Madam Speaker, I want to take this opportunity today to express my disgust and profound outrage at the decal produced by oil company X-Site Energy Services. This decal shows an explicit representation of young environmentalist Greta Thunberg being sexually assaulted.
This is disgraceful and likely warrants an investigation. There are limits to how people can challenge someone they disagree with. This decal blatantly encourages the assault and rape of a young girl. I am calling on the government and all parliamentarians in the House to strongly condemn such declarations and actions.
I will get back to the motion we are debating. This debate is a very important one, and I thank my colleagues in the official opposition for moving this motion. It reminds us that as parliamentarians, we are here to serve the Canadians who elected us to come to the House to talk, make suggestions, introduce bills and build a fairer society and a better world, as my colleague from Newfoundland said.
In 2015, the Liberals repeated ad nauseam that they wanted to do politics differently, that they wanted to respect the work of MPs, that they wanted to respect the parliamentary institution that is the House of Commons.
Unfortunately, what we saw was a Liberal government that invoked closure more times than Stephen Harper's Conservatives. Once again, the Liberals say one thing and do the opposite. This arrogance has a limit, and it was reached on October 21 when Quebeckers and Canadians gave a mandate to all parliamentarians to work together for the good of the country.
The Liberals did find themselves back in power—with fewer votes than the official opposition, as we know—and they must now work with different parties in the House to advance various files and find solutions. Today and for the second time since the beginning of the 43rd Parliament, the Liberals are being given a lesson in humility to let them know that they cannot do whatever they want in the House and that they must respect parliamentarians and the institution.
It is important to know the purpose of these opposition days, which give a voice to the political parties that legitimately represent the will of the people and the interests of their constituents.
Opposition days are an opportunity to bring to the House, here in Parliament, issues and topics that the government of the day might not want to talk about much, but are important to the people we represent and to Canadians across the country. They advance debate because it is not just the government's policies that are always put on the agenda and always being discussed. This creates greater diversity and better representation of the concerns and needs of the citizens of this country.
I will provide a few recent examples and some older ones of motions moved by the NDP that I believe addressed critical issues. This month, my colleague from New Westminster—Burnaby introduced the idea that dental care should be provided in this country. We explained very clearly to all Canadians how this could be done at no extra cost.
The Liberals came up with some other tax cut scheme that mainly benefits the wealthy and the most fortunate in society and does not amount to much for the less fortunate or low-income workers.
The maximum amount one can save in a year with this tax cut is $600. That is what this plan is about. Only people who earn over $143,000 a year will be eligible for this gift worth $600. I really do not think those are the people who need it the most, when there are people living in poverty and who are struggling to make ends meet.
We in the NDP are saying that anyone who earns more than $90,000 a year should not have access to tax cuts above that threshold.
Let us take all that money that we are going to save and invest it in a new public service, a new social program that would give everyone access to dental care. By implementing the tax measure proposed by the NDP, we would save approximately $1.6 billion, which would enable us to provide care to 4.3 million Canadians, who often do not even dare go to the dentist because they cannot afford it.
This is the type of concern that an opposition party can raise here to force a debate and see what positions the government and the other parties will take. That is what opposition days are for. I am pleased that we can debate the need for more opposition days in the House so that we can share more points of view and concerns about issues that are not necessarily part of the current government's priorities.
Last June, at the end of the 42nd Parliament, one of my colleagues from British Columbia moved a motion about the fact that Quebeckers and Canadians pay more for cellular telecommunications services than people in other countries and in the OECD.
We in the NDP proposed mechanisms to help Canadians save money and access affordable internet and cellular services. Our goal was really to save them money, because the profits going to big telecom are frankly obscene.
Of course, the current government is not always keen to discuss these issues, but we opposition members can raise these concerns, start a debate and force everyone to take a side and vote, so they will then report back to their constituents and explain why they accepted or rejected whatever the proposal was.
That is why I think the motion moved today by the official opposition is so interesting. It gives us a chance to list all these examples.
Back in May, the leader of the NDP, the member for Burnaby South, moved a motion calling for a climate emergency to be declared. Here is a subject we have to come back to again and again so we can take the Liberal government to task, since it seems to be incapable of meeting the targets set by the previous Conservative government. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned, based on scientific evidence, that we have 10 years to reverse course, take action and drastically lower our greenhouse gas emissions.
Unfortunately, not only will we fail to reach the Conservatives' targets, but, according to reports by a series of commissioners of the environment and sustainable development, we are falling further behind with each passing year. In 2018, they said we would fail to hit the target by 66 megatonnes. In 2019, they said we would fail to hit the target by 79 megatonnes. On the one hand, the Liberal government dragged its feet for three and a half years before putting a price on pollution, and even that has had no impact so far.
On the other hand, the Liberal government bought the Trans Mountain pipeline with taxpayers' money. That project makes no sense from an environmental point of view, let alone an economic or financial point of view, as we can already see from the pipeline's ballooning costs. It cost us $4.5 billion to buy that 65-year-old pipe, and building a new pipeline alongside it was supposed to cost $7.4 billion, but now that has gone up to $12 billion.
The Liberal government has no idea how high that number could go. Will there come a time when we stop wasting our money by investing in something that has no future? Not only is it an outdated energy source, but it is also the first type of oil global markets will stop buying.
We could take that money and massively invest in renewable energy to help the western provinces, such as Alberta, make a fair energy transition in a way that respects workers. Alberta has incredible solar and wind energy potential that has not yet been tapped. Let us turn toward those energy resources to help us make the transition.
That is what opposition motions are for and that is why it is important to have more of them.