Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Wellington—Halton Hills.
It is my pleasure to be here today to participate in this opposition day, and to share our government's progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Canada is in a unique position to help the world address this issue. Our nation is a leading source of energy and energy technologies. Canada's electricity supply presently is among the cleanest in the world, with more than 77% of our electricity coming from non-greenhouse gas emitting sources, including renewable energy and nuclear power. This transition to cleaner energy is supporting our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is our Conservative government that deserves credit for finally tackling some of the bigger issues around emissions reductions. We are taking a results-oriented, sector-by-sector regulatory approach that is targeting the largest emitters.
Our coal-fired electricity regulations are among the toughest in the world. This will make Canada the first nation to ban new construction of traditional coal-fired plants. The regulations also require all existing coal plants to shut down on a schedule that reflects their economic life. I am sure members are also familiar with our vehicles emissions standards that we have brought in, which will do much to improve greenhouse gas emissions as well. Also, our government has committed to introducing new regulations for the oil and gas sector, making Canada one of the few major oil-producing countries to do so.
Our energy sector has already experienced considerable success in reducing emissions. For example, the emission intensity from the production of a barrel of oil sands crude is down 26% since 1990. We know that our Conservative government has done this on this front, and we are seeing results. The economy is growing and we are keeping taxes low.
I will take a few minutes to talk about the opposition and some of those parties' positions on these issues. They have both been clear in the past that they want some variation of a carbon tax. At the natural resources committee, we talk about this often, and it starts with the issue of carbon pricing. There is an insistence from some people that carbon must be priced by someone somewhere. It is very interesting at committee when we have these discussions. When we ask witnesses if there is a real and natural developing economy around carbon, if there is a price that is naturally being set around carbon, the answer is virtually always no. It is not like beef, or going out and buying a cellphone or a car, where there are options on the market and we can pay for a product, and if we do not like it we do not have to buy it. We are told at committee that, if it is going to happen at all, the government needs to step in and price carbon. The average person really has no idea what a ton of carbon is and does not know what carbon pricing is. However, on one side there is an insistence that government must establish this.
The establishment of that is given as the usual reason that we can then establish a system of taxation based on that pricing. We have seen a variety of carbon taxation suggestions come up, particularly from the other side. We hear about things like a carbon tax, which would be a straight-up tax related to carbon, which would result in things like higher fuel prices where we would see that applied and there would be a direct impact on consumers. Often that carbon tax would go to general revenue.
There is a cap and trade system that the opposition members talk about once in a while. It would allow trading in carbon credits, usually with the goal of avoiding real reductions, so we get a lot of rhetoric around this and lots of noise but very little results. Sometimes we see these revenues also going into general revenue in the government's coffers. These have consistently failed to work. We have seen in particular the failures in Europe of their carbon trading systems. They have failed for a number of reasons. It could be dysfunction, or in some places there is corruption in that system.
The other option is a carbon levy, where there would be a levy put on a particular area of industry, which then normally would get passed on to consumers. All of these things have one thing in common and I am going to talk about that in just a few minutes.
There are three groups that stand out in support of these things. One is industry. We often seen enthusiasm in industry for carbon taxation. Industry is fine with that; it gets a scheme and taxpayers often get a bill from that.
The second group that really eyes this up and thinks it is a great idea is those big spenders, typically the left-wing governments that really want to see a rise in revenue. From the opposite side, typically those members have taken this stand because they see this is as a revenue generator. They get stars in their eyes if they can begin to tax every molecule in the universe. There is really no end to the amount that they can then tax Canadian citizens.
The third group is the environmental group. We talked at committee about this. These groups really want to apply these things, because they think they can get results. The problem is that we first need to establish an artificial market, and then we need to use taxation to change behaviour. We need to price carbon so high that we actually force people to change their behaviour. Witnesses at committee talked about the fact that to do this, we would need to make taxation so high that it would quadruple utility rates so that people would have to change their behaviour. Canadians need to ask themselves if they are ready to have these kinds of prices in their lives. I think most of them would say absolutely not. These three things have one thing in common and that is that taxpayers pay the bill, either directly or indirectly.
Our approach is different from the opposition's. The opposition wants a carbon tax. We heard about $20 billion in the NDP's last election campaign. Those members told Canadians that they were going to do that. They seem to be a little shy about that now.
In 2008, our colleagues in the Liberal Party campaigned nationwide on a carbon tax, which was completely rejected by Canadians.
Consumers really need to pay attention. We are coming back with a sector-by-sector approach. We set realistic goals for improvement and actually get results. That annoys the opposition to no end, but the reality is that it is the way we can improve the environment.
The Liberals signed on to their plan that would have omitted the world's highest emitters. They had no intention of reducing emissions. They wanted a plan that would make it sound as if they were doing something without actually having to do it. When they brought forward their carbon tax plan, as I mentioned, Canadians rejected it outright. They completely turned against it.
The NDP has not learned that lesson yet, because it proposed a $21-billion carbon tax in its last election platform. I am surprised, because in many ways, that kind of tax is really a licence to pollute. It would allow companies to pay the government and then pass that cost on to consumers, all without taking a single ounce of carbon out of the air. I guess that makes sense, perhaps, coming from the NDP. It would allow government to use tools to shut down jobs, cripple industry and slow development. Those members seem to specialize in that. In my own province, we saw the NDP's ability to do that for over 50 years. We finally rejected that and moved on, and now the province is really prospering.
Our government's plan is working. The results speak for themselves.
I want to talk a bit about the advantage of becoming energy efficient. Energy efficiency improved by 25% between 1990 and 2010. Without those efficiency gains, Canadians would have paid $32 billion more for energy in 2010 alone. Our efforts to improve energy efficiency have been widely recognized. The International Energy Agency has determined that Canada was second only to Germany, among 16 countries, in its rate of energy efficiency improvement. One would think that once in a while, the opposition might mention that. It might be willing to acknowledge that some of these things are working and that we are making progress and doing very well. In 2011, the IEA ranked Canada fifth out of 28 countries for its efforts to implement a broad spectrum of energy efficiency initiatives.
I am very proud of Canada's efforts to advance renewable energy and energy efficiency and our success in reducing greenhouse gas emissions while growing the economy. I should point out that our economy has grown. Our greenhouse gas emissions have declined. Between 2005 and 2011, our economy grew by 8% and our greenhouse gas emissions declined by almost 5%.
Canada is clearly making progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, we will continue to make improvements to our diversified energy economy and energy sector that can help drive the global economy and help build energy security, while producing energy responsibly.