Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to join the debate tonight on Bill C-311. The bill has been reintroduced under a new MP, a bill that was put forward in the last Parliament by the leader of the NDP. As such, it really has no material changes compared to its predecessor bill.
Before pronouncing on the bill, I want to take a few minutes to talk a bit about where we are now nationally with respect to this climate change crisis.
In the last three and a half years, I think it would be fair and objective to describe the government's performance as varied, at best. We really do not know any more where the government stands on the climate change challenge.
Just a year and a half ago the predecessor minister of the environment announced to the country and all the industries that operated their businesses that there would be, for example, no international trading. Yet the new Minister of the Environment says that apparently we will join the United States in a cap and trade system, as if the United States has even invited us to join.
The Government of Canada has said, de facto, that we have withdrawn from the Kyoto protocol. We are the only country in the world to have signed this treaty to have unilaterally declared we will not use, for example, 1990 as the baseline year or, worse, we will not even try to meet our targets.
In 2007 we saw a new plan emerge, the so-called made in Canada plan, called “Turning the Corner”. We have seen no regulatory text in the country yet. It is apparently supposed to come on January 1, 2010. The problem is the 11 independent groups, not political parties, but third-party groups, left-wing groups like the C.D. Howe Institute, that have looked at the government's plan have said that its plan cannot possibly achieve the reductions it claims it will achieve.
Right now I think we are in a situation of great flux. There are some, for example, in the NGO movement that declare the bill is the right text, or it is reaffirming the science of climate change and the need to take an evidentiary approach to setting targets. I agree with that claim.
Others in the NGO sector are telling the official opposition that, on the contrary, we do not need to be fixated any more on targets. What we need to do is develop a robust plan in Parliament like we tried to do with the government's failed clean air act when it was rewritten in a special parliamentary committee, a clean air act that was inspired completely by the clean air act efforts of the former Republican administration in Washington.
Now we have a big change. The Democratic government in Washington and the new President are using 2005, so far, as the baseline year. They are saying that the Americans will reduce their emissions by 14% from 2005, effectively meaning we are going back to 1990 levels of U.S. emissions by 2020.
The government says that this is in line with its targets, that its targets are yet more advanced, more ambitious than the American targets. The problem is we are talking apples and oranges because the government is talking intensity targets and the United States is talking about absolute cuts.
Recently President Obama went to Congress, 535 members strong, and asked it to deliver a comprehensive cap and trade scheme, along with renewable energy strategies for the United States.
Right now in the 110th Congress, there are at least 10 different cap and trade schemes on the floor of Congress, not 1 or 2, but 10. The United States is proposing a massive auction of permits to raise up to $80 billion by 2012, $15 billion of which is go to renewable energy and $60 billion for tax credits for modest-income Americans.
The United States is warning its citizenry that the cap and trade system it intends to bring in will have a profound effect on energy pricing. It will, to use the words of the Conservative Party, increase the price of everything, that unfortunate and infantile advertising claim the government used in the last election campaign to the detriment of the understanding of the Canadian people on the need to act now on the climate change crisis.
We have a situation where everything appears to be in flux. We found that the vast majority of the powers and the reporting provisions in Bill C-311 were already law as a result of the two Liberal private members' bills passed by the last Parliament: first, the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act; and second, the Federal Sustainable Development Act.
We also know that medium and long-term targets will be set internationally at a United Nations conference culminating in Copenhagen this December.
What troubles the official opposition about this bill is it does prejudge the outcome of those negotiations. However, we have no idea in this Parliament where those negotiations are. Nothing has been disclosed at committee or in the House. We do not know if Canada is effectively still participating in the post-2012 world of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Having abandoned the Kyoto protocol, I am not even sure how Canada can come to the negotiating table with clean hands, as they say in international law, and purport to put forward a position to be received by 170-plus countries that have signed the deal.
What concerns us as well on this side is if the NDP were really serious about improving Canada's climate change laws, would it not be seeking to amend the existing Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act, extending it beyond 2012, for example? All the regulatory standards that we would like to see and the powers that might or should accrue to a government to follow through on these commitments are there. I see in the bill so far nothing that is conferred to a government, which it needs in order to move forward on the climate change challenge.
Other than enunciating medium and long-term targets, Bill C-311 contains very few provisions, as I said, that are not already under the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act. For example, 90% of the wording in the bill is word for word the same as those already granted by the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act.
Similarly, the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy is already required, under the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act, to review the programs undertaken by the federal government to meet its greenhouse gas reduction targets and to report on the effectiveness of the measures and to report to Canadians on how well things are going, or are not going.
There is an awful lot of overlap. There is also an awful lot of factors in play.
However, in my view it is important to take this issue further. It is important to take the bill further. It is important to have a close examination of its amendability, for example. Because the situation is so much in flux, because we are waiting to a certain extent, unfortunately, for Washington, because we have no climate change plan from the Conservative government, it is our position that the bill requires more analysis and more examination as we go forward.
