Madam Speaker, climate accountability is vital if we want to reduce our emissions. We have missed every single climate target that we have set, so it is hard to understand and wrap my head around why the government would put forward a climate accountability bill that avoids any real accountability for a decade. It puts off accountability for the most important 10 years. This huge omission of a 2025 milestone target is baffling.
The world's top scientists are telling us that the next decade, this decade that we are living in, is the most critical. The next 10 years are the ones that the IPCC reports say are crucial if we want to have any hope of avoiding the most severe impacts of climate change, so it is really difficult for me to understand how Liberal members of Parliament can stand behind this bill, how they can look young people in the eyes and tell them they have to wait for another decade.
However, it is not just young people who are worried about the climate crisis. Canadians are already seeing the impacts. This past summer in B.C., people of all ages were choking on the smoke from the climate fires down south. Grandparents are worried about the world that we are leaving to the next generations. Communities across Canada are already experiencing the billions of dollars of climate costs associated with adapting to climate change. Local governments are spending $5.3 billion a year right now and in the coming decades that number is expected to grow exponentially.
The Liberals said they would provide milestone targets every five years, so why is there no 2025 milestone target? Why put off accountability for 10 years? Why continue the trend of kicking the can down the road when it comes to addressing the climate crisis?
Even with a 2025 milestone target we need stronger accountability mechanisms than the bill would provide, both with the arm's-length advisory body and with the environment commissioner. Neither of these bodies have the capacity or the mandate in this bill to adequately hold the government to account. In this bill, the minister is mainly accountable to himself. If we want to fix these issues and if we want to strengthen the bill, we need to clearly define the advisory body's role.
We have to guarantee that body would be comprised of independent experts. These fixes would strengthen the advisory body, but we also need to ensure that the environment commissioner is reporting on whether our targets are in line with the best available science, whether our climate plan will actually get us to our targets, whether our progress report and our assessment report are accurate, and whether the proposed corrective actions are adequate to address the times when we get off track. It cannot be the party in power being accountable to itself.
The environment commissioner could play an important role in the legislation, but we learned recently that the environment commissioner has not had the resources to do the current regular environmental work. We not only need to give the environment commissioner adequate funding, but we need to ensure that this never happens again. I am curious whether the government will agree to make the environment commissioner an independent officer of Parliament.
There are a number of other gaps. I am curious why the government is not using the language of carbon budgets and a framework of carbon budgeting instead of milestone targets. Why are we not requiring the minister to meet strong standards when setting targets, when—