Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Beaches—East York, who helped get this motion off the ground, as well as my colleagues with the NDP and the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands.
Before I get too far, I would let you know, Mr. Speaker, that I plan to split my time with the member for Pontiac.
Tonight's debate is extraordinarily important. Most of us who have stuck it out here until this hour of the evening are familiar with what the IPCC report has indicated. To condense hundreds of pages into a simple message, we need to take action now if we are going to protect the planet, not only for our kids and our grandkids but even for people who might be getting into politics at my age, before I have the opportunity to retire. The threat is that soon before us.
The nature of the problem is well understood by Canadians. Canadians expect and deserve a government that takes protecting their environment seriously, and that includes the need to address the looming threat of climate change. Climate change is real and I am pleased that we have not had to spend too much time in this debate tonight on that point. However, the fact is we cannot be having arguments about the source of climate change, we have to be having healthy and rigorous debates about the solutions. I have heard a number of things discussed, but we are short on actual ideas to help us push it past the goal line and get to a place where we know we are not going to suffer the catastrophic consequences that were outlined in the IPCC report. Of course, the consequences were well enumerated in the report: threats to species; threats to our marine environment; and, threats to the livability of the ecosystems that human beings inhabit today and, I hope, will inhabit for generations to come.
One of the things that I really enjoy doing in my role as a member of Parliament, when we have funding announcements at a university in my riding, St. Francis Xavier University, is visiting the labs of the professors who are benefiting from our investments in science. I have seen local climate modelling done by Dr. Beltrami at StFX and I had a lengthy conversation with Dr. Andrew MacDougall at StFX, who led me through a history of climate science. I had it sink in for me that if we suffer some of the consequences of climate change with rising global temperatures, those changes are irreversible. If we subsequently bring our emissions back down, the consequences do not stop there, and that is an important message that we all need to understand.
It is essential that we think not only of the solutions that we might be putting forward to avoid these consequences, but we understand that not doing anything will have the most severe consequences of all. The cost of addressing the problem is far smaller than the cost of ignoring the problem. We have a choice to do something right now. If we continue down our current path, we are pushing $5 billion annually as the cost of climate change. When we look at extreme weather events like floods and forest fires, droughts, heat waves, hurricanes and precipitation, the cost of dealing with these is immense. We have heard them all litigated here tonight. We have seen the flooding in New Brunswick recently. I lived in Calgary when we had the flood in 2013. We know that the heat waves have killed dozens upon dozens of Canadians just this past year alone.
However, there are other impacts that are perhaps a little less direct that also have a very serious impact on our day-to-day. I think it was one of my colleagues from Winnipeg who discussed a recent study that indicated that global barley production was going to reduce by 17%, causing an increase in the price of beer. We are seeing huge changes on the Atlantic Ocean, with warming ocean temperatures and the impact that has on one of our economic and cultural staples, lobster. This is important to me. Right now, we are doing pretty well, but a few years ago the state of Maine was doing pretty well and it has seen a decrease of, I believe, 22 million pounds of lobster because the temperatures of their oceans have changed. I do not want to see our region suffer the same fate. When I see studies outside of the IPCC report that indicate that marine life in the gulf region is potentially not going to be able to exist because of the deoxygenation, I have very sincerely held fears of the consequences that will arise if we do not act right away.
The IPCC report flagged that the isthmus connecting Nova Scotia to New Brunswick is the second-most vulnerable place in North America to the threat of rising sea levels. This sounds frightening, not just because we do not want Nova Scotia to be an island, but the economic impact today of the rail line connecting these two provinces is about $50 million a day. These problems could not be any more serious and could not be any more immediate.
I am pleased that we are moving forward with a number of different actions that will have a very real and tangible impact on the emissions that we produce as a nation, and our contribution to the global community is extremely important as well.
Perhaps what has been getting most attention this evening is the fact that we are moving forward with putting a price on pollution. We have heard a lot of divisive commentary over the course of our debates in the chamber. However, very simply, it is easy to understand. If we take a step back, today we have to understand that it does not cost anything to pollute our atmosphere. In Canada today it costs a business that pollutes the same as a business that has greened its operations. If we think of two competing businesses, one that wants to do the environmentally responsible thing and reduce its emissions and the other that just does not care for whatever reason, we have created an incentive to continue polluting because the latter's competitor in the same industry does not get any benefit despite the fact that it has cleaned up its operations. When we put a price on pollution, we incentivize the ability of companies to become greener, and at the same time we ensure that the benefits accrue to Canadian families so that we do not have everyday taxpayers facing an increased burden as a result of this plan. That is a very important feature. In fact, it was celebrated by Mark Cameron, Stephen Harper's former director of policy, who indicated that Canadian families can expect to be better off as a result of this kind of an approach. Of course, as we heard this evening as well, Professor Nordhaus of Yale University recently won the Nobel prize in economic science for his work leading to a very similar conclusion.
However, it is not just a price on pollution that we are moving forward with, but it is also going to take a suite of measures if we are going to achieve the ambitious targets we have already agreed to, and perhaps do more. We are investing in public transit and getting more people moving within cities and communities, but not in their own vehicles. We are investing in energy efficiency. I made an announcement just this past Friday in Nova Scotia that is going to see a portion of our $56 million contribution to the low carbon economy fund go to making homes more efficient. This is just in Nova Scotia alone. Similar measures in 2017 have had the equivalent impact of taking more than 100,000 cars off Nova Scotian roads. We are investing in clean technology, renewable energy and green infrastructure. We are taking significant steps to improve our conservation efforts to protect wildlife. We have $1.5 billion going toward an oceans protection plan. We are investing in science, which is going to continue to give us the information we need to form policy going forward. The benefits of an approach like this are many, and I will not have time in the remaining two and a half minutes or so to canvass them all.
The environmental benefits of avoiding the consequences I mentioned earlier are certainly at the front of our minds. However, also preserving our biodiversity is important. Preserving coral reefs, where 25% of the world's marine species live, is important to me. However, there are also social and economic benefits. When we get off coal, we see a reduction in the rates of childhood asthma. When we eliminate smog, we have more livable communities that people want to live in. There are food security issues at play. There are recreational issues at play. There are national security and migration issues at play.
There are also very direct and easily observable economic benefits if we move forward with a responsible plan to protect our environment. Mark Carney of the Bank of England has indicated that there is a $23 trillion opportunity staring world markets in the face. I want to take advantage of that locally. There are companies doing this kind of work today manufacturing renewables and investing in green infrastructure. We have companies like McKay Meters in Pictou County that secured a patent to attach electrical vehicle charging stations to parking metres around the world. We have researchers like David Risk at the Flux Lab, who has developed instrumentation that can detect leaks that could not previously be detected from energy infrastructure worldwide that equate to the entire production of the country of Norway. We have companies like the Trinity Group of Companies at home that are not just making homes more efficient, not just saving people money but keeping families together. They told me one story of an elderly husband and wife who suffered some health concerns that they feared were going to pull them out of their home, and the husband had to stop working. To see the joy on the faces of entrepreneurs who enabled the couple to save enough money on their power bill to allow them to cover their expenses is a heartwarming experience that I will not soon forget. They are keeping families together, they are creating jobs, and they are doing the right thing by the environment.
To conclude, the IPCC report is a call to action. We will not be deterred by others who seek to create fear by spreading misinformation about the ambitions we might have. We will not abdicate the responsibility that falls to us by virtue of the fact that we happen to be in government at this time in our collective history. We are going to move forward with an ambitious plan to protect our environment, and preserve it not only for our kids and our grandkids, but also for the people who are sitting in this chamber today who deserve a healthy environment as much as the next person.