Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by congratulating the member for Honoré-Mercier on his excellent bill.
It is very much a pleasure for me to stand and speak to this issue. In fact, I cannot think of a more pressing or important issue, not only for this nation but for this world.
The fact of the matter is that we are at a tipping point. It is evident not only in our own country, in places like the Arctic, where oral traditions are being rendered useless by a landscape that is dramatically changing, but we also see it in extreme weather, in rapidly receding glaciers and in so many other ways. Mountains that have been snow-capped for incredibly long periods of time, thousands of years, are no longer.
In fact, just yesterday, I believe, a study pointed out that the earth is at its warmest point in 12,000 years. The Conservatives do not want to acknowledge this, but the reality is that climate change is real, it is impacting us today, and action is absolutely a necessity.
When we talk about Canada's role, we know that Canada actually uses more energy than the entire continent of Africa. We know that North America as a whole uses more energy than Africa, Asia and South America combined. When we look at this, it could not be clearer that Kyoto is needed, needed not just in our own context but in the world.
There is only one path to answering the problem of climate change. That path, without a doubt, is international agreements. Kyoto was an opportunity for all countries to come together and try to hash out the first agreement on climate change. If anybody doubts the effectiveness of Kyoto, they need only ask where the issue of climate change was before Kyoto came into effect. It was in the wilderness. The naysayers were dismissing it. People were pretending it was not a reality. Kyoto forced it onto the international stage, and for those who refused to take action and be signatories, there was domestic pressure, as in the case of the United States with states coming forward and taking action.
The previous federal government signed on to Kyoto. We put forward a series of recommendations to reduce our emissions and meet our Kyoto objectives. In the wake of all of this, when Canada's new government, as it calls itself, came into being, what action did it take? The reality is that it stepped back. Instead of moving forward with Kyoto and the recommendations, the government began slashing money.
The Conservatives took programs like the EnerGuide program, which allowed families to get subsidies to retrofit their homes to reduce the amount of energy they needed, and they scrapped them. Across the board, they scrapped environmental and climate change programs.
Worse than that, they walked away from their responsibilities in COP 11. COP 11 was an opportunity and a chance for Canada to lead the successor agreements that would follow Kyoto, to make sure that those nations that did not join on would join on. It was an opportunity for Canada to take a leadership role and the minister was missing in action.
The minister, whenever she is asked a question in the House about the Conservatives' environmental plan, will talk about what? Mercury. This could not be more evidence of how they do not understand this issue. Mercury has nothing to do with climate change. Zero. The minister of mercury talks about mercury every single time they are asked about climate change, when it does nothing. If she does not talk about mercury, the minister talks about smog, which also has nothing to do with climate change. Both are important issues. Of course it is important to reduce mercury and of course it is important to deal with smog, but neither of them have anything to do with climate change.
If that were all, it would be bad enough. Just simply slashing funding and ignoring the issue would be bad enough, but I fear there is a far greater menace afoot. I will read a quote for members, if I may. This is from U.S. pollster Frank Luntz, who recently met with the Prime Minister and gave him advice on how he should proceed. Mr. Luntz said:
Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate....
This is who the Prime Minister decided to spend his time with and to take advice from, an individual who says to distort the facts. The reality is that the scientific evidence on climate change is irrefutable. We can see it in our day to day lives, but scientists have also proven it through their research. We know that no credible paper published in the last number of years has in any way disputed the fact that climate change is a reality.
The government set Mr. Luntz's words into action. The Conservatives made sure they took action. They started by removing the climate change website, a Government of Canada site that had been set up for information for teachers, students and Canadians about how they could reduce their emissions. The government killed this site. I received a call from a teacher who had been using this site in her class to talk to students about how they could reduce their emissions. She tried it one day and found out that it had been deleted.
The government went through the website and cleansed and erased any references to climate change. It tried to pretend climate change does not exist. The Conservative government listened to its Republican advisers and tried to hide the issue from reality.
What Harper had called previously a controversial--
