Madam Speaker, I have been looking forward to this opportunity to convince my colleagues of the wisdom of the Conservative position. I do not doubt that it will receive a fair hearing from those present.
I want to start by articulating what our position is with respect to climate change and the appropriate response.
Conservatives believe in the science of climate change. We were proud to have presided over the first government in Canada's history that actually reduced emissions. I see my colleagues cringing in response to that point but they cringe because they know it is true and they do not know what to say about it.
Conservatives believe in the science of climate change. We responded to it in an effective way. What frustrates the government is that our response is one that does not involve the government taking more money out of people's pockets.
For the Liberals, it has become automatic. If one believes in the science of climate change, then one believes that the solution is higher taxes on ordinary Canadians. That is where we part company not only with the government but with all of the other parties in the House.
We believe that a more responsible and effective response to climate change is one that does not seek to use the situation we face as an excuse for the government to raise greater revenue for itself.
In the context of this responsible approach that we advance on this side of the House, we are much more willing than my colleagues in other parties to look at the reality of our continuing use of energy and of our need for energy.
There are some in the House who speak as if they want to end the development of our energy resources, who are opposed to the transportation of our energy resources, who are opposed to pipelines going west to east for example, but who do not seem to have a problem with using imported oil from Saudi Arabia for their own energy needs. We have to make choices.
I am not sure if it would be possible for members to live a life completely devoid of energy resources, but they could try. Let me make some suggestions about where they could start if they were to do that.
In my own riding the Liberal and NDP candidates had election signs. They did not have many election signs but they had some and they are made of Coroplast, which is a petroleum product. That is a case where people may not make the connection but that is the use of products that are taken from our energy sector. Fuel and asphalt contain petroleum products. Even bike lanes require some energy-based product in the asphalt that is constructed.
We all use energy. We all fly back and forth to our constituencies. We all benefit from available energy resources. It behooves us not to pretend as if we could stop using energy, not to pretend that we could stop transporting energy resources or developing them, not to pretend that we could stop ever flying or if we lived in certain parts of the country stop driving or heating our homes. It behooves us to try to come up with ways of doing these things more efficiently, that we create incentives to encourage a more efficient way of driving cars, of flying, of heating our homes.
That is why the previous government brought in binding sector-by-sector regulations that were intensity based. Some people criticized this intensity-based regulatory approach but I think the intensity-based approach is important. If we do not have intensity-based regulations and just have an absolute regulation on what can or cannot be admitted in a certain plant, then we create an incentive to stop development.
That does not mean people stop using energy. Limiting the supply from Canada does not limit the demand here or globally. It just means that energy development is happening in other places.
The effect of regulations that are not intensity-based, the effect of carbon taxes is not that we get the deployment of more efficient technology for meeting the world's energy needs but rather it is simply the chasing of investment out of the country to other less environmentally friendly jurisdictions.
I know the leader of the NDP has talked about importing oil for other countries. Again, it does not seem to me to be a logical response to the concern of climate change, a global concern very clearly, to say that we should not be building pipelines that allow Canadians to sell cleaner energy resources to other Canadians. Instead, we should simply be buying energy resources from offshore. Yes, in a certain sense one might say that it will reduce the evident domestic footprint of our emissions. However, it very clearly does not have any positive effect on global emissions. In the meantime, it has a negative economic effect. It makes us more strategically dependent on other countries that in many cases do not particularly like us or share our values.
I think what this debate calls us to is a responsible and prudent approach looking at how can we grow our economy and reduce emissions. It is not magic. It is not rocket science. It is simply a matter of looking at the record of the previous government. There are further steps that we always need to discuss and explore, to create additional incentives and build on that success.
However, the objective record is that during the time of the previous government, the economy grew while emissions went down. It is the first time in Canadian history that emissions went down. I can anticipate the counter argument that people usually bring up when one says the emissions went down in the past. Some will say it was only because of the global economic downturn.
A couple of my colleagues across the way are nodding. I hate to disappoint them but here is the reality. The Canadian economy grew. We did relatively well compared to the rest of the world and yet our emissions went down while global emissions went up. We were less affected, relative to the rest of the world, by the economic downturn. However, we were more successful in terms of producing emissions. How do the Liberals square that with the claim that it was only the recession that led to the reductions? It is very clearly not plausible.
Then the Liberals want to trumpet the record of provincial governments. They want to say that all the good things that happened were only the result of provincial governments, not the result of federal governments. My Ontario Liberal colleagues are so enthusiastic about the record of the Kathleen Wynne government. My car has more seats than the Ontario Liberal Party. That is an indictment of the approach that was taken by the Kathleen Wynne Liberal government. If that is the record they want to run on and if that is what they think leadership looks like then we will happily have that debate in the next election.
The reality is that if one looks at emissions across the country, in every single jurisdiction across the country, emissions either went down or they went up by less than they had in the preceding 10-year period. In other words, very clearly, progress was achieved in terms of the trajectory of emissions in every single jurisdiction in this country. Maybe that was thanks to the wisdom of every single provincial government even though they were, in many cases, pursuing different or contradictory policies.
It is hard for the Liberal government to make that argument, I think. The reality that they have to face up to is that there was something being done under the previous Conservative government that was working. It may not have been enough, in the view of my friend in the Green Party and some other colleagues. Very clearly, if we compare the record of the previous Conservative government to others, the binding sector-by-sector intense regulatory approach was achieving success. However, the Liberal government prefers to use this situation as an opportunity to impose new taxes.
May I say, just parenthetically because there has been some discussion of pipelines tonight, I do not understand how pipelines are brought into a conversation on the basis of advancing the environment and therefore opposing pipelines. It does not make sense to me because if we look at the reality of the need to transport our energy resources, I think it is clear that pipelines are a less emissions-intensive way of doing that work of transportation. If they do not want to see the development at all, then oppose the development, but it is not logical to make the objection about the issue of transportation.
Regardless of that, the approach of the current government with respect to pipelines has been particularly incoherent. The Liberals have directly killed the northern gateway pipeline. They have killed indirectly the energy east pipeline by piling conditions onto it, conditions that they did not apply on the Trans Mountain project. They then refused to enforce the law to get the Trans Mountain pipeline moving and decided to buy it instead as a supposed means to get it moving, and then they did not appeal a court ruling that put the brakes on that. We see a real incoherent back and forth by the government. Meanwhile, the previous Conservative government was able to build four new pipelines while reducing emissions. Certainly we are proud of that record. The government talks about the economy and the environment going hand in hand. Ten years of getting pipelines built, of reducing emissions and of growing the economy is a record that shows that we can do both, but we need Conservative governments in power to do it.
I did want to talk about something that is maybe a bit off the beaten track. Members may find it interesting. They may not, but I have eight and a half minutes left, so I will say it anyway. About 12 years ago, I read an interesting study, the Haifa daycare case. I am not sure whether members have read this. It is discussed in the book, Freakonomics. This was a case where there was a daycare where the staff were annoyed that parents would sometimes show up late to pick up their kids from daycare. This was frustrating to the daycare employees because they had to stay late, so they imposed a fine. They said that if parents were late, they would have to pay a token fine. This was designed as a disincentive to try to encourage parents not to be truant in picking up their children from daycare.
What happened was really interesting. We would assume that if they put a tax on truancy, the rate of being late would go down. Actually, rates went up dramatically. Economists tried to figure this out. Why, if they are charging people to do something that was free before, are the parents actually doing it more often? The hypothesis coming of this study is fascinating. It was that the imposition of a token fee effectively removed any social or moral disincentive from undertaking the activity. In other words, once people were told they had to pay for being truant, they thought they were covering the full cost of truancy by being late, and the fee was small enough that it was maybe worth finishing their game of tennis, finishing their coffee with a friend, finishing their conversation on the phone. The economists concluded that one of two options was necessary if their goal, strictly speaking, was to create a disincentive. In the one case, they had to either create the fine so high that it would be a sufficient disincentive. On the other hand, it was better not to have the fine in place at all, and instead rely on the presence of a social or moral disincentive.
The reason this case is interesting and illuminating to us here now is that many of those who advocate a carbon tax, and I do not, are advocating a much higher carbon tax than the government has put in place. We worry that this is the direction the Liberals are going, that they will look for excuses every time to increase the tax further and further. However, when the Liberals impose a tax that people have to pay but may not have the capacity to shift their behaviour—they may not have the resources to invest in those retrofits—and have not created the conditions or the opportunities to make those transitions, the Liberals will not bring about the kind of change they supposedly want to make. I do not really think that is the objective in this case anyway. I think the objective the Liberals are going after is directly to raise revenue.
There is something we really need to zero in on, and I am going to quote Winston Churchill. I hope that does not offend anyone, but I am going to quote him anyway. He said that it is not enough to do one's best. One has to know what to do and then do one's best.
