Mr. Speaker, I wish to thank my esteemed colleague for her decades-long activism on this file.
I am making this address from my service vehicle, a 100% electric vehicle, in transit to Ottawa, which is not to make a statement about my street cred on environmental issues but I would simply point that out.
My government wishes to thank the commissioner of the environment and sustainable development for his work and his report.
As my colleague for Saanich—Gulf Islands knows very well, we have made tremendous progress when it comes to climate change. Let us go back to our earlier years of activism to COP1 in 1995 where very few people were paying attention to this. We only had one IPCC report that started to point to the fact that humans were causing global warming, and the only thing that countries could agree upon in Berlin in 1995 was that the commitments that we had made in Rio in 1992 were inadequate.
Twenty-five years ago in Berlin, the only thing the countries could agree on was the fact that the commitments made in Rio to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions to their 1990 levels by 2000 were inadequate.
Those commitments did not include any emissions reduction targets, no international mechanism to combat climate change, or any dedicated funding mechanism by the industrialized countries to help developing countries adapt to climate change.
I attended the Glasgow summit a few weeks ago as the new Minister of Environment and Climate Change. More than 50,000 people attend those conferences, and it is no longer just government negotiators, NGO representatives and scientists.
At these meetings, we now have representatives from civil society, indigenous organizations, labour, municipalities, businesses and the financial sector, as well as innovators and investors. They are all saying that they want to be part of this and they want to be part of the solution, which is something we have never seen before. To say that nothing has happened when looking at all of the initiatives that have taken place at the municipal level, in our communities, in many provinces over the years and, frankly, all around the world is to deny the fact that the world has started to tackle climate change.
Now, clearly, as the commissioner's report points out, we need to do more. There is an international agreement on the fact that we need to do more, which was recognized in Glasgow, which is recognized in many of the IPCC reports and which is certainly recognized in the commissioner's report.
As I am sure my colleague has read the commissioner's report, she will know that the report did not study the 2016 pan-Canadian framework plan on climate change that our government presented in 2016, or the enhanced climate plan that was presented in 2020. The commissioner did not study the 100 or so measures that have been introduced by our government since 2016 as well as the $100 billion that we are currently investing in Canada.
I will finish up on this. As our last inventories have shown, we have managed to flatten the curve to 2030. We have taken out more than 30 million tonnes of CO2 greenhouse emissions that would have been in the atmosphere. That is almost equivalent to half of Quebec's overall emissions. So, our plan is working, but we need to accelerate it.