Mr. Speaker, I am extremely pleased to be able to pursue tonight in adjournment proceedings one of the most important questions I have ever asked in this place, which was for the Prime Minister on October 16.
The night before we had held in this place quite an extraordinary emergency debate, thanks to the Speaker's ruling that it was, in fact, qualifying as an emergency. The IPCC, the United Nations agency of the world's best scientists, had just delivered a report that warned humanity that unless we held the global average temperature increase to no more than 1.5°C, we could face unimaginable consequences up to and including the loss of human civilization and potentially our own extinction.
I put it to the Prime Minister that on the eve of the climate negotiations in Poland, now was the time to improve our targets. The IPCC report made it very clear that Canada's targets were wholly, and are wholly, inadequate to the task ahead of us. The good news, and I must stress this, from the IPCC report is that we still have time to avoid those consequences, but we no longer have time for procrastination.
Of course events have taken place since then. The climate negotiations, in which I participated in December in Katowice, Poland, are over. Canada did not step up to improve our targets. I have to say not just lamentably but shamefully that the only countries that improved their targets were Fiji and the Marshall Islands. However, it is very clear that we must take a role of global leadership. Where other countries are not improving their targets, surely Canada, with the weakest targets within the OECD, must do so.
The Prime Minister's response to me was “we are working hard to meet our 2030 targets.” I want to stress that these 2030 targets to which Canada is now committed have not changed since May 2015, when the former government of Stephen Harper placed them with the United Nations. We know from the IPCC report that the targets we put forward are not just inconsistent with the Paris agreement, they are dangerous and reckless.
The Prime Minister went on to say, “We are reversing the Conservatives' reckless changes...” I put it for my friend, the hon. parliamentary secretary, that the most reckless change of the Harper administration was to cancel Kyoto and weaken our targets, not once but three times. We have now embraced, and the Liberal government has now embraced, the weakest of the targets from the three times Stephen Harper changed them. They are clearly inconsistent with the Paris agreement. They clearly do not take us to 1.5°C. In fact, it has been calculated by other scientists that if all countries on earth were pursuing Canada's weak efforts, global average temperature would go to 5.1°C, or well past the danger zone.
We now know we have very little time. We know that other levels of jurisdiction within Canada are recognizing this is a climate emergency. Halifax just did, Vancouver has and other cities are considering it. However, in this place, it seems as though the major political party with the most seats in this place thinks we can just pretend, until we get through the next election, that the Harper targets are good enough. If the small efforts being made by the Liberal Party and the government, for which I am grateful they are not as weak as the Conservatives, lead us to extinction, in the end it will not make a difference.