Mr. Speaker, the first thing we need to do is to stop finding excuses not to do anything. I am looking at my Conservative friends here. I remember a time not long ago where Stephen Harper saw the Kyoto protocol as being a big socialist conspiracy. It is one thing not to agree with the means and to say that the measures being put forward are misguided or could be improved on, and we can improve on what is being proposed, but to state that this is a socialist conspiracy is trying to rally a base against any measure, any action.
I remember in the last Parliament when the Conservatives were in government. We had two parties, the NDP and the Liberals, talking about cap and trade. Each time we mentioned cap and trade, the government said that we wanted a tax. Why? Because it knew that for its base a tax was a bad thing and nobody understood cap and trade, which is a market mechanism.
We need to have some good faith here. I am not saying that what my friends here are saying is in bad faith, but I saw bad faith in the last Parliament with respect to those issues. Unfortunately, when we try to attack the actions being taken, without saying we can improve on this but that it is a good base, we are not going anywhere.
This is why we need to stop saying that it is all or nothing and we need to start ensuring that actions will be undertaken, be it transportation electrification, for which we have the only critic in the House on this issue, or be it on the establishment of a price on carbon, for which there is an international consensus among economists. We need to start agreeing that we are going to move forward instead of fighting the initiatives. The future depends on it.