Mr. Speaker, last week we learned that Canada is warming at twice the global average. This finding should be a wake-up call for all of us.
As the vice-chair of the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development, I am pleased that on Tuesday the committee tabled two reports, one entitled “Clean Growth and Climate Change: How Canada Can Lead Internationally”, along with a second report on forestry, agriculture and waste, with a total of 34 recommendations on how the government can and must do better.
Climate change is no longer a distant threat, and the cost of inaction is too great. The impacts are already being felt in my riding of Kootenay—Columbia and across the country. My constituents are calling for stronger action, just like the high school students who protested in Nelson or the grades 5 and 6 Ktunaxa students who wrote me letters worried about polar bears and the environment, or my granddaughter Lalita, who at times worries if her generation will have a future at all.
Canadians expect us to work together, and we must all commit to doing so. Let us start by agreeing to more ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets and to making climate change a non-partisan issue. Our children and grandchildren deserve no less.