Madam Speaker, I thank my colleagues today for debating concurrence in a committee report from the environment department on the path forward. In relation to this, one of the main things we come at in our dissenting report is that despite claiming that the cost of carbon tax would address climate change, the current Liberal government has failed to meet any carbon climate target. This is something that has to be brought forth here very specifically.
The commissioner of the environment and sustainable development Canada provided five reports to Parliament just a few weeks ago, in which he illustrated exactly what the government was not accomplishing with all of its efforts in this respect. When I say efforts, I mean up to 140 programs across government that are spending money and not reducing emissions at all.
I will go into a lot of the guts of the reports, particularly the report in which the commissioner talks about the net-zero transition and where we are with respect to getting towards net zero in our economy, because he makes some significant statements in this regard. He goes on about this, saying, “Missing and inconsistent information, delays in launching important measures, and a lack of reliability in projections hindered the credibility of the plan.”
Before I go any further, Madam Speaker, I have to tell you that I will be splitting my time today with my hon. colleague from Louis-Saint-Laurent.
Recognize that we are getting zero emissions at the end of the day out of all the programs. Tens of billions are being spent on climate changes, effectively, the latest one of course being the emissions cap, which is a pie-in-the-sky thing, and we are going to eliminate emissions without putting down production. The only way we are actually going to eliminate emissions in Canada at this stage is by undoing our economy.
Especially in our resource production, undoing our economy means that resources are being produced elsewhere, which would mean higher emissions, lower labour standards and less benefit for the world. Therefore we continue on the path of making sure the government is exposed for the folly of its approach to how they are trying to get at emissions, because the emissions are not appearing at the end of the day.
I will go on with another of the commissioner's reports. He said, “The recent decreases to projected 2030 emissions were not due to climate actions taken by governments but were instead because of revisions to the data or methods used in modelling.” For 20 years, the department of environment has had a model that is not transparent about how it is measuring emissions in the Canadian economy. As the environment commissioner has stated, the whole model is flawed. Nobody can see it; therefore, it is effectively flawed.
The only way to reduce emissions is to change the inputs in its own modelling. This does not reduce CO2 in the atmosphere; all it does is make the model look like we are accomplishing something when we are accomplishing next to nothing. What we are accomplishing is the shutdown of the most productive part of the Canadian economy, our resource industry. That is part of what the government's virtue signalling is all about: saying we are doing something, but changing the metrics of how we measure what we are doing. The Liberals are trying to fool the Canadian public. It is deceitful and has to be exposed at its highest level.
It is not the member of Parliament for Calgary Centre but the commissioner of the environment and sustainable development who actually said very clearly that the Liberals are monkeying around with the numbers. The next monkeying around they will do of course is to include in the numbers the actual absorption of CO2 embedded in Canada's forests, to make it look like they have actually accomplished something although that was not part of the inputs from the get-go.
There are a whole bunch of quotes from the commissioner that are very important, and I am going to go through a few more of them. Here is one: “This issue of the lack of transparency in the modelling continues to be an ongoing concern, which can undermine the trust and credibility in the reported progress.” Did members hear that? The government has lost all kinds of trust with Canadians and has also lost credibility with anybody who is paying attention to emissions and to our energy production systems in Canada, which need to be sustained in order for us to continue with our prosperous economy and to continue as a world leader in emissions reduction.
Fully three-quarters of the amount of money spent by private enterprise in this country on climate emissions reductions is spent by the oil and gas industry in making sure it gets cleaner production. That production, specifically in the oil sands, on the emissions profile per barrel of oil produced has gone down by 26% in the last 20 years. That outperforms any other industry in Canada as far as reductions associated with technological advances. When my colleague across the way talks about technology not taxes, we have clear illustrations of how that works.
Businesses spending money on technology as opposed to spending money on taxes actually advance the science and advance the utilization of carbon-reducing emissions. This is what we are after at the end of the day. We want less carbon emissions per unit of production. We want to make sure we have a sustainable economy going forward. We want to replace carbon being produced around the world with more carbon-efficient and less-emitting options available here in Canada.
I will conclude with a quote from the commissioner of the environment: “This lack of transparency meant that accountabilities for reducing emissions remained unclear.” I beseech my colleagues on the other side of the House. It is not the opposition saying this; it is the government's own commissioner of the environment and sustainable development who is saying the Liberals are not getting anything done. The only thing they are accomplishing in numbers, and the numbers are down slightly from their peak pre-COVID, is not necessarily a result of anything the programs have designed; it is a result, significantly, of changes to the model.
Now, the Liberals can change their input models all they want, but in the end, the world is getting more carbon in the atmosphere. We have to actually get less carbon in the atmosphere, so we need to find some programs and find some technology that actually accomplishes that. However, the government seems strained on that because it is bent toward that whole regulation and control as opposed to innovation and market decisions, which are going to be part of the future and the solution.
I said to my constituents, “When you have dug a hole this deep, it is time to stop digging.” That is the main thing. The Liberals have gone down the rat hole, and making sure they are producing less emissions is no longer their goal. The goal is to push more money out the door, and I am particularly worried about this—