Mr. Speaker, I first want to respond very briefly to my colleague in the Bloc. He mentioned being able to deduct transit passes. Even though it is not in our motion, that is something the NDP has supported in the past. Members will recall that a private member's bill or motion sponsored by the former NDP member for Kamloops, Nelson Riis, which called on the government to do that actually passed in the House. This is all the more reason for us to be critical of succeeding Liberal finance ministers and Liberal budgets for not putting into a budget something which the House of Commons itself at one time encouraged the government to do.
I will start my speech with a bit of a historical overview. Mr. Speaker, I also want to indicate that I will be splitting my time with my colleague from Windsor West.
I remember when the first mention of greenhouse gases was made in the House. It was around 1983. At that time 90% or even higher of the members of Parliament thought that maybe the member who raised it, an NDP member from Regina, Simon de Jong, was talking about some kind of new greenhouse in which to grow tomatoes or something. There was a look of absolute bafflement on the faces of many members of Parliament, at least those who were paying attention.
Here we are 22 years later, the day after a major international accord on greenhouse gases has come into effect and I wish that we were better positioned as a country and better positioned as parliamentarians to have something to celebrate. We celebrate the accord, but we have nothing to celebrate in the Canadian context yet, because we do not have a government that is fully committed to implementing that accord. We have a government which is committed to the appearance of implementing the accord, but not a government that we get the feeling at all is committed in its gut to really making this happen. It is absolutely critical that this be made to happen.
I want to tell a little story which I read in a book years ago when I was reading about the environmental crisis as it was seen then in the 1970s. The story may have been in Barry Commoner's book
Closing Circle.
Anyway, I ask hon. members to imagine a lily pond. The lily pond will be covered in lily pads in 28 days, but it will be covered in the following way. It will start off with one lily pad, then two lily pads, then four, then eight, then 16, then 32 , then 64. I do not want to go any higher lest I tax some of the Tory backbenchers, but members can see what I mean. These problems tend to grow exponentially. This is the problem with climate change and a lot of other environmental problems.
If that lily pond is to be covered in lily pads in 28 days and that process is taking place exponentially, on the 27th day of that 28 day process, how much of the pond will be left? Fifty per cent. We are sitting there on the 27th day and somebody is saying that if we do not do something about this, some day the lily pond will be covered and we will have a problem, because it is important to us to have open water. There will be people, whether they be Liberals, Conservatives or others, who will say, “What is with you guys? Half the pond is left. What are you worrying about? There is nothing to worry about”. Then on the 28th day, bingo, the game is over. The system has collapsed and it is too late to do anything about it.
This is the kind of process we are in when it comes to climate change. I do not know whether we are at the 27th day, the 26th day or the 25th day; I hope that we are at the 19th or 20th day, but we know that we are in a position where things could happen very fast. We could be putting the whole planetary environment at risk.
I am not under any illusions about the fact that Canada can do this by itself, but it would be a shame if a country with the resources that Canada has, the political, civil, spiritual and other resources that we have, could not bring itself to meaningfully implement the only global environmental accord that is there at the moment and on which the future of the planet depends. If we cannot do that, what kind of message does that send to the rest of the world? Countries that have fewer resources than we do, in that comprehensive meaning of the word resources, why should they even try?
We have a responsibility to the world, to the world's environment, even if we do not feel a responsibility to ourselves.
This is why we have urged the government to finally get serious about this. Getting serious about this means regulation.
We have already tried voluntary compliance. We have had this same story from government after government over the time that I have been here, “Let us just have those in the industry do it on their own”. They do not do it and they are not doing it now.
It does not bother us to regulate individual behaviour. We have regulated smokers almost out of existence. Why is it that it is okay to regulate and mandate the behaviour of individual Canadians, but when it comes to corporate behaviour, that is a different story? That would have economic effects.
Banning smoking has had economic effects on community clubs, on legions, on all kinds of things, but that is okay. Why is it okay? Because there is a higher environmental goal or health goal to be met and we expect those organizations, many of them community organizations that are being hurt by this, to abide by that in the name of the larger interest, but not corporations, no. When it comes to mandatory fuel emission standards or other kinds of emissions, whenever corporations do not like it then all of sudden, let us make it voluntary. What if we did that with the smoking bans that have been put in place across the country? Some restaurants can have smoking bans and others cannot.
On the face of it there seems to be a double standard. This is what bothers us. It bothers us because the empirical evidence has accumulated to the point where we know that depending on the industry to come up with voluntary emission standards and to actually implement them is just a fool's paradise.
I would like to think it is a fool's paradise, but it is actually a cynic's paradise. What it is is a Liberals' paradise, pretending that they are doing something when we know full well that it is not going to happen and therefore they are never going to have to answer to their corporate friends for making them behave in a way that they should be behaving anyway.
Apparently the Minister of Natural Resources said that they do not want to pass this motion because they are right in the middle of negotiations. Would it not be something for the Minister of Natural Resources and the Minister of the Environment to have in their back pockets a motion passed by the Parliament of Canada, by the representatives of the people of Canada, which says that we want mandatory regulation of emission standards? Would that not be something to have on the table when they are negotiating? What kind of negotiator is he anyway? Does he want to go there with his hands tied behind his back, or does he want to go there with something in his hand that matters; the will of the people of Canada to have their government finally do something about this problem?
The Minister of the Environment apparently said that California brought in compulsory emission standards but it only did that after voluntary emission standards did not work. Where has the Minister of the Environment been? He thinks it is working here. Apparently he said, “We are not there yet”.
Why should we have to wait? It is almost an admission that he has to go through this process. He knows in advance that it is not going to work, but he has to go through this process first. In the meantime the air gets dirtier, more people have asthma, more people die, but that is okay because we would not want the Liberals to have suffered any discomfort in their relationship with their corporate friends.
For all these reasons, and lots more could be said, I would certainly encourage individual members to support this motion. Even if their parties cannot bring themselves to support this motion, perhaps there are Liberal and Tory backbenchers who could bring themselves to support the motion because they know that ultimately this is what is going to have to happen, and the sooner it happens, the better.