Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Elmwood—Transcona.
I am always proud to rise in the House and represent the people of Timmins—James Bay.
In the 14 years I have been here, I have found a dismal state of discussion on the greatest crisis of our time, the environmental crisis. There is a great book called The Great Derangement. It is as though people do not seem to have the ability to come to terms and discuss what is actually happening to our planet when we see it all around us. I see it with the Conservatives today. I see it with the Liberals today, who went to Paris and took such beautiful photos of themselves, and made such beautiful expressions of change. We have seen under their plan that carbon emissions did go down, by 1.4%, which is a rounding figure, but that may go up again next year.
There is no coherent plan from the government to meet those targets, just as with the previous government there were no coherent plans, because in the fundamental area, over the last 10 years oil and gas upstream emissions have risen 47%. Transportation emissions are up over 11%. For all the other efficiencies we try to find, we in Canada are not meeting a coherent strategy.
I am going to talk a bit about some of the incoherent strategies that have been put forward, and then talk about some of the ways we need to move forward.
I remember when I was here in 2004-05, the Liberals had a great plan. We were going to meet all our Kyoto targets. We were going to diminish greenhouse gases easily. What was the plan? It was called voluntary emissions. I was newly elected, so the idea that we had voluntary emissions standards struck me as one of the most ridiculous things I had ever heard. However, Stéphane Dion, a man I greatly respect, said we must understand that on the voluntary emissions, when we work with industry, they will do the right thing. For crying out loud. I come from mining country. Inco never cleaned up the mess in Sudbury without legislated standards. That is how we clean up the environment.
I have dealt with mining companies over the years. It used to be perfectly legal to just, as in my backyard, take the waste and dump it in a lake because it was the cheapest solution. All over my little town of Cobalt we have these beautiful green beaches, which 100 years later we still cannot swim in the water. Someone said to the mining companies that they were not going to be able to dump arsenic and cyanide in the waters, that they would have to set up proper tailing dams. Of course, we heard from them, just as we hear from the Conservative backbench, “Oh my god, you are going to kill efficiencies. Oh my god, you are going to chase business all around the world. They will leave.” They did not leave, and the mining sector became more efficient and more profitable, just as the oil and gas sector will become more efficient and more profitable when it actually has to meet these legislated targets.
We have another one, which is cap and trade. People have been trying to explain cap and trade to me for years. I know there are a lot of brainiacs out there who understand the ins and outs of cap and trade, but the idea that if a whole lot of non-polluters can sell credits to polluters and the world would somehow be a better place always struck me as selling sobriety credits on the highway. If we have 15 sober drivers and one drunk driver, and that one drunk driver can buy sobriety credits from all the sober drivers, I am not an economist, but if I were an economist, we would see a graph that would show that overall, sobriety on the road would actually rise. We could do that, or we could just say to the drunk that it is time to sober up.
This has been the problem. We have always been trying to find schemes to deal with the fact that we actually have reached a limit for carbon. We reached that limit for carbon, and we are now into the Anthropocene, where our traditional relationship with nature has been upended and the costs we are starting to see from flooding, fires, drought, and freezes are becoming more and more of a serious economic issue.
I am certainly more than willing to share the numbers on whatever the carbon pricing is going to be.
I would also like to start seeing some serious numbers on what is happening in terms of our overall economy, which is being hit by increasingly unstable weather, because we are now in the period of what they call another great acceleration. As anyone who has grey hair like me would remember, how often did we hear on the radio 25 or 30 years ago about entire cities under threat from weather? We have see a number of cities seriously damaged. We are in a different era. Canada has been the laggard on this. In fact, Canada has been very sanctimonious on this without taking the steps forward.
I come from blue-collar, natural-resource-based communities. The people we need at the table when we are talking about what an economic environmental plan must include are the workers. We do not throw a generation of workers under the bus. The only political entity that ever did that was Margaret Thatcher, and the damage that was done to the U.K. we are still feeling today. These issues of transition and building a new economy are essential, because we do not get environmental justice without economic justice. The two go hand in hand.
I had the great honour last year in Edmonton of meeting with the IBEW workers in Edmonton. The IBEW workers who work in Fort Mac, in Fort Saint John, and in the patch are actually setting up training, because they see the potential for new economies of energy. One of the IBEW workers told me that when Prime Minister Harper talked about an energy superpower, he was right, but he was talking about the wrong energy, because the greatest single source of solar power in the world today is south central Alberta. The potential to transform our economy through the natural geography of the Prairies in the solar and wind economy is immense. Of course, The Flat Earth Society, my friends on the backbench in the Conservative Party, will say that this is tilting at windmills, and, yes, there are windmills there too. However, if we look at other countries, like Germany, they have moved far ahead of us. We even see China starting to move far ahead of us.
The Liberals talk about the economy. They talk about efficiencies and jobs. They need to start to talk about the renewable economy that is passing Canada by, because we are still defiantly defending the typewriter when everyone else is moving into the cellphone age. Canada needs to pick up.
I would say this to my colleagues in the Liberal Party. They have talked the talk, but they have not met the aggressive targets we need. We will not meet the Paris accords. That has been found in numerous government studies alone. To get there, we need to establish a couple of common principles. We have to establish a legislated limit on carbon. Once we have established a legislated limit, we then have to ask how we start to diminish it. That is when we can start talking about subsidies and start to work with industry on meeting efficiencies, but we have to have a solid limit we do not go above.
I refer members to the United Kingdom and Scotland, where they established a national carbon budget. These countries were extreme laggards on meeting their greenhouse gas emissions, and they are well on target now to meeting their economic and environmental targets on renewables, because they had a coherent national response. They had a focus on how they were going to deal with areas where they had the highest level of GHGs, and they started to move it down.
We need a coherent response. The idea that we can do this voluntarily or simply by putting a price on carbon and hope it will all get there will not get us where we need to be. After 14 years in the House, to see the degradation of our planet that has happened in that time, while this House has produced talk and no action, is shameful on all of us. It is upon us to start saying that this crisis is real, to start moving with the urgency that is needed, and to recognize that there is incredible potential if we start to actually move toward efficiencies rather than the same old 20th century vision we have now outgrown.
