Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to join in this debate. I followed it this morning and it has been very interesting. I will make a quick mention about the member who just spoke.
I probably disagree more than I agree with the policies of that member's party but certainly the issue of the reserves is tremendously important to rural communities. Any time I can sing the praises of the Brockville Rifles I will take the opportunity to do so. Had it not been for the reserves during the ice storm, we would have been in real trouble.
I will now turn my attention to what the budget says about the government's environmental agenda. Over the next four years the Government of Canada will invest $700 million into a variety of environmental initiatives. Most of the money is earmarked for climate change and the remaining for pollution control, species at risk, habitat protection and the development of environmental and sustainable development indicators.
Let us take a closer look at some of these initiatives. The government will invest $25 million into a green municipal enabling fund to help municipalities and communities assess their environmental needs. One hundred million dollars will go into a green municipal investment fund to encourage private sector innovation in areas like waste management and water conservation. I think this is a very important expenditure, not necessarily in terms of the amount of money, because as we can see from the debate this morning, we can always argue about the dollars and the amounts. The green municipal investment fund is a roll out of the program that was started in Toronto, the Toronto atmosphere fund. What it essentially does is make money available at competitive interests rates for retrofitting energy efficient technologies.
Why I think this type of expenditure is appropriate is that the current markets, if we look at the payback requirements for business, the return on investment that some of these high tech stocks are giving us in the stock market, the return on investment that businesses will require for investments is perhaps a year at the most. These environmental technologies are much longer term investments. Without some sort of parallel money that is not going against investment options that pay back in less than a year, these things would never be done.
We need to invest in these technologies because we need to demonstrate that they work. We need to demonstrate that there are economic benefits to some of these new types of technologies, otherwise we will never get them off the ground and off the drafting table.
There is also $100 million for a sustainable development fund to develop new technologies, particularly in the areas of clean burning coal and new fuel cell development. In addition, $210 million over three years will go to the climate change action fund, $60 million to the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Science and $100 million over the next four years to help developing countries deal with climate change.
I guess I should point out at this point that I will be splitting my time with the member for Ottawa Centre.
The government will also put in $22 million over three years to reducing pollution, to stabilize at $9 million per year thereafter, as well as $8 million per year to improve the environmental health of the Great Lakes, and part of the infrastructure program is something being referred to now as green infrastructure which will go to sewer and water and the types of infrastructure projects that will result in improvements in the quality of people's lives in terms of the quality of the water that they are drinking. These investments are very timely and definitely significant.
The ministers of energy and the environment will sit down in Vancouver at the end of this month and again in the fall to hammer out the national implementation strategy on climate change. The Kyoto file is a very interesting file. If we can come up with a strategy that is effective for dealing with our greenhouse gas emissions we will go a long way to taking a different kind of look at our environmental policy, a longer term look that tries to align society's interest with the market's interest so that we are not always at odds.
Some critics have said that $700 million falls short of what is required. I would argue that we will never have enough money if we do not spend our money wisely. Almost three-quarters of a billion dollars is certainly a good start.
Let us take highways as an example. The transportation sector is the single largest contributor to Canada's total greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for 27%. How do we approach such a challenge? Our highways and infrastructure are fundamental to a competitive economy. The shipping of goods and services back and forth is the key to why we are enjoying such growth in our export markets. Rather than putting restrictions on the use of highways, we could make changes to the way they are built.
I had a representation from the concrete manufacturers that showed me data that said that if we made highways, especially the ones that are heavily travelled by trucks, out of concrete as opposed to asphalt that it would significantly reduce the amount of fuel that would be used. I think those kinds of creative approaches could turn this ship around. I think all of us would agree that we are headed in the wrong direction.
I now want to spend my time on something that is very near and dear to my heart. It is an item in the budget that did not get a lot of attention. It was the announcement by the Minister of Finance that $9 million will go to the development of a set of sustainability indicators. I feel that there should have been much more fanfare associated with this announcement.
At present public policy is pretty much based on the assumption that expanding economic activity or growth is the only road to well-being. This may have been accurate at one time but things have changed.
If we measure the rate of a baby's growth it will tell us a lot about how well that baby is doing but we cannot take that measure and apply it to an adult and get useful information. We saw exchanges just now about numbers, about money, about GDP. Is anyone talking about whether Canadians are happy? I think the GDP as an indicator of well-being falls well short of what I think Canadians expect their governments to adopt.
It makes no distinction between money spent on education and money spent on cleaning up after automobile accidents. While GDP mixes good expenses with bad, it takes no account of the unpaid work in homes and by volunteers in our communities. If we did not have that, our well-being would be significantly affected.
GDP fails to recognize any changes in the availability of natural resources. My background is one of business. I have never hugged a tree in my life but I may start. If I could draw a business analogy, we run the country off the income statement. When I say “we” I mean governments at all levels. We do not have a balance sheet. We are assuming that we can use resources and count the economic activity that it generates. In no way are we reconciling these accounts. In no way are we keeping books for future generations. We have bought into the notion that growth is good and that the GDP is a measure of our well-being. I really think we need to take another look at it.
Making decisions primarily on the information provided by the gross domestic product is like driving a bus and just staring at the speedometer. The GDP speedometer has its place but it does not explain some matters of consequence. The Atlantic cod is a classic example. The fisheries contribution to GDP was rising steadily, right up to the day the stocks disappeared. Another instrument on the dashboard, something that gave us some indication of the health of the stocks, could have provided information which would have stimulated action to steer clear of the disaster that followed.
The dashboard of any modern society should be equipped with a broad range of instruments to indicate changes in natural resource stocks, pollution levels, biodiversity, the durability of goods, employment satisfaction, the quality of education and health care, leisure time, unpaid work, crime and other factors of consequence. The political reality is that while for years politicians have driven the bus looking only at the speedometer, the people are looking out the windows. They are getting more and more concerned.
What we count and what we measure signifies what we value. When all we count is money, talk about the environment and social cohesion does not produce action. When we legitimize other factors by measuring and reporting on them in our core measure of progress they become visible. This visibility enables anyone to see how policies and actions affect the measures.
Increased awareness of causes and effects will naturally incline decision makers to consider how their decisions might affect the measures, and management processes will evolve to seek well-being in a broader context. Once we understand the possibilities that improved measures offer, we will never again accept a system that relies on a narrow economic perspective. It is not unlike the ISO process that businesses have gone through. It is simply accountability and transparency that the country has never seen before.
In conclusion, long after we have spent our tax cut on the public policy implications of developing and reporting on a set of sustainable indicators, we will be paying dividends for not only Canadians today but for every generation that follows us.
