Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member for Simcoe North for bringing forward this important motion. It is one that we will be supporting.
It is a local issue about which his community clearly cares. The member for Simcoe North has kindly shared with me support letters from arenas and other businesses, as well as property owners in his riding. As he rightly points out, this about is $24 billion worth of property, 160 dams, 50,000 residences and property owners, and more.
By way of background for those who are not as familiar with Ontario as I and the member, we are talking about the channel that links the Trent-Severn Waterway to Georgian Bay. It is a winding, narrow passage chiselled from the rock floor of Georgian Bay, immediately south of Lock 45 in Port Severn, Ontario. It is a hazard for recreational vessels because it is, first, rock-faced. Second, it requires fairly sharp turns. Third, it is not wide enough for larger vessels to pass each other. Finally, it suffers from unexpected swift currents from the release of water from the locks.
The channel becomes even more difficult to navigate safely during low water level conditions on Georgian Bay, a condition that has now prevailed since 1999. The bay is currently 35 centimetres below its long-term average for this time of year. The hazardous nature of the channel has deterred boaters from using it, resulting in lost business for services, arenas, retail sector, food services and more on Georgian Bay.
As an environmental lawyer, I fully understand that water resources support Canada's social fabric, underpin our biodiversity and are central to our economic prosperity.
Now, while I support the motion, I also think the government has a responsibility to take action when environmental challenges pose threats to our environment and our economy. This is a perfect demonstration project or case of how we should hand the realities we will face over the next 50 to 100 years.
For the past 20 years, I have been calling for a detailed national climate change strategy for Canada, a strategy to both mitigate and help adapt to climate change.
Just last weekend, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released some numbers showing that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was now well over 400 parts per million and holding. Why is that important? It is important because we are trying to maintain the projected temperature increases to 2°C going forward. If we continue to climb in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it will be very difficult to contemplate holding that temperature increase to 2°C.
Why is this so important? It is important because we now know that the Great Lakes are in long-term decline because we have seen an ever-increasing temperature increase in them for a few reasons, mostly evaporation because of temperature increases.
We have also the effects of the dredging of the St. Clair River, and we have seen other effects of climate change right across Canadian society: storms, flooding, and the frequency and severity of these are going to continue.
If we had a national climate change strategy for Canada, it would help address the low water levels. It would help many waterways in Canada become safer and easier to navigate, without having to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece for dredging.
That makes it all the more difficult to understand why the Prime Minister, last week, with the Prime Minister of Australia, once again, positioned the economy and the environment in isolation from each other, saying that we could not afford to address the climate change challenge. He could not be more wrong.
Last year, Lake Huron and Lake Michigan hit their lowest January water levels since record-keeping began in 1918, following more than a decade of below normal rain and snowfall, and higher temperatures that increased evaporation.
Furthermore, at a time when we need more and better science, one would think we would want to know, for the 50,000 property owners along this waterway, what might be coming.
At that very time, we found out that the Conservative government was cutting funding for environmental science. It has cut funding to the International Joint Commission, leading to Lana Pollack, the U.S. co-chair of the IJC, commenting, “We have always depended on good collaboration with agencies in both the governments. When those agencies get cut, we feel it, the lakes feel it.”
For the Conservative members who might want to listen, in the report on plans and priorities over the next two years, the government plans to decrease Environment Canada's budget by one-third, 30%. That is $300 million cut from a $1 billion budget.
In 2014-15, again in the report on plans and priorities, climate change and clean air programs are being cut 70% between now and 2017. I would think the member, in this important motion, would want to work internally in his own caucus to remind the Prime Minister that we need to help these property owners. We need to help companies in the private sector to adjust to these new realities.
Instead of embracing the economic opportunities that are inherent in the adaptation mitigation that is to come, the government continues to divide the two. International climate change and clean air funding will be cut 45% and staffing level will be cut by over 80% by 2017. That hardly sounds like a country getting ready to adjust to the realities of climate change and all of the economic opportunities that are inherent in addressing climate change going forward.
We will continue to put pressure on the government to also drive forward on a national water resources strategy, a comprehensive water strategy, working with the provinces, municipalities, territories and beyond, and, when necessary, with the government of the United States. Our waterways are interconnected, our land masses are connected, our oceans are contiguous. We are going to have to work together.
Finally, this is a wonderful opportunity, a wonderful case, where if the government had not eliminated the national round table on the environment and the economy, the national round table could have worked with the member, with private businesses, with aboriginal groups, with environmental NGOs and with orders of government to come together with a better, more comprehensive approach to deal with the watershed management challenge.
It is unfortunate, but it is an important moment for the government to stop, drop the rhetoric, drop the partisanship, drop the ideology on climate change, and understand that we can, as one person once said, do a lot of damage to the planet by running down its capital. Imagine how much more money we could make by actually replenishing it.
