Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague, the parliamentary secretary for environment and climate change, knows how deeply I lament the weakness of the government's plan, just as much or more than I lament the fact that the Conservatives have no plan. The Liberal plan will take us nowhere near Stephen Harper's old target, which puts us on a path, as the hon. parliamentary secretary well knows, to catastrophic climate breakdown that could deprive our own children of a livable world.
We are in a climate emergency, yet in this place, as in many parliaments around the world, we continue to pretend that the incremental efforts to do something in the right direction should be applauded, even as we know, and this is a really enormous example of cognitive dissonance, that what we are doing now is not enough to protect our children.
The Conservatives may not know it. Some do. Certainly some hon. Conservative members know it. The NDP should know it, but its plans are also nowhere near achieving the kinds of reductions that actually are about phasing out fossil fuels, 100%, by 2050 and cutting Canada's use of fossil fuels by at least 50% within a decade.
I do not think it is solely corporate influence, but can the hon. parliamentary secretary deny that corporate influence is a big part of why a government tries to have its cake and eat it too? It brings in carbon taxes and then buys a pipeline.