Mr. Speaker, I intend to share my time this afternoon with the hon. member for Halifax West.
Clearly, today in the House we, as parliamentarians, are confronted by the 21st century challenge: climate change.
I am proud to have been elected to keep the government accountable on the environment and to defend the Kyoto treaty. It is one of the things I ran on and it is one of the reasons I ran at all.
I have had the great privilege, over the last 20 years, of working in the area of environment and energy and I am very privileged now to have been named by the official Leader of the Opposition as the environment critic and, in a sense, I have come full circle.
I have been asking the government for a full year now a simple question: Will it table its plan to fight climate change? I have asked that question repeatedly and I have yet to receive an answer. Unless the government can show Canadians otherwise, now 12 months into a term, there is only one reasonable conclusion for Canadians to draw: there is no plan. The government is making it up as it goes along. It is, as I like to say, jumping from ice flow to ice flow, announcing programs, handing out cheques and organizing photo ops.
However, worse than that, it is now clear, after questioning yesterday, when 18 times in a row the Prime Minister was asked to clarify his views on climate change, which he campaigned against for 10 full years before becoming Prime Minister, including as Leader of the Opposition, whether his views were correct then or whether his views are correct now, and he refused, in every instance, to answer the question. It is now clear that it is worse than the fact that there is no plan. There is no vision from the government and no vision from the Prime Minister.
The Conservative platform almost did not mention the environment, except for a made in Canada plan. This, while the Minister of the Environment flies off today to Paris to do damage control at the intergovernmental panel on climate change meeting. I suppose in France he will be finding his made in Canada plan.
The federal government did not mention environment in its recent economic update. It was barely mentioned in the Speech from the Throne. The made in Canada plan right here in Ottawa was a euphemism for taking Canada out of the Kyoto treaty, something that has been the project of the Prime Minister's for a long time.
Canadians are asking what the made in Canada plan included. They want some details. As I said, it was not in the Speech from the Throne.
In late February, the former minister of the environment told The Globe and Mail, “There is an action plan that we are going to move on very quickly”. February became March and then April. The Conservatives introduced a budget that froze or cut every major climate change initiative that our government had put in place, to the tune of $5.6 billion. Bureaucrats were told to take every reference to Kyoto off every government website, including our archives.
By October, environmental groups were beginning to think nothing would happen. The former minister said, “All targets, whether short, medium or long term, will be consulted with industry, provinces and territories”. Meanwhile, our party was pointing out that there was no need for new legislation. Every legislative power that the government needs is at its disposal under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. All the government needs is conviction, vision and political will.
Senior officials were sent to deliberately undermine Kyoto, while we, as a nation state, were chairing the international talks. Now we see a second Minister of the Environment in the young government, given that the first minister had taken too many bullets already for the Prime Minister and the PMO.
Environment itself is not one of the top five priorities. It was not in the Speech from the Throne. It was slashed from the budget and was not in the fiscal update. Now we have a so-called clean air act. Knowing full well that it does not need any more legislative authority than that which it already possesses, the government creates a smokescreen, smoke and mirrors, photo ops.
We had draft regulations in place. We had negotiated these and had achieved targets with the large final emitters before we were defeated. The so-called clean air act was met with condemnation from every quarter in the country.
A new Minister of the Environment has been appointed and now he is re-gifting core Liberal programs. First, he brings back rebates for renovations that make homes energy efficient but he leaves out the part of the program that makes it affordable for low income Canadians, particularly our seniors, when it is the wish of all parliamentarians that seniors can reside in their homes independently and with dignity as they grow old in, usually, their older homes.
Low income Canadians spend 13% of their income on energy, compared with 4% paid by average households. Low income Canadians are being left out in the cold.
Second, a year later the minister also brings back funding for wind power and renewable energy, having first spuriously stated that it was wasteful spending and that it was not achieving its targets. This is cloak and dagger, behind the scenes, media manipulation where the minister disgracefully resurrects and re-gifts the programs which he had described only weeks earlier as wasteful spending.
Why were these programs ever cut? If Canadians believe the government when it described the programs as wasteful spending, then why were these programs brought back exactly as is?
Third, the government has come back to the table on clean energy technology but the year of uncertainty has had a damaging effect on young Canadian companies. Investors know which party did not make the environment one of its top five priorities and they are not flocking back to put their money in solid Canadian technologies that they were investing in 18 months ago which need a real federal commitment to turn the corner and take off worldwide. Our green industries are being left out in the cold.
Yesterday, our party held the Prime Minister to account for his radical anti-Kyoto campaign when he was leader of the opposition. In that letter he said that Kyoto was a “dangerous and destructive scheme”. He went on to say “we will do everything we can to stop Kyoto”, including, apparently, a taxpayer subsidized and disgraceful PR blitz against a proven environmental leader, the Leader of the Opposition.
I do not think Canadians buy that the Prime Minister or the government has turned over a new leaf. Just days before Christmas, in the foyer of this building, he was still talking about so-called greenhouse gases. Before that, he was saying that we must redirect federal spending aimed at fulfilling the terms of the increasingly irrelevant Kyoto protocol. He clearly believed that the Liberal government was acting to fight climate change because he was so fiercely opposed to it.
Another member of cabinet with us here today, the Minister of Public Safety, mocked the science of climate change just a few short months ago.