Bob Mills

[The Budget, March 7th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I am very aware of all the figures in the budget. The problem is the back-loading, as I mentioned. The problem is also whether we will ever see some of that. We have had so much money allocated that never gets spent because there is no vision. There is no game plan of how we are going to get there.

Let me address the issue of the large emitters. I believe in cooperating with provinces and with these large emitters. By doing so, we can achieve even better targets than what the Kyoto protocol is all about. But what if we buy carbon credits from somewhere else?

Let us take a company in my riding. Its charge is going to be $6 million a year. That $6 million is going to be transferred to buy a piece of paper in the Ukraine. How are we going to monitor that?

Would it not be better for that company to invest that $6 million into new technology or into developing a technology, into CO

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sequestering, which is really possible now, or into some clean coal technology or some of these new innovative things, these alternate energies? There is the wind power process, and I agree very much with that process. We have biodiesel, biomass and all those things. Would it not be better to invest the $6 million there and then be in a position to transfer that technology to China, India, Mexico and Brazil, the countries that are the big emitters now because they are using old technology?

For us to simply penalize Canadian companies makes absolutely no sense to me. Let us use that money domestically. Let us develop these processes here. Let us clean up our environment here but then make the technology available to those other developing countries. That is the way to go, not with a European carbon trading system. Carbon has gone from $3 on January 1 to $11.80 as of last Monday. The Russians hope it is going to go to $35. The Canadian government has guaranteed a price of $15 for heavy emitters. We can just imagine if it goes to $20. That $5 commitment has to be picked up by the Canadian taxpayers and we are talking about billions and billions of dollars. It is not the way to go.

The way to go is through technological development here. It will help our environment, but more important, it will go to the really big emitters in the other countries, in China and so on. If we do not have them on side we will go nowhere.

[The Budget, March 7th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to the budget.

I would like to take one moment to recognize two young men from Red Deer who received all their education there. Anthony Gordon and Brock Myrol, who were part of our community, were in that tragic killing of RCMP officers that occurred. I spent some time with the local RCMP in our riding. They had a ribbon campaign on Saturday and the whole community is in sorrow over that terrible incident. I do want to recognize those parents from my community and those two young men who gave their lives for all of us.

Going on to the budget, Canada has no plan and no vision. We should be at the top on environmental issues and instead we have 300 boil water warnings at any given time. We have no water plan, no energy plan, no air plan and no land plan. In fact, the Liberals really do not seem to have a plan for much of anything except how they can spin things so they can get re-elected. We do not do anything about our watersheds or our brownfields.

We use the poster child of the Sydney tar ponds. I have been here for 11 years and in every budget I have heard that we will deal with this problem. All we do though is set up another study. The people in that area are still asking what we are going to do and when we are going to come up with a plan. We have some 50,000 other contaminated sites, 10,000 federal government sites, and the government has no plan. It should be embarrassed to come out with a postdated budget like it did with no real plan.

The minister talked to me last week and said that we would have a Kyoto plan this week. It is now 3.30 p.m. on Monday and I still have not seen that plan. I do not know if there ever will be a plan but obviously that is typical for how the government reacts.

The back-loaded budget that we have is basically one of “Trust us. Just wait. We will come up with something”. Yes, the government will come up with something. When the next election comes it will drag out all that money that it postdated and we will be into that campaign.

A tax relief of $16 per year is not a tax relief. It will not revitalize our economy nor will it result in capital and corporate investment. It will not result in anything. If a corporation is looking at investing in alternative energy, in new technologies and in environmental integrity for our country, it needs to know the direction in which the government is going, not this wishy-washy, feel good, pat ourselves on the back type of budget.

I get rather annoyed when I hear people telling me it is a green budget. Mr. Speaker, this budget is no more green than the chair you are sitting in, which is a nice colour green and you look good there.

The national debt is $500 billion. Let us look at the interest payments and imagine what we could do with that money. However there is no plan to deal with that. We just hear the government telling us how wonderful it is for bringing down the debt to GDP. Actually it is just that Canadians are out there producing more and the government is simply spending. The $210 billion of spending is an embarrassment when we look at how there is nothing in the budget.

I and many others got into this business because of our kids and our grandchildren and because of the future we wanted for the country. When we see this unfocused, wasteful budget that we have in front of us, it certainly does not make us enjoy those flights back and forth very much.

We obviously look at the Gomery inquiry and we see just the tip of the iceberg. In my riding this past week, and in two or three other ridings that I visited, people are saying that the government is covering up things, covering up what it really wants and that it has no vision and does not know where it is going.

Let us look at the climate change issue. In 1992 we signed on and said yes. We agreed in Rio that there was a problem, there was climate change and that we should deal with it but what did we do? We waited until 1997 and nothing happened. We have absolutely no plan. Nothing was done.

In 1997 Canada ratified Kyoto without even having a plan. The only plan that the then prime minister had was that we had to beat the U.S. If the U.S. goes for 5% below 1990, he said, let us go for 6%. Obviously the provinces were shocked when the then environment minister came back and said, “Yes, we signed on”. There was no plan, there was no understanding of the economic impacts and obviously there was still no understanding of what that really meant.

In 2002 Kyoto was ratified. There was still no plan. The prime minister himself stood up at meetings and said, “We must have a plan. There is no plan”. Here we are in 2005 and we still do not have a plan. Our only plan seems to be that the government has now set up a clean fund. A clean fund worth a billion dollars at arm's length is just another foundation. This is just another word for a foundation.

Yes, we are going to buy credits. Where are we going to buy credits? Probably if people are good Liberals they may well have credits for sale that could be purchased domestically.

Internationally, of course, we are going to monitor environmental integrity in Ukraine, Russia and Chile. We cannot monitor the environmental integrity in this country, let alone the environmental integrity in Ukraine, Russia or someplace else. The Liberals must consider voters absolutely stupid to believe that they could monitor this kind of hot air credit.

The government has allocated $3.7 billion. Now we have had another $3 billion put forward. I try to explain these billions of dollars to people. If we were to spend a thousand dollars an hour, a million dollars would last 21 days. A billion dollars lasts 31 years at that same spending level; a billion dollars is a lot of money. There has been $5 billion of back-loaded money committed, $1 billion of it to a clean fund that will simply be a slush fund for the Liberal government.

What results do we have? Let us look at the results. Committed to was $3.7 billion and now $5 billion. We have Rick Mercer running around in a program of $48 million initially, which is going to increase. In 1997 we were somewhere in the neighbourhood of 15% to 18% above 1990 levels. By the year 2000 we were 20% above 1990 levels. Today we are 30% above 1990 levels. We have spent that money and we are going the wrong way.

I do not understand how the members of this government can stand up and say, “We have environmental integrity. We care about the environment. We have a green budget”. It is just not green, there is just no plan and it is just going nowhere.

What does the Prime Minister do on the day that Kyoto comes into effect? By the way, Kyoto is now a word outlawed in the budget because of course someone might actually ask what it is. What does the Prime Minister do? He announces that we are going to have COP 11, the conference of the parties, number 11, in Montreal. Let me tell members what happened at COP 10. At COP 10, 123 countries got up and trashed the Americans. Then they said, “The Canadians are a bunch of laggards. They are doing nothing; they are just talk. They have the one tonne challenge, big deal. That is 20 megatonnes and we need to get to 300 megatonnes”.

Thus, what do Canadians think will happen in Montreal in December? I predict that it will be somewhat the same. It will give the European Union and many of those other countries a launching pad to go after the Americans. So much for working together. So much for a relationship when that sort of thing happens.

My biggest fear is the little bit in annex 1 of the budget wherein the government talks about taxation being used to get people to submit to its carbon system. That is scary because the scenario would be that CO

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becomes a noxious substance under CEPA. If it becomes a noxious substance under CEPA, that would then give the government, simply by regulation, the ability to tax carbon everywhere.

For us in western Canada that would be the national energy program too. That would be a carbon tax. There is no other word for it. On Thursday the minister gave me his verbal commitment that there will be no carbon tax. I say that here because I want that on the record.

I could go on for a long time, as members know, but let me conclude by saying that there is no plan. Also, the threat of a carbon tax scares me. The cost of carbon has now escalated to $11.90 and it is going higher. The jobs and the investments are what will be hurt in this country. The budget, then, is a disgrace, and it is certainly a disgrace to call it a green budget.

[The Environment, February 21st, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister said that this plan was inadequate and lacking, and now we see this 2002 plan being held up as some kind of a plan. It is not. The Liberals have no intention of living up to the Kyoto targets. This in fact is just a job killing tax.

How can those ditherers expect to buy carbon credits somewhere else in the world and how will they monitor that when they cannot monitor the projects here at home?

[The Environment, February 21st, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the closer we get to the budget the more we realize that the government has been dithering for years on a plan for Kyoto. We do know, however, that the Liberals want to spend up to $6 billion on this non-plan.

How can those ditherers include any Kyoto spending when in fact they do not have any plan?

[Supply, February 17th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, in reality maybe I understand a little what it is like to be a Quebecker and how people sometimes trash them. It is a little bit like that being an Albertan; just because a person is an Albertan, somehow he or she is hooked to the oil industry. I have never worked for that industry. I have never had anything to do with it. I have no connections with it, so I really do not know what the member is talking about. That is the problem; people just assume things.

The reality is, I believe, that the future of technology is fantastic. Whether it is wind, whether it is solar, or whether it is geothermal, biomass and ultimately hydrogen, that is where we have to end up. When we do that, we will preserve the oil and gas industry by doing value added things with it, such as pharmaceuticals, fertilizers and petrochemicals of various kinds. That is where the oil industry's future is, certainly not burning it in cars.

[Supply, February 17th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I sort of feel like the Prime Minister today. He gets quoted and all those things.

We sit down with the industry and we take the fuels. What we were talking about were fuel cells, the hybrid vehicles and what the auto industry could do. For instance, when we go up a hill we use six cylinders, when we go down a hill we use two cylinders. If we were to ask the industry to put regulations on those kinds of things, I am sure, if they are intelligent regulations that will make the industry competitive wherever it went, then the industry would agree to them.

The whole idea is to work with the companies, put the regulations in which then keeps out foreign competitors who will not agree to those kind of things. Those are the kind of off the shelf technologies that, yes, we can regulate and we can control.

Those members can imply that is massive regulation that would put all Canadian businesses out of business, which is probably what they would do, but how do they equate that with their union buddies when they talk about throwing these regulations on and having that industry leave the country? How do they stand in front of auto workers and tell them that sort of thing?

We must work with them and put in those kinds of regulations with which they agree.

[Supply, February 17th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, it is a privilege to speak to the motion today and to clarify something for the NDP critic.

I appreciate the motion today but I have one problem with the word “mandatory”. I do not feel that mandatory demonstrates a cooperative approach, the approach we have to use if we want to achieve this kind of work with our industries and with Canadians. What we are lacking is a long term plan and a vision.

Members on the other side have talked about how much the government has done and what a wonderful record it has in terms of the environment. We need to continually remind them what the environment commissioner said in her last six reports, that the government talks a lot but accomplishes very little.

We need to remind them that when the OECD looked at 24 of the top industrialized countries it said that Canada rated at the very bottom, that it was 24 out of 24.

We need to remind them that there are over 300 boil water warnings at any given time in Canada. Who would have thought that Canada, that pristine, clean place that many of our international friends think we have, would have 300 boil water warnings? One might attribute that to some poorly developed countries, but not to Canada.

Cities are dumping raw sewage into the oceans. Landfills are spewing waste which is entering into aquafirs and spreading into our waters. We have brownfields in every city and about 50,000 contaminated sites in Canada.

We have a Kyoto plan to which we have committed to 6% below 1990 levels. The member mentioned that we have committed $3.7 billion. Let us examine that $3.7 billion. Canada committed to 6% below 1990 levels. By 2000 we were 20% above 1990 levels and today we are 30% above. That $3.7 billion went down the drain with nothing to show for it. If that is accomplishment in the eyes of the Liberals, then they are the only ones thinking that way.

The big problem with this whole environmental issue is that the government does not have a plan nor does it have a vision. It does not know how to deal with water or the whole issue of air pollution. A major battle is going on between NRCan and environment. They are more interested in protecting their turf and fighting with each other than they are with accomplishing anything. I hope that will change soon and that we will be the ones to do that.

An important point to mention to our NDP friends is that cooperation rather than confrontation will get them a lot further. Industry knows it is good to be green. Industry understands what that means. It is good for business. All of the ads for Ford, DaimlerChrysler, GM and Toyota talk about being green. It should not be a big stretch to sit down and work with them and show them a vision.

As my colleague mentioned, had this been done in 1992 when climate change was first identified as a problem, we would be a lot further down the track than we are here in the last weeks of Kyoto trying to accomplish something. Those guys just do not know where they are going, and that is the most important point.

What has been mentioned in today's debate is that this is a global market. No longer are we isolated into planning for one country. We cannot isolate ourselves from our number one trading partner. There are $1.4 billion a day crossing the border. Like it or not, that is the reality of Canada. One in four jobs, and in some places higher than that, depend on that. We work in a cooperative manner to accomplish something, and that is what this is all about.

I was working on the Sumas 2 project in the Fraser Valley, looking at the building of a power plant right on the B.C.-Washington border. After spending time in that community I realized just how bad the pollution was. That is the second most polluted smog belt in Canada. The first is in southern Ontario, which I have visited as well. We realize that Canadians want us to deal with the smog and pollution problem. It is only common sense.

We have higher incidences of asthma and other health problems associated with pollution. Industry understands that. People understand that. The only ones who do not seem to understand are the government members across the way. Instead, they sign an international agreement with targets that they have no idea how they might achieve. Their solution will be to send the money offshore, buy that hot air wherever they can find it, instead of dealing with the technological solutions that we could find here in Canada.

I really believe Canadians want us to deal with the smog problem, the smog days in Toronto, in Ottawa and in the Fraser Valley, which is caused by sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxide, particulate matter and surface ozone.

What is the government doing? The government is attacking carbon dioxide. The government is thinking about, believe it or not, making CO

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a toxic substance and regulating it under CEPA.

CO

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is a plant food. CO

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is what we give off as animals. CO

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is what one pumps into a greenhouse to get more plant growth.

Technology is moving quickly. There is the sequestering of CO

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. I saw a situation where a plant in Denmark was capturing the CO

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, gasifying the CO

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and selling it in tanks to greenhouses to pump into the greenhouses. It was also being sent to Norway to pump down oil wells to increase the removal of oil and gas by 30%.

What are we doing in Canada? We are using water, pure clean water and pumping it down wells.

There are so many things that the government could show some leadership in and yet it is basically doing nothing. We are signing an international agreement and we have no plan. We are going to send the money off and companies that would have liked to have cooperated on a plan will not be able to. They will be deprived of that money for research and development and all of those good things on which we could become leaders.

What is the government occupied with now? Again, we have the players of Environment Canada and NRCan having a battle over whether it is a poison or not. I do not know, but I know my background in biology would certainly have a difficult time finding CO

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to be classified as a poison by anyone. Anyone who understands photosynthesis would know how important CO

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is to life.

We need to move forward technologically. We need to look at hybrid vehicles. We need to look at fleet vehicles, using natural gas, using various forms of hybrids or using propane.

The government could be doing so many things but what is it preoccupied with? It is going to force the auto industry into some kind of regulations that in fact will handicap them. The end result will be auto jobs here in Ontario will be lost. There is no other answer to that.

If the government had sat down with the auto industry 10 years ago and told the industry what had to be done, told the industry what happened in Rio and what was in the Kyoto accord, then maybe together they could have come up with a solution. Instead, it holds a hammer over the industry's head, the hammer of mandatory regulations, with no help and no other solutions. That is just not the way to go. We have learned that and we have seen that.

Companies do have an option. They have the option to leave Canada, to leave Ontario where those jobs are.

I could take a lot longer to elaborate on the environmental hazards of what the government is doing.

[The Environment, February 17th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, unlike the Prime Minister, I was at the international environment conference in Buenos Aires. I listened to the countries, one after the other, get up and talk about Canada being a laggard for not having a Kyoto plan.

The Prime Minister now thinks he is a world leader. He is only a leader in his own mind.

Why will the Prime Minister not stop the photo ops, take some leadership and come up with a plan for Kyoto?

[The Environment, February 17th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, we are starting to find out where large chunks of the government money that has been wasted on Kyoto has gone. This year, for example, $26 million were spent on the one tonne challenge advertising and, of that amount, $85,000 went to Mr. Rick Mercer.

Does the minister not think the money would have been better invested in Canadian technology? Why is the minister continuing to throw away money on Kyoto when he does not even have a plan?

[The Environment, February 16th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, obviously his cabinet colleague thinks he is wrong.

The latest revelation in the Liberal embarrassment called Kyoto is news that the environment minister is planning to send billions of dollars overseas for non-environmental purposes. While Canadians choke on smog, live near waste dumps and dump raw sewage into the ocean, the minister is using Kyoto money for foreign aid.

Why has the minister taken this long to admit that his hot air plan is simply to cover his boost in foreign aid?