Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to have an opportunity to be part of this important debate on an important subject: climate change. However, I am also very disappointed to have a debate that is predicated on one of the parties in the House, the New Democratic Party, playing politics with such an important issue. The time is long past when we should be using this as a topic to divide parties, to insert into the motion some text that makes it an egregious insult to those in the Liberal Party of Canada who have done so much good work on this issue and have advanced this issue so far. Frankly, this is not worthy of the good intentions and the integrity of the members of the New Democratic Party. I was very disappointed to see this issue being used in this way.
The time to debate the science of climate change is over. Apparently there are some Conservative members who are speaking out because perhaps they still think that climate change science should be denied or mistrusted. Frankly, they are in such a small minority on this planet at this point that they are marginalizing themselves.
What we have is an issue that crosses countries, crosses cultures and crosses everything. It is a human species issue. As a species, we need to co-operate to solve this issue. This issue is so complex that it touches people in the whole range of our society, the whole range of the global community, and we need to work co-operatively together. We cannot advance on this issue with the kind of divisive tactics that frankly this motion itself embodies. That is my disappointment.
It is not a Canadian issue; it is a global issue. The atmosphere does not have national boundaries. We will be experiencing the effects of American, Chinese, French and every other country's greenhouse gas emissions, and vice versa. This is an issue that is costing lives. It is costing species, and it is costing the security of our future on this planet.
It is not just low-lying islands such as Tuvalu or low-lying deltas in South Asia; it is also the forests of British Columbia, where we have 70 million cubic metres of pine that have been decimated by changing climate and warmer winters. It is not just the floods in Manhattan that cost billions; it is also floods in Winnipeg, in first nations communities around Winnipeg, and in low-lying suburbs of greater Vancouver. It is not just droughts in the mid-west or the huge costly drought in Australia and China; it is also droughts in the Nicola Valley in British Columbia, droughts that are costing the Okanagan Valley wineries and having an impact on the Great Lakes and Lake Winnipeg.
Salmon is the iconic species of British Columbia and first nations. We saw a 90% drop in the Fraser River sockeye salmon returns, and climate change is part of that impact. Do we accept a world in which we might not have salmon in British Columbia in 50 years because of acidification of our ocean, because of the warming of the streams in which those young salmon fry have to survive and because of the change in the food cycle that nourishes the salmon when they come into the ocean? That is impacting our salmon right now, and the situation is already desperate for many salmon species.
We are in a race against time. The climate change issue is urgent.
Canadians and people around the world are driving a car with a broken engine. Arguing about it is not going to fix anything. We need to work together to have a car that will win this race, because it is a race for humanity.
It is not just future generations as some theoretical concept. It is the people who are alive today. Think about the projections. There is a 10% chance that the vast majority of this planet will not be able to support human habitation—not be able to grow food, not have adequate fresh water, not have fish protein for human consumption—by the end of this century.
My niece's son is one year old. That means that he will be 88. It is the people alive today who are faced with the risks that our society is imposing on their future, and that is completely unacceptable. We need to co-operate to deal with this. We cannot keep playing political games, which this motion embodies.
The motion talks about a grave concern about the impact of a 2° rise in global average temperature. For all the lack of commitment on the Conservative Party's part, that party did sign the Copenhagen accord. The Copenhagen accord, which is operational immediately, states:
We underline that climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time. We emphasize our strong political will to urgently combat climate change in accordance with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.
Where is the urgency in the government's action? There are urgent communications that try to convince Canadians that it is doing something, when, in fact, it is taking us backward with every month that passes. In the Copenhagen accord the Conservative government signed, it further states:
We agree that deep cuts in global emissions are required according to science, and as documented by the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report with a view to reduce global emissions...so as to hold consistent with science and on the basis of equity. We should cooperate in achieving the peaking of global and national emissions as soon as possible...
This is what the Conservatives actually signed, but what they are doing is completely antithetical to that supposed commitment. Unfortunately, this is a government that has consistently embarrassed Canada on the international stage and has been obstructive in climate change negotiations,. It has even ripped up its binding legal international agreement under Kyoto.
One would think that it is not an issue of concern to take that kind of step and smear Canada's reputation on the world stage. One would think that would suggest that this is not an issue for the Conservatives. In fact, that is what their actions would suggest.
The new president of the International Monetary Fund has been very clear that climate change is one of the major economic threats facing the future of the global economy. The government does not seem to consider it a concern at all.
IMF managing director Christine Lagarde, a former Conservative finance manager of France, stated that the real wild card in the pack of economic pivot points is “increasing vulnerability from resource scarcity and climate change, with the potential for major social and economic disruption”. As I said, she called climate change “the greatest economic challenge of the 21st century”. That is something one would imagine the Conservative government would actually take account of. On the contrary, this is a government that has a focus on accelerating the development of Canada's fossil fuel commodities, from oil sands to shale gas to coal, at the expense of capturing virtually any of the market investment in the thriving clean energy market.
I am quoting from a study called Competing in Clean Energy. Capitalizing on Canadian innovation in a $3 trillion economy. This is a market that is set to grow much more quickly than the other aspects of our economy. “In Canada, our venture capital investment”, especially from large institutional investors in terms of the clean tech sector, “has declined from around $3.3 billion in 2000 to less than $1 billion this year” with Canadian “companies securing only two per cent of clean energy patents granted in the United States since 2002 (compared to Korea’s five per cent, Germany’s seven per cent, Japan’s 26 per cent...).”
The advice of the Canadian clean energy sector is to have a level playing field, have some certainty for business, get rid of the subsidies for the oil and gas industry, subsidies that include the absence of a price on carbon, that include the absence of actually regulating that industry.
There has been a lot of talk but there has been no action. The Conservative government's plans in that regard are also considered to be amongst the most ineffective and costly approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
I do want to add that there are enormous opportunities to take action on greenhouse gas emissions but there are also economic costs to not taking action, and not just environmental costs as the member for Etobicoke North has been so eloquently able to lay out for us today.
Those are the kinds of tariffs that other countries are putting in place, carbon taxes, like Japan's on our coal exports to Japan. Canada now has a massive wealth transfer of approximately $400 million every year into the Japanese treasury because Japan has a price on carbon and Canada does not. That is just the beginning.
Japan is poised to put the same legislation in place for oil, natural gas, and bitumen, so that for all of those products exported to Japan the Japanese government will collect a tariff. There will be a massive wealth transfer into the Japanese treasury, a competitor nation, because of a failure to act by the government in Canada.
I want to go to the section in this motion, “condemn the lack of effective action by successive federal governments since 1998 to address emissions and meet our Kyoto commitments”.
I will start by asking the member for Windsor West, who was celebrating the reductions that Lafarge cement has made. That is to be celebrated. In my province it is not just the cement industry, it was the aluminum industry, the pulp industry, the transportation industry, and the oil and gas industry.
These industries began to make changes to their processes and technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They started to do that back around 2000, because of the Liberal government's voluntary reduction registry. It worked. There was up to 35% reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by the pulp sector.
The idea that the Liberal government did nothing is completely fallacious. In fact, I was right at the table in those days. I was the environment minister in British Columbia from 2001 to 2004. I had a chance, not as a federal Liberal but as a member of a provincial government, to witness the activities of the federal Liberal government of the day.
What I want to say is that when we have an issue that is this woven through the fabric of our society and requires this much co-operation, it also requires education and understanding. That is what the Liberal government, from 1997, when it signed the Kyoto protocol, began to do. It began to educate the Canadian public who at that point did not know much about this.
I understand some members here have been deeply engaged in this issue for many years, not the ones who have been cackling from across the aisle, but some on this side of the House.
In fact, I wrote my Master of Business Administration thesis on just this issue in 1992.
However, the bulk of the public was not aware of the issue when the Liberal government began working on it, so part of what the government did was begin to bring the public on board and have public understanding of individual actions that could take place, co-operating with the public. Part of what the Liberal government did was work through the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, FCM, so that the municipalities understood their role in it. They started to become champions for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Today, we see these municipalities and federations, whether they are provincial or countrywide, as leaders in greenhouse gas reduction because of their partnerships co-operating with the federal Liberal government of the day.
The Liberal government began working with industry, and began industry-by-industry negotiations so that the kinds of reductions that they would make would not harm their competitive chances or their businesses, but would contribute to greenhouse gas emission reductions. It worked, and it worked right across the country. Then they began working with provincial governments, and I was the representative of our provincial government. I witnessed the Liberals of the day in 2001, 2002, and 2003 undertake an extensive set of modelling.
How we can actually accomplish our goals in a way that is fairest for the provinces, the industry, and individuals, and is as cost-effective as possible? The modelling and those conclusions were then brought to me and to the provinces to reflect on, to analyze, and to give input on. Then, the modelling was redone, taking in the information provided by the provinces. That is called consultation. I know that the Conservative government of today does not even know that word. Why consult? It knows better than anybody about everything. Well, the Liberal government consulted and that is how it got the provinces on board.
In British Columbia, I had the privilege of leading an initiative that brought the captains of industry and others who were interested in the issue together to work with our cabinet on how we could move forward on it. Out of that, we came up with a climate change plan in 2004 that involved every ministry reducing its own greenhouse gas emissions and those of its partners.
Following that, in 2007, in the throne speech, the Government of British Columbia launched its greenhouse gas reduction plan, which is widely admired across North America today. An audit has shown that greenhouse gas emissions have actually declined by 15% since 2008 under the B.C. Liberal greenhouse gas reduction plan at minimal or no impact to the economy. That ties into the partnership that the federal Liberal government made with the provinces to create bilateral agreements to support the provinces in bringing forward their own plans and carrying out their own activities.
The Liberal government, in 2005, had project green, the final piece of its road map to action. It was a regulatory tool that would have accomplished the Kyoto targets had the Government of Canada not changed.
The Liberals did nothing? That is one of the biggest fictions of our politics today. The Liberals set the entire framework for the actions that have been carried out, and I was there as witness to it. British Columbia was on board because of it.
What happened next? What happened in the fall of 2005, when the Liberals were poised to put that last piece of the puzzle in place? The NDP made the decision that it knew better. It thought it would be better to have a Conservative government. It thought it would be better for climate change to have the current Prime Minister in charge. It would be better for Canada's reputation to pull down the government of the day and put a Conservative government into the driver's seat. What a mistake.
However, for the NDP to bring this motion forward, claiming that the Liberals did nothing, is the height of hypocrisy. It is very disappointing to me, as someone who works constructively, I would like to believe, with many members of the NDP.
I know my time is drawing to a close. I am just getting going here. I am having a lot of fun, but I remain highly disappointed that we have to have partisan wedge issue motions--
