David McGuinty

[The Environment, February 12th, 2007]

There they go again, Mr. Speaker, instead of demonstrating that they can actually absorb basic facts about this file. The Minister of the Environment just last week repeated his misleading rhetoric about hot air credits.

Foreign investment in Canada will be devastated if Canada locks itself out of international emissions trading projected to be worth $60 billion U.S. annually under Kyoto. Canadians will be dependent on imported technology. Does the international trade minister, then, who once endorsed participating in carbon markets, agree with this new-found position of this new government?

[The Environment, February 12th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister is turning his back on Kyoto and billions and billions of dollars in economic opportunities in spite of the legally binding word of the people of Canada.

Last Thursday, shares of Climate Exchange PLC, the owner of emissions trading exchanges in Amsterdam and Chicago, climbed to a record high, but our new environment minister confirmed that Canada would not pursue international carbon trading. Is it the government's position that the Chicago Board of Trade is wrong when it comes to the future of international carbon trading?

[Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act, February 9th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, It is my pleasure to rise in this House this afternoon and speak on Bill C-288, an act to ensure Canada meets its global climate change obligations under the Kyoto Protocol.

For Canadians who are watching, let me read that again: “an act to ensure Canada meets its global climate change obligations under the Kyoto Protocol”.

I would like to commend my colleague, the hon. member for Honoré-Mercier, who introduced the bill and it was passionately driven through the House of Commons.

The bill has captured the attention of Canadians from coast to coast to coast. In fact, even the National Post has half of its front page today dedicated to the merits of the bill.

Canadians are concerned about the Conservative government's disregard for climate change. If there is one thing that has become clear to me hearing the debate on the bill thus far it is this: On the most important issue of the early 21st century, the Conservatives have decided to surrender without even trying to fight.

Last week in this chamber the three opposition parties united behind a Liberal motion calling upon the government to use the existing means provided in the Canadian Environmental Protection Act to take necessary steps to meet our obligations under the Kyoto protocol. The vast majority of Canadians are with us but the government is lagging far behind.

The Conservative decision not to try is incredibly unfortunate. I hardly need to remind the House that, according to the best experts today, if the average temperature of the Earth's surface increases by 2° above what it was during the pre-industrial era, by the year 2080, hundreds of millions of people, our children's families, are likely to be confronted with flooding along coasts and widespread famines. Hundreds of millions of people risk coming down with malaria and billions of others may run short of fresh water.

It is necessary to recognize that the effects of climate change have already been felt, especially in the north, and that the situation will worsen if we do not take concrete action in Canada, as well as elsewhere in the world. This is, therefore, at its heart, a collective and global effort.

Climate change deniers and Kyoto resisters are fond of painting scenes of economic ruin to keep us from working together to improve our environment. The Prime Minister has called Kyoto “a socialist scheme”. I am only led to conclude, as a result of those comments, that he was not able to distinguish between Japan and China.

The Minister of the Environment, the former minister of energy in the province of Ontario, for three years led the province-wide campaign against the global response to climate change. In fact, he fundraised, along with the Prime Minister when the Prime Minister was the Leader of the Opposition, to lead the anti-Kyoto movement across Canada.

On his watch, the Minister of the Environment, while in Ontario, oversaw a 127% increase in the use of coal fired plants. On his watch, the Minister of the Environment oversaw a 124% increase in carbon dioxide emissions in the province of Ontario, 114% increase in emissions of sulphur dioxide and a 22% increase in the emissions of nitric oxide.

Canadians know the record. It is unfortunate that the Minister of Finance, the Minister of Health and the Minister of the Environment are not prepared to admit their roles when it comes to the undermining of a climate change response in one province, the province of Ontario, just as they are very anxious to run away from their record in their contributions, as Justice O'Connor reminded us, their direct contributions to the Walkerton crisis where seven Canadians died and 2,300 Canadians were seriously sickened. They do not want to tell this to Canadians. They do not want Canadians to know that they now form part of the new government led by the leader of climate change denying in Canada.

Whatever the case, for over one year, I and my colleagues and many other Canadians have been asking a simple question of the Prime Minister: “Tell us what your plan is. Please deliver a plan to us. Where are we going on climate change”. A plan is necessary to take meaningful action.

There is no evidence of any plan, only ad hoc announcements, a big green tie and photo ops in Paris. However, we do have evidence of where this government is going.

The only Conservative track record on the environment is one of drastic cuts. The list is a long one: cuts totalling close to $900 million affecting the EnerGuide program for house renovations and the initiative for low income households; cuts of close to $600 million in the wind power production incentive program and the renewable energy production incentive program; cuts of $2 billion to the climate change programs; cuts of $1 billion for the climate change fund and the list keeps getting longer all the time.

This government is putting an end to the funding of a program promoting the design and construction of new energy efficient buildings. This is a program with over 500 design and construction projects for buildings that are, on average, 35% more energy efficient than other new buildings. The financial support provided under this program has helped reduce greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 182 tonnes annually for each multiple unit residential building, and, in the case of commercial buildings, by almost 300 tonnes annually.

This government did not evaluate the effectiveness of these programs at all. It abolished them because they were Liberal initiatives and because it is a far-right government that is influenced by the Republican Party in the United States.

Yesterday in committee, the Minister of the Environment was asked repeatedly to give the Canadian people a single, solitary number. When he was ask how much the government spent on climate change in its first 12 months, he was unable to answer. He was asked the question six times, until we suggested that perhaps the Minister of Finance should come and do his job at committee.

It is flabbergasting that we have had to table legislation to call on the government to come up with a plan to fight climate change. Should we be surprised, given the Prime Minister, the Minister of the Environment , the Minister of Finance, the Minister of Health and even the Minister of Public Safety who described climate change as a joke on his website until he was caught in what has become known as a Flintstone's moment? The moment this was discovered, the Minister of Public Safety removed all reference to it from his website.

The Kyoto protocol is more than numbers and targets. It is not just a step in the right direction, it is the right direction that will lead to the right results. To go it alone with a so-called made in Canada plan, which, apparently, is somewhere in France, is to misunderstand the very basis of the challenges we face.

I am sorry that we had to legislate this but the government was unprepared to move with Canadians, unprepared to continue our fine work under the Liberal green plan to work with industry in the provinces and the territories. It cut funding to Ontario by $557 million to shut down coal plants. It cut funding to Quebec by $328 million for the Kyoto projects.

As a nation and as a people, we committed to lead the world in a global response to a global problem. The government refuses to accept that although there are over 180 nation states, there is only one atmosphere, and there must be a global response, which is why 168 countries joined Canada in signing the treaty. The government would like us to leave the treaty but will not tell Canadians the truth about it.

It is time for the government to hear Canadians, to act to implement the Kyoto protocol and to work toward saving our solitary atmosphere.

[The Environment, February 9th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, should we be surprised? This is the Minister of the Environment who oversaw a 125% increase in CO₂ emissions in Ontario in his time as Ontario energy minister.

It is clear we have a second Conservative environment minister who is not only a defeatist but who also sees environmental concerns as an economic nuisance. Should we be surprised again? The government slashed $5.6 billion in climate change programs.

The environment minister got caught cheating at committee yesterday, but he could not answer dozens and dozens of questions on the basics of his file. When will the Prime Minister appoint an environment minister who does his basic homework and gets on with the job?

[The Environment, February 9th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the environment minister's uninformed testimony before committee yesterday suggests that the government believes that over the next five years making our businesses and homes more efficient will apparently cause economic collapse; that substantially increasing renewable energy power production in this country will cause economic collapse; and that investing in exciting new technologies and rapidly expanding international carbon markets will apparently cause economic collapse.

Can the government confirm to Canadians that this is indeed its position?

[Business of Supply, February 8th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the fact is that the Government of Canada, first through its first Minister of the Environment, dispatched senior officials to a conference of the parties meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, to openly undermine the Kyoto treaty, this at a time when our country in the international community was actually chairing the entire international negotiation process. It was revealed to us through leaked documents from the Minister of the Environment's department that officials were dispatched to sabotage the process from the inside. Now we learn that it gets worse.

In answer to the member's question, I do not recollect, in my knowledge of international environmental treaty law, an occasion when a government has deliberately misled the international community in its reports. Now we learn that in the report sent by the government last November to the office that oversees the commitments of Canada and the 167 other countries under Kyoto, we learn that the only thing, after its first year in government, that the Conservatives have sent forward as a plan for Canada is the plan put forward by the hon. leader of the official opposition.

The 10 year, multi-billion dollar deal, the green plan that the Conservatives are so ready to reject, is the one they put forward to the international community.

It is interesting that in that report to the international community the government did not come clean and tell the international community that it had just eviscerated the very report that it put forward to actually substantiate that it might be doing something on climate change, cutting the funding of that plan by 50% and misleading the international community. I have never seen that before.

[Business of Supply, February 8th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, it is a wonderful opportunity again for me to put questions to the government that were put to the Minister of the Environment an hour ago.

Every question I will now put to the government remains unanswered because the minister refused to answer or could not answer them. For example, I asked the minister and the government members whether they were prepared to monetize carbon. I and all Canadians would like an answer to that question.

Which is the most efficient way to move forward? Should we move using a domestic emissions trading system, an international emissions trading system or a carbon tax? Could they please explain to the Canadian people what it is they intend to do in this regard.

I also asked the minister if he could tell us what the price of a tonne of carbon was today in the European and Chicago markets. He could not answer. I asked the minister what the projected value was of the international carbon market by 2020 or 2050? He could not answer. I asked him on what scale his department estimated that the monetization of carbon would affect the Canadian economy, say, by 2017. He did not even understand what the quantization of carbon meant.

I asked him again whether he would introduce a cap and trade system for Canada. He could not or would not answer. On and on it went.

The point is that we are waiting for some indication from the government as to what it is it actually intends to do, other than master the blame game, which is precisely what we have been seeing for a year. When the polls struck, it desperately sought to put a green face on what is clearly an anti-climate change party.

[Business of Supply, February 8th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, it gives me a wonderful opportunity to remind Canadians that it was not our party that guaranteed wait times within its first term of office and has now backed off publicly. It was not our party that promised not to undermine all those who held income trusts. The Prime Minister of Canada gave three separate speeches when he promised Canadians that he would not wreck their savings. Let us be honest about this issue.

The issue here is about partnership and whether or not the government even has a plan. Just moments ago in the committee the Minister of the Environment had several questions put to him by me and other members of all parties. After $5.6 billion in cuts in the last budget, $5.6 billion in cuts for climate change responses in this country, I asked the minister if he could please reveal to Canadians in dollar terms how much has been spent by the government in its first year of office. The minister was completely incapable of answering the question.

This is deserving of a national response. This is deserving of a plan from a government whose leader for 12 years before becoming Prime Minister was the leader of the anti-climate change movement in the country, who raised funds to undermine the ratification of the Kyoto protocol. This is a matter of record. This is not a matter of embellishment. What does the Prime Minister have to hide? Was he misleading Canadians then, or is he misleading them now? We do not know the answer to that question.

It is important for us now to move forward and find a plan for the country. We had a plan. It was disembowelled by the government. Some $5.6 billion was slashed, so now we are looking to see where the government is taking us.

Apparently we are not going to participate in the international emissions trading system, which is news to Canadian industry, particularly the oil and gas companies that are counting on the mechanism to reduce their greenhouse gases efficiently. We are not going to emulate the U.S. Clean Air Act which actually inspired the Kyoto protocol because it was there whence we derived the whole concept of a domestic emissions trading system.

We do not know where the government is going but we know there is Bill C-30, the so-called clean air act, which has been tossed to a legislative committee. When I asked the Minister of the Environment an hour ago whether he would agree to promise to Canadians that when that work came back to the chamber on March 30 he would move immediately to implement it, he said no.

My point is it is time for a plan from the government. There is no plan. The government is making it up as it goes along. What the Conservatives are really doing are jumping from ice floe to ice floe, handing out cheques across the country and re-gifting Liberal programs.

[Business of Supply, February 8th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak this morning to the motion put forward by our colleagues.

I am pleased to rise in this House today to express my views on an issue as critical as the Kyoto protocol on climate change.

First, I would like to thank all the Bloc and NDP members for supporting the motion tabled in the House last week by the leader of the official opposition. Through their votes, the vast majority of hon. members confirmed their support for Kyoto and their commitment to fight climate change.

We know that the government is now all alone in its approach to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This shows that it is headed in the wrong direction. The motion that enjoyed the support of the three opposition parties recognized that human activities are largely responsible for the disruptions affecting the climate, and demanded that the government respect its Kyoto commitments.

The motion directed the Prime Minister to develop a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to use the existing means provided in the Canadian Environmental Protection Act to take necessary initiatives. The motion was adopted a week ago and the government is still not acting on it.

The Kyoto protocol is a cooperation tool that unites nations willing to address the international issue that global warming represents. It is not just a set of targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it is not just a step forward, it is also, and more importantly, the right path that will lead us to results. The Kyoto protocol is dealing with the issue before it is too late, because the alarm is already sounding.

Last week, the intergovernmental panel on climate change, a group established by the United Nations, released a shocking report. It concluded that human activities are almost without a doubt responsible for global warming and are, consequently, also responsible for the major socio-economic disruptions that this warming trend could trigger in the years to come.

Despite the international panel's shocking statements last Friday, the Prime Minister cannot yet answer a question that I and many others have been asking him for over a year now. Where is his plan to fight climate change?

The only conclusion we are left with is that the Conservative government does not have a plan. The Prime Minister is trying to fool Canadians who are now more than ever concerned with the future of our planet. We cannot trust a Prime Minister who was leader of the opposition and called the Kyoto treaty a socialist scheme. He promised to battle its ratification, “whatever the cost”.

We know that if the Prime Minister were serious about climate change, he would have mentioned it in his last fiscal update, just last fall. If climate change were a priority at all for the Conservatives, it would at least have been mentioned perhaps in their Speech from the Throne or perhaps in their so-called list of five priorities during the campaign. It was absent from all those documents, from all those speeches and from all that rhetoric.

The Conservatives' record in the fight against greenhouse gas emissions is just pathetic. The Conservative government axed federal programs that promoted the reduction of greenhouse gases.

The proof? Here it is: $395 million cut from the EnerGuide program for home renovations; $500 million cut from the EnerGuide program for low-income homeowners; and $250 million cut from the partnership fund for climate change projects that the Liberals concluded with the provinces and municipalities.

Almost $600 million was cut from wind power production and renewable power production programs. The Conservatives did away with the One Tonne Challenge. They cut a billion dollars from the Climate Fund to reduce greenhouse gases. They cut $2 billion of general climate-change program funding.

The most recent victim of the Conservatives' cuts to environmental programs is the Commercial Building Incentive Program, which provided a financial incentive for the design and construction of new energy efficient buildings.

This was not a useless program; it produced results. Since its inception, this program supported no less than 541 projects in Canada that improved the energy performance of new buildings. These new buildings perform on average almost 35% better than similar buildings.

This program proved that it helped reduce greenhouse gases; every residential building, for example, built through the program emitted 182 fewer tonnes of greenhouse gases a year. For commercial buildings, the average reduction of greenhouse gases was 291 tonnes a year.

A government that eliminates such a program cannot say that it is taking care of the climate change problem. And similar announcements keep on coming.

Yesterday we learned that the government is shutting down the Northern Climate ExChange in the Yukon, which excels in climate change research in northern Canada and in the world. Since the Conservatives are cutting off their annual funding of $320,000, the researchers and scientists at Northern Climate ExChange have to end their studies.

If we do a quick calculation of all of the cuts, we get over $5.5 billion that has been eliminated from initiatives to reduce greenhouse gases—$5.5 billion in cuts. Is this how the government shows that it is serious about fighting climate change?

If the government is serious about action on climate change, it certainly has not shown it with its widely penned and so-called clean air act.

The Bill C-30 legislative committee has resurrected a bill that was dead on arrival in the House of Commons and only resurrected it with a promise to completely and utterly rewrite it.

Experts agree that there are no significant powers, not a single significant power to regulate in the new Bill C-30, that the government does not already possess under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. In short, the bill does nothing. I think we know that if the government were serious, it would have acted rather than punting the whole issue into Parliament.

Just half an hour ago, the Minister of the Environment refused to promise that the amended Bill C-30, once sent back to this chamber on March 30, would be acted on quickly by the government. He refused to guarantee and promise Canadian people that the hard work of the legislative committee would be implemented by the government. What kind of game is this when we are talking about such a serious issue for the future of the country?

Let us turn our attention to a subject that fascinates government members, the Liberal record on the environment. Project green was introduced as the centrepiece of the greenest budget in Canadian history. To paraphrase the Minister of the Environment, who said that? Elizabeth May, the leader of the Green Party of Canada.

With several key platforms for action, six greenhouse gases were added to the list of toxins under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. A proposed large final emitter system was published and draft regulations were nearly released before the unexpected 2006 election. We released a proposed set of rules for an offset credit system to award credits to large and small industries, technology companies, municipalities, farmers, foresters and individual Canadians, achieving greenhouse gas emission reductions. That system would have also created a market, allowing these individuals, industries and organizations to sell their credits, which is one of the most efficient ways to get the maximum emissions reductions at the lowest cost.

Our climate fund was set to start operations in early 2006, acting as a kind of investment bank. It would have purchased reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, resulting from tangible projects. For Canadians, opportunities would have been available in every sector of the economy. Many different groups would have benefited from the fund: forestry companies that engaged in state of the art forest management practices; farmers who adopted low-till practices; property developers who included district heating and renewable energy elements in their plans for their new subdivisions; businesses that developed innovative ways to reduce emissions through recycling and energy efficiency; companies and municipalities that invested in their communities to encourage alternative transportation modes; municipalities that went further and captured landfill gas and used it to generate electricity; or courier companies that retrofitted their fleets.

We have lost a key year, 12 months of silence, 12 months of blame game. In the 12th month, what does the government do? It goes back into our green plan. It cherry-picks three core programs and re-gifts them for Canadians. Not only does it re-gift the programs, but seriously weakens all three.

In other words, at some point Canada's new government will have to deliver a plan. We will have to see a plan. The Canadian people are desirous of a plan.

Another major part of project green was the $250 million partnership fund. This fund was expected to grow to $2 billion to $3 billion as projects were expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55 to 85 megatonnes by 2012.

The first project announced under the partnership fund was a three-way federal-provincial-private plan in Prince Edward Island to upgrade the province's electricity transmission system and to allow P.E.I. to take advantage of wind energy. This is exactly the kind of investment we need to leverage industry to fight climate change. It is a program that was stillborn with the Conservative government a year ago.

Our climate change plan was in fact a business strategy for Canada that generated beneficial investments across the economy. Where did that plan go?

We do not only denounce the lack of vision on the part of the government. The Liberal approach is quite different from what the Bloc Québécois is advocating. Today, the Bloc is calling for $328 million to be transferred from Ottawa's coffers, merely a transfer of money. We would prefer a partnership between the two levels of government.

When Canada ratified the Kyoto protocol in 1997, it joined its efforts in a cooperation agreement entered into by a number of countries to achieve a single goal. Climate change is a global problem that Canada cannot solve on its own, in isolation. We took the lead, we agreed to live up to our responsibilities and we committed ourselves to working to improve the situation.

Because we cannot ignore our allies in the fight against climate change, we must also seize the opportunity to work in close collaboration with each of the provinces, each of the territories, all of the cities and villages and aboriginal communities. We are talking here about a collective effort in which every level of government must do its part. The federal government should extend its hand to them and demonstrate its intention of collaborating. Cooperation is one of the keys to success. That is how we can be sure that our efforts are not in vain and that we are advancing toward our common goal.

Just as for all of the childcare agreements that the government had entered into with the 13 provinces and territories, just as for the Kelowna accord, the first comprehensive federal agreement with all of the major aboriginal and Métis communities, the objective of the Kyoto protocol Partnership Fund was to secure agreements between Ottawa and all of the provincial and territorial governments for fighting climate change.

We had a memorandum of agreement, with Quebec, which involved $328 million and possibly more. Similar agreements had been signed with Ontario, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan. But after the 2006 election, Quebec found itself alone in its efforts to achieve the Kyoto protocol objectives. The federal government made a big mistake when it took away the $328 million we had set aside for Quebec to fight climate change.

In my closing remarks, I am going to ask the government again to table a plan for the people of Canada to honour our obligations under the international treaty called the Kyoto protocol.

As a nation and as a people, we committed to lead the world in a global response to a global problem. The government refuses to accept that although there are over 180 nation-states, there is only one atmosphere and there must be a global response. That is why 168 countries, including Canada, have signed the treaty. The government instead would like us to leave the treaty but will not tell Canadians the truth about it.

To conclude, I would like to move an amendment to the motion by the Bloc Québécois that is before us today.

I move that the motion be amended by replacing the words “the sum of” with the words “a sum of not less than” and by adding after the words “Kyoto Protocol targets” the following: “in accordance with the commitment made to all of the provinces and territories by the Partnership Fund established in Project Green”.

Those are my remarks. On this extraordinarily important time in Canadian history, we support the efforts of the Bloc Québécois; we support the efforts of all provinces and we are desperately looking forward to plan which engages Canadians, provinces, municipalities, towns and villages in what is the challenge of the 21st century: to reduce our greenhouse gases and protect the only atmosphere we have.

[Climate Change Accountability Act, February 5th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am rising today to speak to the merits of Bill C-377, An Act to ensure Canada assumes its responsibilities in preventing dangerous climate change. This bill clearly deserves a careful examination on its merits. As I said moments ago, the sincerity of the member who is putting it forward I believe is beyond reproach. But the introduction of Bill C-377 is timely.

On Friday you will recall, Mr. Speaker, that the House considered Bill C-288 put forward by my good friend the member for Honoré-Mercier. Of course, Bill C-288 is an act to ensure Canada meets its global climate change obligations under the Kyoto treaty. Bill C-288 reflects our party's hope that Canada will choose the right path while listening to climate experts, playing a leadership role with the international community and transforming our economy to meet the challenge of the 21st century.

As we all know there is a legislative committee currently at work rewriting the government's failed clean air act. With the ongoing work of the environment committee, Parliament is seized with environmental issues these days. This should not come as much of a surprise.

Where are we now? The environment emerged as the number one issue for Canadians after the government cancelled successful programs like EnerGuide, halted initiatives to increase renewable energies such as wind power, and effectively killed a national plan to regulate large final emitters and worked to establish a carbon trading market in Canada, all in the first year of the Conservative new government.

In total, $5.6 billion worth of environmental programs were scrapped. The government has stumbled in particular when it comes to the question of climate change.

I have a simple question for the government, which has now been in power for a full year: will it table its plan to fight climate change? I have asked this question repeatedly, and I am still waiting for an answer.

Unless the government can prove otherwise to Canadians, 12 months into its mandate, Canadians can draw only one conclusion: there is no plan.

The government is making things up as it goes along. It is jumping from ice floe to ice floe, announcing programs here, handing out cheques there and holding photo ops. What is even worse, last week, the Prime Minister was asked 18 times to clarify his position on climate change—which he denied for 10 years before becoming Prime Minister, including while he was leader of the opposition—and to tell us whether he was right then or whether he is right now. He consistently refused to answer.

This is worse than having no plan. Clearly, the government and the Prime Minister have no vision.

Climate change was not one of the government's top five priorities. It was barely mentioned in the throne speech, absent in the economic update and, worse, the only attention paid to the environment was to be found in the 2006 budget, which demonstrated massive cutting.

The first year was spent aggressively discrediting our government's 2005 green plan. The new Minister of the Environment, the one sent to rescue a sinking ship, was not that long ago the minister of energy in a provincial government who led the fight to stop the ratification of the Kyoto treaty and to stop action on climate change. Since his appointment, the government has taken to regifting parts of our 2005 action plan.

The hypocrisy of this is so bad that the government regifted our government's report on our obligations under Kyoto for the calendar year 2006, imagine. It may have knowingly misled the international community by reporting programs it was cutting as actually being in place.

The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that the government intends to withdraw from the Kyoto treaty and is doing so by subterfuge, by stealth, and by a thousand cuts.

Its spurious misleading of the House with regard to what it describes as “useless Russian hot air purchases” deliberately misleads Canadians and undermines the hard-fought clean development mechanism and the joint implementation mechanism, both in the treaty, that leveraged the power of the free market to meet our goals. It relies on, for example, the use of an international trading system to reduce greenhouse gases internationally at a lower cost.

That is why my leader, the hon. member, said:

I call on the Prime Minister to implement a comprehensive plan to honour Canada's Kyoto commitment, including a cap-and-trade carbon market, with more demanding targets than that proposed in 2005.

I call on the Prime Minister to implement environmental tax reform and fiscal measures to reward good environmental behaviour, and provide disincentives for behaviour that harms the environment and human health—all in a way that enables every region and province to succeed in the sustainable economy.

He also said:

I call on the Prime Minister to better support greener energy production and other forms of renewable energy, starting with a minimum target of 12,000 megawatts of wind power production.

I call on the Prime Minister to better support the research, development and commercialization of resource-efficient and environment-friendly technologies.

Most importantly, I call on the Prime Minister to do all this in a way that strengthens the Canadian economy, providing better jobs and a higher standard of living for our children.

If the government is serious about a global response to a global challenge, which reflects the fact that there may be 190 countries in the world but there is only one atmosphere, I challenge it further. I challenge all members of the House, including the government's caucus, to vote for our motion tabled in the House on Thursday.

Let me turn now to the merits of Bill C-377.

Like the clean air act, Bill C-377 is not necessary. It is important for Canadians to know that the bill was introduced in October, prior to his requested secret meeting with the Prime Minister to discuss the clean air act. It is unclear to Canadians and to us, as an opposition, whether the NDP has cut a deal with the government on the so-called clean air act. If so, it is legitimate to ask whether the bill ought still to be put forward by the leader of the NDP.

Upon re-reading the bill, I was astonished to learn that the leader of the NDP has dropped any reference to respecting the Kyoto accord in its entirety. Just like the so-called clean air act, Bill C-377 sets no short term targets to curb global warming. Only two are defined: one in 2020 the other in 2050. Perhaps the member could explain why his bill sets no short term targets.

Perhaps the leader of the NDP could explain why he has called on Canada to unilaterally vary the targets for emissions in Canada without any mention of the penalties that would accrue to Canada and Canadians under the Kyoto protocol. Has he forgotten we are a party to the protocol? Is he proposing to facilitate a government skirting the essential issue of near term targets? Why would he suggest that we delay action?

Let me reiterate that the Canadian Environmental Protection Act is available now, this week, for immediate action. There is no excuse for avoiding short term.

What is the NDP's intention with respect to our motion on Kyoto? Will the leader of the NDP be fully supportive at the vote this afternoon? Will the government?

It appears as if the member's bill, by giving discretion to the environment minister to set targets starting in 2015, facilitates a further removal from Kyoto. I remind the government and all members that targets were negotiated internationally. I am convinced the member would not knowingly facilitate the government treating Canada like an island or under the guise of splinter groups, and have us withdraw from our 167 partners that support the Kyoto treaty. It is fundamental that Canada participate, globally, to fight a global threat.

Finally, I welcome the attempt in Bill C-377 to leverage the role of the environment commissioner to meet our targets. Given our proposal as the official opposition to make the environment commissioner fully independent, I also welcome his support of our motion to hive off the commissioner's position and make it a stand-alone one with a strengthened mandate.

I look forward to hearing answers from the leader of the NDP. I congratulate him for his positive contribution to this debate.