Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to take part in debate in the House of Commons, specifically on ratifying the Kyoto protocol. As the member for Vancouver East indicated, the New Democratic Party is very pleased to support this motion. We believe it is the right thing to do, not only for ourselves but for all generations that follow us.
We recognize that we have a lot of responsibility in terms of cleaning up our own backyard. The member for Vancouver East talked about our pollution being the same as on the continent of Africa. We are energy pigs, to put it less politely than she did, and we have to do something about it and do something about it quickly. There is a limited amount of time, less than a century, we are told. It is breathtakingly short period of time in which to get our environmental house in order.
Recently the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote to the environment minister and urged him to ratify Kyoto. They said:
Signing the Kyoto protocol is both a necessary responsibility and a symbol of Canada's commitment to the health of our world.
We certainly agree with the Canadian Council of Catholic Bishops on that point.
There is widespread agreement among the world's pre-eminent climatologists, that the climate is warming, that our time to adapt is, as I indicated, growing short and that we must do something about this, and soon. We have only one earth and it is not a flat earth as some people here would have us believe. We cannot do a controlled experiment here. We have to get it right and we have to do it right now.
The International Panel on Climate Change, surely the world's most renowned group of experts on this matter, tells us that global warming is occurring, that it is due to greenhouse gas concentrations and that the prudent thing to do would be to act on it immediately.
A group of church leaders in the United States, many of them evangelicals, went earlier this month to the big three automakers in Detroit to meet with them and to tell them that climate change is a moral issue. They want those companies to develop more fuel efficient vehicles.
The organized interests who want us to delay or entirely avoid any action on climate change talk only in dollars and with no sense. Those interests are concentrated in the petroleum and carbon industries and they have as their errand boys members of the Alliance Party, a few Liberal backbenchers and Premier Klein in Alberta.
As a member of the New Democratic Party, I get relatively little opportunity to rub shoulders and exchange ideas with senators but I was delighted to be read yesterday an interview that appeared in the Hill Times this week by retiring Alberta Liberal Senator Nick Taylor.
I do not know Senator Taylor personally but I do know that he comes from the oil industry in Alberta. He has just reached the mandatory retirement age. He had a number of interesting things to say, starting with:
The Esso group through Syncrude because they are the biggest heavy-oil producers, and Petro-Canada, good old Petro-Canada, with the Maple Leaf. They have had the most influence on Ralph Klein and Alberta.
He prefaces this by saying that not all oil companies are opposed, as we heard from the member for NDG a few minutes ago, and the parliamentary secretary.
Senator Taylor goes on to say:
So it's an Esso type of thing, Standard Oil of New Jersey-thinking which bought these old dirty refineries from McColl-Frontenac and had gone ahead with a great deal of the tar sands development. Credit to them, they were the pioneers in heavy oil at the tar sands, but now they are the ones who are going to have to get in the inhibitors and clean up things a little.
He then was asked the question by the journalist as to who in cabinet was opposed to Kyoto. The senator, who sits in on national Liberal caucus meetings I assume, indicated that the Minister of Health and another minister from Alberta were listening carefully to the oil people.
In reference to the Minister of Health, he said:
She used to be minister of energy, ...one of the architects, along with [the member for LaSalle--Émard] of the rejuvenation of the tar sands. They changed the tax laws so that there is a tremendous advantage for large oil corporations to get into the tar sands. She looks to the tar sands as one of her favourite children, possibly being made to bear a bigger weight than the others right now.
Senator Taylor also said:
The oil and gas industry always raises [heck] for any new environmental thing--acid rain, salt water disposal or natural gas. Take salt water disposal. We used to dispose of it on the ground, to get rid of weeds and the dust, now we pump it back into the ground to get out more oil. Natural gas we used to flare off to get at the oil. They made us stop. Now we collect it, and sell it. Big pipelines. Lots of profits.
Here is one person who has worked in the industry, knows a little about it, a lot more than I do, and feels very strongly. He concluded:
I think the government has done a very poor job indeed [of selling Kyoto]. First of all, by shilly-shallying and wondering and dilly-dallying, they gave the flat earth society people the time to get organized and get going. After all, this was a treaty that was signed in 1997 following a voluntary agreement in 1992... People who were worried about CO2 had since '92 to do it. The debate [in the House] now should be how to put Kyoto in place, not whether to join it.
One of the things to which insufficient attention has been paid in this whole debate is the notion of retrofitting. I had the opportunity in August of this year to attend the conclusion of the Canada-Saskatchewan infrastructure program. More than $600,000 had been put up to retrofit six municipal buildings in the great city of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.
We were told at that final conference that the savings alone on reducing energy costs as a result of that retrofit were in excess of $200,000 annually, which meant that in three years all of that retrofit would pay for itself. Incidentally it created jobs in the process, and it probably has a shelf life of a minimum of 50 years. We could anticipate tremendous savings over half a century with those kinds of projects.
Those are the things about which we in the House do not talk often enough. We hear gloom and doom, that if we ratify Kyoto the sky will fall, we will not be able to do it, and we will lose jobs. People totally forget to think about what the opportunities are. Yes, there are challenges and some sectors probably would be hurt. The oil and gas sector may be hurt somewhat but there are opportunities with this initiative. If the Americans want to slow walk this, I say even better, because it is an opportunity for us to develop some interesting new technologies that can be sold and exported to other countries around the world. We have the capacity and the capability of doing that.
This party fears that the interests opposed to Kyoto are trying to prevent necessary action. They insist on a complete blueprint for the future regarding our plans on Kyoto. Many of the members who are asking where the blueprint is for Kyoto are the same members who, in 1988 and 1989, were telling us to take a leap of faith on free trade, that we did not have all the studies but it would be good for Canada. Now they are telling us to hold on a minute and are asking for a blueprint.
The proposition being put forward by the opponents of Kyoto actually would allow a significant increase in greenhouse gas emissions when we need a significant decrease. This is not a realistic option and Kyoto is the best and only instrument we have.
