject of my question about Monday, relating to the upcoming climate negotiations in Warsaw, we will be hearing from my friend, the member of Parliament for Oshawa. I wish to congratulate him on recently becoming the parliamentary secretary on the environment. I enjoyed working with him enormously when he was the parliamentary secretary for health.
The issue before us is critical. There is no point in minimizing it. Tonight we are talking about the single greatest threat to our children having a livable world and to us having a future.
The talks that will begin on Monday, November 11, in Warsaw, Poland, is the 19th time that parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change will have met to try to advance the agenda. No one can claim, at this point, that we have even come close to addressing the severity of the crisis. It grows year to year.
Canada was once a country that contributed to the forward progress of the community of nations when assembled in these negotiations. We contributed enormously back in the late eighties and early nineties. In 1992, Canada was the first industrialized country, in fact the first country in the world, to both sign and ratify the convention that still gathers nations of the world together, as we will see next week in Warsaw, Poland.
The advice from the scientific community has largely been ignored throughout the world. Those countries that have taken on targets have largely met them. I point to the European Union, which has largely met its Kyoto targets.
We know from the advice of scientists that we are running perilously close to something that can only be called a point of no return. It is a place where greenhouse gases build to such a level in the atmosphere that we will be unable as a human society, as a civilization, to arrest the threat of what scientists refer to now as runaway global warming, with the heating of the planet releasing, on its own, new sources of heating of the planet, and so on, in what are called positive feedback loops.
On Monday I put it to the Minister of the Environment that I will be attending the COP 19 negotiations in Poland. As far as I know, I am the only member of Parliament attending, other than the Minister of the Environment. There certainly is no longer the traditional practice of Canada engaging and involving opposition members of Parliament in government delegations. However, that is a minor point compared to the threat.
The Prime Minister of this country attended the Conference of the Parties that took place in Copenhagen in 2009 at COP 15 and took on extremely weak targets. I think it must be said that collectively the targets taken on in the Copenhagen accord are not sufficient to avoid part of that accord, which is to avoid a two-degree global average temperature increase against the levels that existed before the industrialized revolution.
For Canada, that means we must reduce our emissions to 607 megatonnes by 2020. The most recent report from Environment Canada states that we are farther from the target in 2013 than we were in 2012, and instead of 607 megatonnes we will be at 734 megatonnes. That is a clear failure of leadership and of programs. It is a complete condemnation of the so-called sector by sector approach advanced by this administration.
At the same time in Copenhagen, the Prime Minister committed to advancing funds to a $100-billion-a-year fund for global climate assistance to developing countries to both reduce their emissions and to adapt.
As my time and the planet's time run out, will this administration and the Prime Minister keep their word and deliver greenhouse gas reductions and assistance to the developing world?
