Madam Speaker, as I rise tonight in this late show on December 6, I am keenly aware that this is the last time I will rise to speak in an adjournment proceeding in this place, in this building. I leave tomorrow for the climate negotiations now in progress in Katowice, Poland. By the time those negotiations are completed, Parliament will be in recess. It is bittersweet to stand here, at this hour of night, knowing that this beautiful chamber will not be the one to which I return in the new year.
The question I raised and pursue tonight in adjournment proceedings was on September 25. I asked the Minister of Environment whether we were going to take the warnings of climate scientists seriously. I am quite firmly of the view that most Canadians from coast to coast to coast want to see their government take meaningful action, whether they are in New Brunswick and experienced a flood such as I have never seen before, or in British Columbia where I live, where we have now had several summers in which our usual rain does not come and our forests are on fire. Last summer we had 500 separate fires burning. We had so many volunteer firefighters leaving Vancouver Island very bravely, heading into the interior into the forest fire zone to fight fires, that some fire chiefs worried that if we had a fire on Vancouver Island, we might not have enough people left to fight it. Moreover, we had storm surges in Atlantic Canada, droughts and weather in the Prairies that drove farmers to levels of depression as they saw their crops covered in snow far too early before they had been able to get out and harvest them.
I am of the view, and the Canadians who speak to me consistently say, that we need to see real climate action. The level of despair is a real risk, because as people read the reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, they are informed that we only have a very short period of time in which to meet the Paris targets of ensuring that global average temperatures will increase no more than 1.5°C above the global average temperature before the industrial revolution. They are equally informed that Canada's plans and targets are among the weakest in the world, that if the world followed our path, we would not hold to 1.5°C or to 2°C, but would hit a 5.1°C increase in global average temperature. That is a path to the loss of human civilization.
Sir David Attenborough spoke at the opening of COP24 in Katowice and said exactly that. We are in a race against time to save human civilization because the ravages of catastrophic climate crises are not merely more bad weather, but amount to an existential threat.
As I stand here today, the Minister of Environment has said that we are not going to improve our targets for another two years. We do not have two years. The question I raised on September 25 was about we are going to have consistent policies. How can we possibly spend another $10 billion on the Kinder Morgan expansion to get raw bitumen out of Canada with the effect of boosting production of some of the most heavy greenhouse gas producing fossil fuel on the planet?
My question tonight, and I will raise it every chance I draw breath of life, is when are we going to set partisanship aside, do what our children and grandchildren demand of us and make a wholesale transition off fossil fuels and to the forms of energy that sustain us?