Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Edmonton Strathcona for her excellent speech and her very thoughtful answers.
Today we are debating a motion moved by the official opposition, the Conservative Party, an oddly drafted motion that addresses a number of different themes. The wording of the motion feels like a trap. In fact, it makes a tenuous connection between a number of things that might also be the subject of entirely separate debates. The motion tackles everything from access to information and transparency to the cost of home heating and climate change. It combines all these topics and patches them together for a debate that could go pretty much anywhere.
I am going to talk about three things. First, when it comes to transparency and access to information, let me take a moment to point out the irony of the Conservative Party moving a motion calling for access to more information. When I think of the Harper years and the Conservative Party's record on providing access to information, I do not know whether to laugh or cry.
Creating the parliamentary budget officer was a good idea on the Conservatives' part. It is a good thing. It is a watchdog that audits estimates, government expenses, and the repercussions and costs of various programs and measures. However, once they created the parliamentary budget officer position, they made it so difficult for the incumbent to access figures and data that he had to use the Access to Information Act to get departmental figures.
The Conservative government was anything but transparent and open. It was the worst. In 2014, journalists told us that never in Canadian history had the Access to Information Act been in such bad shape. That matters because that is how the government is meant to be accountable to Canadians, so they know how money is being spent and whether it is really helping people.
If the government makes decisions but keeps information hidden, how can citizens of a democracy understand the pros and cons of those decisions and judge whether they are appropriate?
The Information Commissioner used to give a report card, like the ones children are given, to the defence and transport departments concerning their handling of access to information requests. They received marks ranging from D to F. However, nothing was really done about this.
The Access to Information Act states that a disclosure must be made within thirty days of the request for access. The Conservative government set a record when the defence department took 1,100 days to respond to an access request. That is the equivalent of three years. It is just slightly longer than the siege of Leningrad.
In 2013, Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault said, “I know of no other federal law that is so openly flouted by government authorities.” Today, I have to admit that I find it a little funny that the Conservatives are lecturing us about transparency and the openness of government. Now that they are in opposition, they are changing their tune. However, they are not the only ones. The Liberals have also changed their tune now that they are in power. That is also interesting.
Pat Martin, our friend and former colleague, introduced a bill to improve access to information, and the Prime Minister himself supported it when in opposition. However, today, now that he is in power, he is doing absolutely nothing.
The NDP has been asking for years for the Access to Information Act to be modernized so that government information is open and accessible to associations, organizations, citizens, opposition parties, and the media.
Accessing information is still extremely difficult today. Despite all of the nice words and grand promises to be a different kind of government, develop a new policy, and restore public confidence, the Liberal government remains secretive and opaque.
It is not the intent of the motion, but it is still important to mention the Liberals' by-invitation-only fundraising activities, which gave privileged access to ministers and the Prime Minister. That is not at all the type of politics that the Liberals promised during the campaign.
Furthermore, the Conservatives have every reason to be concerned about energy costs, because they are causing a lot of trouble for many families across the country. I understand my Ontario colleague's concern about high heating costs, which are causing a lot of trouble for many individuals and families right now.
The NDP believes that a good public power generation and distribution system is part of the solution. In Quebec, we are lucky because the cost of energy is regulated and controlled. We are also fortunate to have many rivers, which means that our energy is renewable. That is important when it comes to climate change, an issue that we are going to talk about shortly.
We must not use the trouble some provinces are having with heating and electricity costs as an excuse to tear down measures that are a critical component of our contribution to fighting climate change and global warming.
I am surprised at the Conservatives' silence on the subject of energy costs even though they were the ones who cut the program. The Liberals' silence surprises me too. Why not bring back the ecoENERGY retrofit program, which I think was a win-win-win program? My colleague talked about it earlier. Why is that program no longer available? It worked. Its benefits were threefold: it lowered heating costs for families because houses were better insulated and lost less heat through their roofs, windows, and doors; it reduced greenhouse gas emissions because it lowered energy consumption in places where people heated with gas, oil, or coal; and it created jobs because people and small businesses needed workers to replace windows and doors to better insulate houses.
We can reduce the cost of heating, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and create jobs, and yet what is the Liberal government doing? It stays silent, which is unfortunate. We in the NDP really want to hammer this home, because we think it is a good program that should be brought back.
Now I want to talk about climate change. We can see the trap set by the Conservatives, as they use pretexts like the cost of heating and so-called transparency to attack something that is necessary, that is, our contribution to what is probably the greatest challenge of our generation, the fight against global warming. Global warning will reach a tipping point and cause massive natural disasters.
Unfortunately, the Conservative government did absolutely nothing on this issue for 10 years. In fact, certain members of the Conservative cabinet and certain Conservative MPs even denied human activity's influence on global warming. That is absolutely incredible.
Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and do members recall why? It was for his efforts to combat climate change and global warming. Indeed, if sea levels rise by one or two metres, it will create population movements so massive as to provoke conflicts. Some areas will be flooded, while others will become deserts.
We need to tackle all of these changes, and we want action from this Liberal government.