Madam Speaker, I am very proud to be here this morning participating in this discussion, which is an important one for our country and for the world.
If the right words and an upbeat attitude were all it took to resolve the climate change crisis, Canada would be a world leader, but the fact is that Canada has no credibility on this file because, year after year, it has failed to take action. I will support this one small step this morning, but it will obviously not get us anywhere close to meeting our international obligations, nor does it explain why the government refused to set the limits Canada needs to fulfill its responsibilities under our international obligations.
I am very pleased to speak on this issue. This is the fundamental issue of our time. It is the issue that our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren will judge us by.
I have been in this House for 12 years, and I have seen the complete lack of leadership and abdication of responsibility by Canada that has been a disgrace internationally. I remember being in this House when I was very young at the time, 12 years ago, and there was the now Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was telling us that the Liberals had this brilliant idea to meet Kyoto objectives. They would have voluntary targets. He was saying that voluntary targets are important and that we have to work with industry and we have to be positive in Canada.
We saw where that got us. It got us 12 years of inaction, of Canada looking like the laggard it has been. It is not good enough. We need to set the hard targets and put out a vision for what a green economy is about. There has been this false dichotomy all along that somehow we have to choose the jobs versus the planet. That has been as opposed to talking about how, when we actually start to look at moving towards a green economy, we can become much more efficient. We will become a much more positive country.
In my own region, because of the push to get to clear greenhouse targets, we have the Borden mine. The greenhouse gas emissions are being completely removed because it is getting rid of diesel. It is moving to battery power. As it starts to move in that direction, it realizes that it can actually cut down its energy costs. This is a really important thing to discuss.
It is not about replacing our sources of energy only. It is about reducing our overall energy use. It does not matter what kind of energy we use, it has an impact. This country has been completely wasteful in its attitude towards energy.
What does a green vision for a nation look like? Well, I would like to think that if we are going to go $30 billion in debt under the government, that it be a green strategy that says, “We are going to start to retrofit. We are going to encourage families to make their houses more efficient. We are going to work with first nations to get them off the diesel generators.” We can do so much to lessen our overall energy inputs.
However, what I see is a government that came in and said that the Stephen Harper targets were false targets. We all know that. We know that the past government had no intention of doing anything on the climate change file. However, the government has accepted the same targets as Stephen Harper. That is not good enough.
When the environment minister talks about keeping us at the 1.5 degree or 2 degree red line, it is an absolutely bizarre conversation in this House, that we can somehow limit the damage to the planet to this level, or we can get up to that level to limit the damage to the planet. We are going to keep carrying on and carrying on. We need to move beyond these tactics and ask what we are going to do as a nation.
The one thing I note, when the government talks about ratifying the Paris agreement and working with the provinces and territories, is that it is not talking about working with the municipalities across this country, which are on the forefront of the fight against climate change. There are so many strategies at the urban levels that could move us toward meeting many of these targets, but we have to work with them. The municipalities are also the ones that are bearing the brunt of climate change, from the extreme fires to the extreme floods. They are having to plan as they start to build infrastructure on how to mitigate the effects.
It is a bubble effect, the Prime Minister saying he can do this here, and within this chamber we can make these changes. Unless we are talking to the people who are on the front lines, we are going to fail. Nowhere is that clearer than with the fact that the government does not believe it has an obligation to discuss with the first peoples of this country that it can bring in these standards, put a carbon price on, and talk about the fictitious numbers they are going to somehow reach if we all stay positive. It is in Indian country that we are at the ground zero of changes that are already happening. These are the melting ice roads, the effect in communities where people cannot afford to go out on the land because the cost of fuel is so high, where the houses are not properly built. People are living in crushing levels of poverty because they cannot pay for the fuel that is being flown in or brought in on barges. We do not have a government that has any kind of vision about moving these communities toward more sustainable greener futures.
How are we going to talk about getting to a better position as a nation if we are not talking with respect, and with our international obligations that have been laid out in UNDRIP, with the first peoples of this country? This leads us to the government's recent pushing of megaprojects: the LNG project that has been described as a carbon bomb, the Site C dam. What is it, $9 billion to flood out all that land in the Peace River? Imagine what we could do with $9 billion in British Columbia if we were not destroying indigenous lands and farmland, and we were instead putting solar in houses or getting people on geothermal. That $9 billion would go a long, long way.
However, with these federal and provincial governments, we have this love of the megaproject. Whether it is a dirty or supposedly clean energy megaproject, they love the big megaprojects. However, they do not want to do the work that is necessary, the talking with indigenous people who are being affected by these projects time and time again.
Our Prime Minister has an enormous mandate from the Canadian people. He has captured the positive spirit that Canadians have. Canadians want action, and that is why they gave him this unprecedented mandate. They believed that this was the person who could take us to a better place in terms of where we need to be environmentally. When he went to Paris, so many Canadians were proud. They believed our Prime Minister when he said that Canada was back. Canadians want to take these steps and are ready to take these steps. However, if it is going to amount to tens of thousands of dollars or selfie photos in Paris, and coming back and saying that Stephen Harper's plan was not so bad, we will just be a little nicer about it, that is a betrayal of the Canadian people. It is a betrayal of the larger willingness of the Canadian people to get down and do the hard work of climate change.
I come from a blue-collar riding, from agriculture, from mining. Many of our people fly out on contract work to work camps. However, every one of them tells me they are worried about what it looks like for their children. They want a government that is going to start to make some changes. It is not sufficient that we tell ordinary Canadians to turn light bulbs off at night, or that we put a carbon tax on the hydro of poor Mrs. O'Grady. We are downloading the costs to people who cannot afford to pay it. This has to be done at a national level by securing hard targets for industry. We keep talking about a market solution. The market caused the problem. It is up to government now to legislate clear hard targets so we actually get to where we need to go.
