Madam Speaker, I entered politics and decided to run for the nomination within my riding because the government of the day's economic record was anemic. We had low growth in Canada, a high unemployment rate and we did not have a plan to move the economy forward. Just as important, there was no plan to deal with the issue at hand, which was climate change and how we would part and parcel work together to create a strong economy and also a healthy environment. They go and in hand.
In the global financial market, I saw the transition that was happening to deal with climate change, with new technologies and industries being created. I worked for over 20 years in New York, London and Toronto, and I saw companies moving toward that.
Our party put forward a plan to grow the middle class, strengthen it and assist those working hard to join the middle class. We created an environment for job creation and investments to raise the standard of living for all Canadians. To deal with the issue of climate change, we put forward a real plan on climate change.
That is what we did as a government. We put forward a plan that, over the long term, would lower emissions and get us to net-zero by 2050. A crucial element of that plan was pricing an externality, as we say in economic terms, and create pricing pollution. We put together that plan with applause from across the spectrum. When I use that term, I mean economist and policy-makers, whether they were on the right, the left or the centre. We were using a market system to price something and use those proceeds—