Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise in the House again today to speak in support of Bill C-12. We are having this discussion at a time when Canada is warming at twice the global rate and the regions in our north are warming at three times the global rate. Meanwhile, Canada is a top-10 emitter of greenhouse emissions on an absolute basis and is firmly entrenched as a top-three contributor to emissions on a per capita basis.
We have signed on to agreements like Kyoto and Copenhagen and made commitments to lower our GHG emissions, but never followed through with the detailed measures that would be needed to meet them. Bill C-12 would change that by requiring transparency in the policies the federal government would bring in to mitigate climate change, as well as hold us accountable to meeting them. Bill C-12 would ensure that Canada follows through on our strengthened 2030 target of 40% to 45% below 2005 levels of emissions that were announced at the Leaders Summit on Climate, held on Earth Day earlier this year.
Bill C-12 would ensure that Canada is on a path to realize net-zero emissions by 2050 and that we can implement our strengthened climate plan that would cut our emissions and allow our economy to thrive in a low-carbon world. For that reason, I urge all colleagues in the House to join me in supporting this legislation, but members should not just take my word for it. They should listen to the calls from leading environmental NGOs in this country for the two Houses to swiftly pass Bill C-12. A recent letter co-signed by the Climate Action Network, the David Suzuki Foundation, Équiterre, Ecojustice and West Coast Environmental Law made that particular case. It is hard to believe that just a decade ago, the Minister of Canadian Heritage, the member for Pontiac and I were each working for those latter three respective organizations.
The decade that was lost under former Prime Minister Harper, and the efforts described by some as cowardly or even as a pariah in the context of UN-led climate change negotiations, is a big reason we are here today. Climate accountability legislation is long overdue. Since Bill C-12 was first tabled, I have spoken with hundreds of constituents and dozens of organizations, both within and outside of my riding, that wanted to know more and had ideas for this legislation. People like Daniel Huot have reminded me as recently as today why it is important that people who represent the public are accountable for the commitments they make, and climate change is no different.
I have spoken with members of all parties about this legislation and I know there has been a tremendous amount of engagement with experts across the country since the first reading of this bill. There is proof that improvements have been made. The Minister of Environment and Climate Change stated that he was open to amendments that would strengthen this bill. His actions have shown that he was true to his word. I want to thank all members of the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development for taking an already good bill and making it significantly better through a number of amendments. In particular, I want to thank the NDP for supporting the government on the majority of the amendments made at committee.
I also want to thank the Bloc Québécois for the amendments it proposed and for voting in favour of sending the bill back to the House.
In my speech at second reading, I raised a few key aspects of this legislation that needed to be strengthened for it to give the House and all Canadians confidence that this bill would hold the government to account sooner and allow for longer-term planning. Originally, this bill would not have required reporting on Canada's track to achieving 2030 targets until a 2026 report by the commissioner of the environment and sustainable development and a 2027 progress report by the government.
I argued that the progress reporting in this bill needed to occur sooner so that Canadians could judge with confidence whether our country was on track to meeting our commitments for 2030 and averting the greatest challenge the world faces. To that end, the bill has been amended to require the first progress report to be submitted no later than the end of 2023 and that another be submitted in 2025. Earlier and more frequent reporting will provide enough time to take corrective action, or to vote in a government that will deal with the climate emergency and meet our international responsibilities.
Bill C-12 has also been amended to require that any progress reporting related to 2030 must now include an update on the interim greenhouse gas emissions objective for 2026. This satisfies some people who were seeking a 2025 target. It also addresses a concern I had raised that, due to our federal structure, shared responsibility for policies related to climate and the need to consult and accommodate indigenous peoples would have collectively taken a year or more to go through. Setting a short-term target for 2025 would have made that difficult, and it may have also led us to make short-term changes to cut emissions at the expense of changes that may take longer to pay back, in terms of emissions reductions.
I also focused on the long term in my last speech. I argued that we should provide targets and plans looking five years in advance, as the original bill required, as well as look 10 to 15 years ahead to allow the government and the private sector to make the investments now that will get us to our medium-term goals and on course to get to net zero by 2050.
This will allow us to have what the Canadian Institute for Climate Choices calls the safe-bet solutions, which are based on existing technologies like electric vehicles, measures for methane reduction and home retrofits and will help us meet our near-term reductions, as well as to work on some of the wild cards, which are the high-risk, high-reward technologies that we need to get to net zero.
These breakthrough technologies include climate solutions like hydrogen. They can be game-changers in hard-to-abate areas like freight transport. For these technologies to do the heavy lifting to help us reach our medium- to longer-term decarbonization, we need to set the minds of our government to where we are going and also show the private sector where we are going, so that those investments are made today and so that those jobs are also created today.
The testimony I heard as part of my role on the Standing Committee on Natural Resources clearly underlined that this is the certainty that businesses are looking for. They also said it was critical to pair this with a steadily increasing stringency of measures like the clean fuel standard and the price on pollution that will make Canada a destination of choice for low-carbon investment. To this effect, the amendments to Bill C-12 have acknowledged this by requiring emissions targets to be set 10 years and a day in advance.
I want to run through a number of the other important changes as well.
The content of the reporting has been improved to require the inclusion of more detail in projections for annual emissions reductions by each economic sector, and also to show what additional measures could have been taken to better ensure that targets are met.
Amendments have also made it clear that the net-zero advisory body will be independent of government and will also have a role in target setting in addition to its role in meeting those targets. This body has already been set up, with a diverse and exceptional group of 14 experts, including several who have been highly critical of the government's efforts to date. Together they will provide wholly independent advice and annual reports to the minister, which the minister will have to respond to publicly.
In what may seem self-evident, another amendment will require that governments make progressively stronger greenhouse gas emissions targets and ensure that Canada's targets are at least as ambitious as the most recent nationally determined contribution communicated under the Paris Agreement. While these requirements may seem self-evident, they guarantee that our emissions targets do not stale and will instead ensure we achieve and maintain a position at the forefront of global climate action.
If my colleagues think that this piece of legislation, with the Bloc Québécois's amendment, does not go far enough to promote climate accountability, a review will be mandated within five years or less.
Ultimately, Bill C-12 will require the federal government to be ambitious with its climate action, to be transparent with Canadians about the measures it is taking, to be clear with how it could do more and to put them in the driver's seat to holding the government accountable to ensure that we do what we must to address the climate emergency.
I will conclude today with the following: Let us not let one party's intransigence on climate change derail our country for a decade, as it did before. Let us not make the same mistake again. Let us ensure that we deliver the climate action that the vast majority of Canadians want to see and let us pass climate accountability legislation today.