Mr. Speaker, I would like to answer the member's question. He said that I am opposed to the government working with corporations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but that is not true. There is room for corporate partnership. It is just that the threshold has to be that public funds are leveraging new investment. It cannot be a company like Loblaws, which is investing $36 million of its own dollars, which is appropriate and which it was doing anyway to renovate its fridges.
The impression is not of a government that is looking for real investment opportunities and saying, “How do we further reduce Canada's greenhouse gas emissions? How do we leverage investment from the private sector?” Instead, there is the impression of a government that is looking around and saying, “Who is already doing some of this work? How do we get to the podium? What is the cost of buying our way into announcements that are happening anyway?”
The government is happy to spend the money because it is not government money; it is the money of Canadians. The government is roaming around, buying its place at a podium for things that are happening anyway, rather than leveraging new investment that will create reductions in carbon emissions.