Madam Speaker, my two questions arise out of the government's climate change agenda.
On January 29, the environment minister met here in Ottawa with her counterparts from across the country and announced very little. She simply announced that work was ongoing to try to establish a pan-Canadian framework to address Canada's climate change challenges.
In conjunction with that announcement, she also made a bold statement that it was the first time that environment ministers from across Canada had gathered together for over 10 years. We went back and checked the record and that was not quite true. On the minister's own website, in fact the website of the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment, there is a press release dated June 23, 2015, in which the ministers confirmed that they met in Winnipeg in June of last year to discuss the specific issue of climate change.
First, would the parliamentary secretary correct the erroneous record that was established by the environment minister?
My second point goes to the root of the transparency the Prime Minister talked about during the election. In the lead up to the Paris climate change conference and shortly after he was sworn into office, the Prime Minister dropped a bombshell on Canadians. He said that he would be paying over $2.65 billion to address climate change, not in Canada, but in foreign countries. He made that announcement not in Canada but in Malta of all places.
Canadians fully expect that before the present government spends money abroad on climate change initiatives, it should come forward with a plan, a pan-Canadian framework, to address climate change. They also expect the first investments to be made in Canada to address that challenge, not spent around the world.
It gets worse.
We are now finding out in dribs and drabs that the $2.65 billion the Prime Minister promised is to be paid over a five-year period. In the final year of that period, $800 million will be paid to foreign agencies to address climate change issues in other countries.
Canadians were not told that the expectation was that Canada would continue to make these payments beyond the five years, going into the billions of dollars. Even worse, this program is to be made permanent. In other words, Canadians are committing under the green climate fund and under the commitment by the Prime Minister to make these payments in perpetuity.
Could the parliamentary secretary confirm that the meeting that the minister had with her counterparts this past January was not the first time that ministers of the environment have met to discuss climate change in over 10 years?
Second, could the parliamentary secretary confirm that this five-year plan to pay $2.65 billion to foreign countries to address climate change is going to become a permanent annual program for payments all around the world to address this issue?