Mr. Speaker, the topic I am discussing tonight comes from a question I asked in the House back in April. The question was essentially, how can the government square its approval of the Trans Mountain pipeline with Canada's Paris climate action commitments? I asked this question then because I hear it almost every day from my constituents. We hear a lot in this place about pipelines and concerns about consultation with first nations and concerns about the impacts on the marine environment. Those are important issues. Those, in fact, are the issues the Federal Court of Appeal raised when it recently quashed the Trans Mountain expansion approval.
However, the question of how a government that claims to be a world leader in climate action can approve a pipeline whose only purpose is to expand oil sands production is troubling. This question was raised by the government's own ministerial panel that toured the pipeline route before the government gave the project approval. This was one of the six questions the panel said should have been answered before the pipeline decision was made. Now we have not only approved the pipeline, but have bought it.
How are we doing on our Paris targets? At Paris, we committed to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by 30% below 2005 levels by 2030, which points to a target of just over 500 megatonnes of carbon dioxide. We are at about 700 megatonnes now, so we have quite a ways to go. To put that into perspective, we would have to take all passenger vehicles off Canadian roads to get halfway to that target, and lately our emissions have only been dropping by a few megatonnes per year.
A national price on carbon would get us part of the way there, and I commend the government for its commitment to that action. However, all of the government's announced policies will still leave us short. The Climate Action Tracker site, which covers the commitments of all countries that signed onto the Paris Agreement, classes Canada's climate action efforts as “highly insufficient”. It is easy to feel that we are doing well when we live beside the U.S.A., which is listed as “critically insufficient”, but we share our highly insufficient grade with some countries whose carbon footprints many people like to criticize, such as China's. Most of the developed world—Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil and Mexico—rank well above us. Also, one of the countries I often hear held up as a problem on the world climate action scene, India, is actually leading the pack with its policies and accomplishments.
With planned policies, Canadian emissions are projected to reach 569 megatonnes by 2030. To get below that, I hear rumours that Canada will try to change the rules and move the goalposts by relying on carbon sinks in our forests and land-use policies, without reference to the levels those sources were providing before our Paris commitment.
The Climate Action Tracker site adds that there is no clarity as to how many international credits Canada plans to use to meet its target. The use of international carbon credits implies that a portion of Canada's emissions reductions will not be met by domestic mitigation efforts. Here I would add that there is no indication that the international community will recognize international carbon credits for any country trying to meet its Paris commitments.
After I first raised this question last spring, the Canadian government doubled down on Trans Mountain and bought the project for $4.5 billion. We are spending our money subsidizing the fossil fuel industry. We are going in the wrong direction.