Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today. I am reminded of the famous words of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, when he won the election in 1980, “Welcome to the 1980s.” That is exactly what I thought when I read this opposition day motion from the federal Conservatives.
In the early 1980s, we stood on the cusp of the beginning of a neo-liberal or neo-conservative economic theory that was championed by Ronald Reagan and later by Brian Mulroney. It consisted of a certain approach to public policy and public finances, and the guts of that are present in this motion. The Conservatives want to lower taxes, eliminate regulation, encourage free trade and remove tariffs. They essentially just want to bring in the neo-liberal playbook once again.
The difference now is that we have had some 40 years of empirical evidence of what the results of that neo-liberal economic plan is, and the truth is it is not good. What we have seen in the last 40 years is a completely dangerous, in fact, a potentially fatal, rise in carbon on our globe that has caused what I think is the foundational political issue of our time, which is climate change.
In our greed to overdevelop everything very quickly, we are now risking the very environment on Earth that makes all economic activity possible: clean air, clean water and clean land. We see inequality in our country, as measured by the Gini coefficient, at historic rates now, where the share of wealth in this country is owned by an increasingly small number of people at the top, where the middle class is actually shrinking and the working class has done worse.
We see a country where the social programs and the public enterprise, the public projects that were once an important part of Canadian life and that we built in the 1950s and 1960s, slowly dismantled and starved over time. Our education system, our health care system, and our ability as government to intervene positively in the economy for the benefit of all citizens have been slowly strangled by decades of Conservatives and Liberals who pursued the same failed neo-liberal economic policy.
I want to mention for people who may be listening to this debate that one of the major themes of the Conservative motion under debate today is a complete opposition to and call for the removal of a carbon tax. I think this allows us to have a very important conversation in this House about climate change.
As I said, I believe that climate change is one of the foundational issues of our time. There are thousands of issues in politics, but sometimes there are certain issues that are so fundamental that they beg us to deal with them. I think looming disastrous climate change is one such issue.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report about three or four weeks ago that I think is profoundly alarming and very disturbing. It is something that all policy-makers in the government, in the chamber, and all across the world need to pay rapt attention to.
There have been three or four iterations over the last 25 or 30 years of the statement that in order to deal with rising carbon in our atmosphere, we have to reduce so much by so much by such and such a date. I have seen Liberal and Conservative governments blow through every one of those and fail to meet every single promise and pledge that they solemnly made internationally and here. In fact, Eddie Goldenberg, former assistant to former prime minister Jean Chrétien was so bold as to say that the Liberals had no intention of ever meeting their Kyoto targets. That is how brazen and cynical the Liberals have been on climate change. We have never met any of those targets.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that the 2°C rise in temperature over pre-industrial times that Paris identified as being imperative to not exceed actually is too much.
It said that if we proceed to have global temperatures rise by an average of 2°C over pre-industrial times, we will lose 99% of the coral reefs on the planet, we will lose thousands of species to extinction, and we risk the melting of the polar ice caps. It says that the world actually needs to get to a 1.5°C degree cap, not a 2°C cap.
Where are we now? At current levels on the globe, we are on a path to hit 3°C to 5°C. We risk environmental armageddon and climate change disaster. What does it mean we have to do? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that we have to reduce by 45% our carbon emissions, as compared to 2010 levels, by 2030.
These are numbers we can all really understand, because they are stark. We can all remember 2010. Whatever Canada was producing in 2010, only eight years ago, we need to be at almost half of in terms of our national carbon emissions and greenhouse gas emissions, and we have to meet that target within 11 years. Are we on target for that? No.
Day after day, the Conservatives are absolutely stone silent in this place and in public about whether they take climate change seriously, whether they think it is actually real, and what their plan is to deal with it, leaving Canadians completely confused and mystified about what their plan is. Do they think it is real? Do they think the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is joking? Do they think we do not face rising sea levels, massive uncontrolled forest fires, drought, food production problems and mass migration? Do they think these things are mythical? They will not say.
For their part, what do Liberals say? They say that we just have to be balanced. They say that we can triple the export of raw bitumen through the Burrard Inlet. We can increase oil sands production in northern Alberta. We can purchase a pipeline for $4.5 billion and spend another $9 billion to $12 billion building it without any problem. However, they never tell us how they are going to meet their Paris commitments.
The truth is this. We cannot expand fossil fuel infrastructure at that rate and meet our Paris climate change targets, never mind the warnings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Liberals themselves are ignoring the foundational problem of our times.
I want to talk about the second part of this motion, which is the Conservatives' neo-liberal fixation on cutting regulations and red tape. I do not know what they mean by red tape or regulations. Just today I asked a question in the House about medical devices in this country. Over the last couple of weeks, there has been excellent investigative reporting done by CBC and other news outlets. These are the things that go into our bodies, are implanted in our bodies. They are things like pacemakers, insulin pumps, hip replacements, surgical meshes and breast implants. These are medical devices that are implanted in Canadians every day in all our communities, and what did we find out?
Health Canada does not act when other countries recall defective devices. It continues to allow the devices to be implanted today. It approves products when they have not even been tested on human beings, when they have only been tested on cadavers and animals. As well, there is voluntary reporting. What is the result? Fourteen thousand Canadians have been injured by these devices, and 1,400 Canadians have died. Is that the kind of regulation and red tape Conservatives want to see eliminated? Are we spending too much time at Health Canada? They do not identify that.
I want to finish by talking quickly about trade. Only a foolhardy government would sign a trade agreement dealing with tariffs with the U.S. without dealing with the U.S. tariffs on Canadian aluminum and steel products. There is a company in my riding, La-Z-Boy furniture, a Canadian-owned and operated company. It is costing the company $55,000 per month because of these tariffs. These Liberals were so incompetent that instead of holding firm and refusing to do so, they actually signed a deal with President Trump on tariffs and trade without dealing with the single most punishing tariff being imposed on Canadian business.
That is incompetent and the New Democrats are going to continue to stand up for good trade policies, good regulations and for fair tax policy in our country.