Rob Merrifield

[Supply, December 5th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the member is absolutely right. The provinces are the front line deliverers of the services. People cannot tell me that home care is the same in downtown Toronto as it is in what we could say is the outback of Saskatchewan, the remote areas of Saskatchewan. From that perspective, provinces have the ability to deliver on their mandate and be much more in tune with what needs to take place. The caveat here is that we cannot and should not allow the provinces to take federal money without some accountability measures.

The provinces should be asked how will they spend those dollars to force measurable outcomes that will drive efficiencies and sustainability into the system as we move forward into the 21st century. We say there should be a collaborative approach. If we do not go there, the mandate of the federal government will not be followed. We must be mindful that the mandate for the federal government is accountability.

[Supply, December 5th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague makes a very good point with regard to the amount of private funding in the health care system now. Actually a little over 31% right now is private. Yet we do not have a NAFTA challenge. We do not have naysayers saying that it will destroy the system if there is any privatization of our system. Our system is 30% there already. That truly is false and it truly is trying to fearmonger and add phobias.

However, all of that is falling on deaf ears because Canadians are so much further ahead. What Canadians really care about is having a system that is there for them when they are ill. We have to realize that this becomes the focus. There is no question about that. So when we are asked questions about alternate delivery and following the mandate, that is what has to happen. We have to stop the adversarial roles. We have to draw clear distinctions between the role of the federal government and how it supports the health care system in Canada and the role of the provincial governments in delivering health care services to their constituents. We have to realize what that role is.

When we respect those roles, then we will be much more able to collectively do what Canadians expect us to do. As we realize, the same people support the federal government and the provincial governments with the same tax dollars. It comes from the same pocket. It is the same money.

Taxpayers do not like the differences we have had, the adversarial conditions that have been set up in Canada. Canadians want health care when they need it. This is what we had better focus on.

[Supply, December 5th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague has it so wrong when says that we want a private system. Where he comes up with that is amazing to me.

We are saying that the provinces should be allowed to follow their mandate to give alternative delivery options. If the private sector can provide the service as efficiently as and cheaper than the public system, then fair enough. It can be contracted. What we are saying is that all people will need is their health care card to access services in the country.

The Canada Health Act, if we want to talk about it, does not necessarily restrict the ability of private delivery options, but Mr. Romanow has, and the government in this place has certainly been putting the boots to any kind of an attempt to allow any private delivery options, as we have seen over the last decade in the way it has treated the provinces. In fact, it is such an adversarial role that I would say it is almost dysfunctional at this stage.

Let us get it straight about where we stand on private delivery options within a public system. What we are saying is that within a public system we need to have some competition to be able to know that we can deliver the system as affordable as we possibly can. If the private sector can do it, then we should not be so alarmed at that, we should embrace it. However that is not up to us, it is up to the provinces. It is a provincial jurisdiction.

All we are saying is that since the provinces are asking for the opportunity to deliver health care to their patients as efficiently as they possibly can, we should be open to it and encourage them. The government should take its eyes off the system, get over the phobias that I hear and start thinking about the patients and curing the ills of those patients as its number one priority.

[Supply, December 5th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to this important issue at a time in the history of Canada when we are engaged in the debate on health care. We have an opportunity now to come to a decision. Decisions should have been made years ago and actually they were, but they were made in the wrong way. There is a potential to make those wrong decisions again.

In this upcoming year of debate ahead of us, we have an opportunity to decide to go down a road of sustainability for health care, or not. We have an opportunity to cooperate with the provinces, or not. We have to put the patients first or lose them into the system like we have seen in the last decade, or even further back to the last three or four decades. The patient has become secondary to the system itself.

Health care reform has been left on the back burner for far too long by the government. There are critical cracks in the system. They are so wide and unbelievable that the patient, the ordinary person on the street, has the sense that the system is not sustainable.

We could argue about whether the system is in crisis or not. It really does not matter because it depends upon whether a person is one of the million on the waiting lists trying to get access to the services that we love and hold near and dear. With one million people on the waiting lists, with critical shortages of doctors, nurses and technicians, and I could go right down a very long list, there are acute problems with our health care system that need to be addressed. They should have been addressed long before now.

The problem is so large. When we compare Canada to other OECD nations, we rank 18th when it comes to access to MRIs, 17th in access to CT scanners and eighth for radiology equipment. One thing which is even worse is that the World Health Organization rates us 30th when it comes to our health care system. Our health care system is rated 30th, in a country that is rated number one as far as the best place in the world in which to live.

Something is wrong with our health care system because it does not match the rest of the ratings that Canada gets. That is absolutely true. Patients and ordinary Canadians understand that full well. That is why they are engaged in this debate like never before.

The federal government has been asked to make a decision on health care and that decision is long overdue. It can embrace one track or another track. It will be interesting to see which track the government will hang its hat on.

My guess is it will hang its hat on the $50 million report of Commissioner Romanow, the government's golden boy as far as health care and the future of health care are concerned. If that happens we will have squandered an opportunity to innovate and drive the health care system into the 21st century in a sustainable way. We will have entrenched the status quo for more money and a broken system.

The easiest thing to do in politics when running into a problem is to throw money at it. I would urge the government not to do that but to open its eyes, look forward into the 21st century and look at some of the initiatives that need to take place to sustain health care.

The report done by the Romanow commission is a centralist bureaucratic vision of the future of Canadian health care. It is no real surprise that those on the extreme left are the most supportive of that report.

We criticized the commission when it first started, first because of the two year delay before the government actually came to a decision as it needed to make a decision on health care long before that, and second because of the idealistic bias of the individual who was running the commission. We said that this delay would retard the amount of health care reforms that needed to take place. We realized that the terms of reference of the commission had a limited scope for reforms to the publicly funded health care system.

This commission cost $50 million. Imagine how many MRI machines that would buy. There is rumoured to be an overrun of perhaps up to $26 million. We are going to use an Access to Information Act request to find out how many dollars Mr. Romanow did spend. It is true to what the government normally does with overruns. We could look at gun control or perhaps the blank cheque on Kyoto. Canadians get nervous when they look at some of these issues.

The government does one thing well. It studies. It studied health care to death. In fact there have been $243 million worth of studies since the government came to power in 1993. There was $12 million for a National Forum on Health study which now sits nicely on a shelf. That was a two year, very intense study similar to the Romanow commission.

Senator Kirby just finished his study. It was the most efficient one as far as numbers of dollars spent. It was very comprehensive over a two year timeframe.

It appears that the fix was in from the very beginning on the Romanow commission. Let us look at that report. He is calling for a massive infusion of cash, $15 billion over a three year period, and then carrying on from that with up to a 25% ceiling for the percentage of cost into health care.

We agreed with money going into health care. The system is collapsing around itself and the injection of more cash was something we had called for as far back as 1997.

Provinces are shouldering much of the cost as 40% of their budget is used up in health care. We see only 14¢ to 18¢ on every dollar from the federal government, depending on the numbers one uses. That goes into the fuzzy money the federal government has injected into health care. The money goes into the CHST, the Canadian health and social transfer, which adds education and social services into the health care budget. The Auditor General even said that this is inappropriate because we cannot tell how many dollars the government is actually putting into health care. Clearing that up is something that is long overdue.

Clearly the federal government is not paying its fair share on health care. It has not got its priorities straight when it comes to the number one priority of Canadians which is health care. It is time that happened.

It is interesting to look back at the September 2000 accord and the number of dollars put into health care. The government brags about how much money it has injected. Not one cent of that money for health care reform or primary care went into the system until the April after the September accord. It was more about an election promise and trying to win an election than it was about health care reform. In fact, there are still three years left on that money to go into the system.

If it was the number one priority of the government, it should have been a much more aggressive injection of dollars. Instead we are now just up to the 1993-94 level of dollars into health care from the federal government.

Mr. Romanow said that we should be taking all the money, the $15 billion, out of the projected surplus. Projected surpluses can be there or they cannot be there. All it would take would be a little recession. If we signed the Kyoto accord within the next, I would suggest that the surplus would evaporate before our eyes. We had better recalculate the surpluses that are proposed to be there.

The situation is that the government does not have the appropriate priorities. If health care is to be the number one priority of the Canadians whom it represents, then it had better get its priorities straight.

The motion before us today is very important in the sense that it talks about dollars coming from the federal government with no strings attached. The reason it is there is that Mr. Romanow is suggesting that there be lots of strings attached. In fact, there are five areas: rural and remote access to funding; diagnostic services; primary care transfers; home care transfers; and catastrophic drug transfers. All have strings attached and they open up the system into many more boutique services and programs in health care than were there before.

It is irresponsible to suggest that new dollars would be tied in any way to force the provinces to provide some expanded services. The commissioner was sent to talk to Canadians and to all the professionals to decide how to fix the problems in the existing health care system. Instead of fixing the existing problems, he came back with a report that said to expand it, make it bigger and to tie dollars to the provinces to force them to put those dollars into certain areas.

I do not have a problem with home care. If the catastrophic drug plans address the principle that a person should not lose their home or income or all the money in an RSP because of a catastrophic illness, that is a principle Canadians hold near and dear and we should be protecting it.

We need to work with the provinces when we target dollars. The provinces should be given more flexibility for the new funds that are being injected. The provinces are on the front line of health care delivery. The heavy hand of the federal government is not a way to deal with that.

We should be asking the provinces and holding them accountable for the dollars they need to spend with the ultimate goal of obtaining measurable results on where the dollars will be spent in order to sustain the system in the long run.

We have seen an example of exactly what we are headed into just recently in the 2000 accord with $1 billion in the equipment fund. What happened with the fund when we followed it through was that some of the money was not spent on where it was intended. Some of it was spent on floor scrubbers, lawn mowers and ice cube machines because in certain areas they did not need the high technology equipment and in other areas they did not get it. When we have the blunt instrument of the federal government putting conditions on, we cannot hit the nail on the head as far as where the problems really lie. It only interferes in the provincial jurisdiction which has the mandate to deliver on health care reforms.

When it comes to the motion, we are saying that these measurable outcomes are something that absolutely have to be there. We would have a problem with it except that the Bloc has seen fit to amend it and to add, according to the priorities that it has determined, that it should be accountable to its population. I believe the key is that we need accountability in the system. The provinces need to be accountable for the money that the federal government is injecting. That is fair enough, and I think the provinces all agree with that. From that perspective, I think the motion is now worthy of consideration. We need this cooperative approach if we are going to save health care in the long run.

Let us talk about some of the disappointments we have seen in the Romanow report. One of the most disappointing is in regard to the private provision of health care services. Romanow said that he would like to see an end to any private provision of health care. It is really interesting because 30% of the system is private right now. I wonder if he will roll back every doctor's clinic that is out there and pay them differently. I do not understand exactly where he is with that. He says “not now, not ever” as far as any kind of private delivery.

What we are saying is that we do not really care who delivers as long as the payer is the public, that it is from the public purse and that it is a single payer option. Our health card should be able to access services any place in the country and who delivers the service is not something that Canadians are all that concerned about. We have to leave some options open to enable the provinces to follow through on their mandate to do that.

The title of Mr. Romanow's report is “The Future of Health Care in Canada”, but if it were implemented it would not be the future he would be talking about, it would be the 1960s and 1970s model with twice the mandate and half the money. It would be destined to failure. Five years from now we would be sitting in this place wondering where all the money went, saying that the system is unsustainable, as the baby boomer bubble hits it and the weight is lowered down onto the system, as new technologies and the costs of them come forward and we are trapped into a model that cannot be sustainable in the future. We have an opportunity to do something about that system now and we had better seize that opportunity.

Canadians need, and should expect, timely services. It does not matter who provides those services but they absolutely have to be able to get to the place where they can access the services.

We have the five principles of the Canada Health Act. I suggest that most people in Canada have no idea what those five principles are. I suggest most people in the House would have a difficult time reciting the five principles. I certainly know there is no one here who can define the five principles because no one really has.

However that is not really important because when most Canadians walk into a health care facility they do not look up and say “I wonder whether this complies or not”. They are saying three things. They are saying, “Make me better when I am sick”. They are saying, “Don't make me wait to get better. They are saying “Don't make me pay to the point that I will lose my home or my life savings for an illness when I do get sick”. Those are, in very simple terms, where we are going with health care and what Canadians so dearly love and want in their health care system. That is very simple and straightforward but it seems to be missed in Mr. Romanow's report.

This brings me to the other issue that he so blatantly missed, which is a patient guarantee. We had talked a few minutes ago about the Kirby report. Mr. Kirby is one individual who said that at least there should be patient guarantees, that patients and the public are putting $102 billion into health care right now which will go up another $15 billion a year at least.

Will we get anything for that? Will we remove the one million people on waiting lists? The CMA, Canadian Medical Association, is saying the same thing and so are we when we talk about timely access. It should be there but Romanow rejects all of that as being unworkable. It is not unworkable. It just does not fit into his ideology.

What good is it if we create the best system in the world but we cannot access it? That kind of system does not do anyone any good.

Mr. Romanow has missed a few other things in his report. One of the things is the setting up of the health council or the watchdog over health care. If we have to set up another watchdog, what is the federal Minister of Health doing? What are the provincial ministers of health doing? Is it not their responsibility to deliver on the money Canadians pay in taxes and who expect their money to be spent reasonably and efficiently on their behalf? That is their area of jurisdiction. We would only need a watchdog if they were not doing their jobs.

The other thing is the human resources shortages that we have in the country. I talked about that earlier in my speech. I said that we have a massive problem that will not go away very quickly and that has been totally ignored by this report. If we do not deal with the waiting lists so that Canadians can expect timely delivery of services when they are ill, and if we do not deal with the human resources problems that really cause a lot of that problem, then we have missed the boat on health care reform.

There are some things that we actually like about his report. He has talked about splitting up this fuzzy money, the CHST, and dedicating it. We are saying that the Auditor General agrees with that. She came out with a report a few weeks ago saying that was what happened in the early 1990s. Money was pulled back under the guise of the CHST. We do not even know how many dollars are going into the federal coffers. If we split that up, we would at least have some accountability. Some degree of accountability is absolutely needed.

With regard to stable funding, we agree with stable funding. In fact, we fought the last election on stable funding for health care. Canadians need to know that. If we are going to deal with the system of health care, we had better have secure dollars so we can count on those dollars moving ahead.

We agree with the independent drug safety agency because we have a massive problem when it comes to drugs in this country. A pharmaceutical program, opening up more pharmaceuticals to the people, might be a noble thought but we had better fix the abuse problem before we ever go down that road.

Canadians believe in timely access to high quality health care regardless of their ability to pay. We support the province's effort to use alternative service deliveries within the public system as a way to improve patient care and increase efficiencies in encouraging greater investments.

We oppose big government solutions which too often ignore the health of Canadians. Tomorrow the minister is heading into a meeting with provincial counterparts. It will be really interesting to see whether she will be dealing with them collaboratively or whether she will use the big stick approach that the government has used over the last nine years.

We must work cooperatively with the provinces now. The government must not use the Romanow report to turn back the clock on real health care reform. What a terrible error and missed opportunity that would be if that were to happen.

We become very nervous when we hear Liberal backbenchers say that their whole caucus would like to hug Romanow. She also went on to say that they did not have time to look at any other report. I would say that the time has come for real health care reforms in this country. The public is way ahead of the politicians. This room needs to catch up. Reforms that place the patient first and not the system is where we have to go.

[Health, December 3rd, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, Senator Kirby also noted the rejection of a guaranteed patient time in the government's Romanow commission. The lack of timely access to quality health care services is the number one health care concern of Canadians.

What is the point of having a great system if we cannot access it? Does the minister think that Canadians deserve guarantees of timely access?

[Health, December 3rd, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday a leading member of the Liberal caucus and a spokeswoman on health issues said, “As a caucus we have decided to hug Romanow”. She also said, “We don't have time to consider other health issues”.

We all know where Romanow is on a state monopoly. Does this mean that the government will eliminate alternative delivery options in the provinces?

[Kyoto Protocol, December 2nd, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the smog in downtown Toronto was mentioned. I think a lot of Torontonians actually feel that if the Kyoto accord is signed, it is going to solve that problem. Forty-five days of smog alerts this year is significant and the city absolutely has a problem. The problem with the Kyoto accord is it is not the CO

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that is causing the damage, it is all of the other pollutants that come along with it. Even if we sign the Kyoto accord and implement it, reducing it not by 6% but let us say 100%, still would not eliminate the smog. That is one of the problems and misconceptions.

The longer we have this debate, the clearer it becomes to Canadians. When it comes to our international agreements, for a lot of the countries who signed them, it is more about wealth changing hands than it is about the environment. In fact, we even see provinces that are sort of on side with it. It is not so much because they are environmentalists, but because they see the dollars and cents that could be gained from signing the accord. That is the unfortunate part about it.

We have to look soberly at why we are signing this thing and whether we are going to get any benefits from signing it at all. We certainly know there will be devastating effects on the economy from it.

[Kyoto Protocol, December 2nd, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member's question is a very good one. It is one thing that I did not mention in my address, but it is absolutely true.

We trade 80% to 90%, depending on the numbers one uses, with our largest trading partner which happens to be the United States. It is not signing the accord. It is not that it is not for the environment; many of the states are doing much more aggressive things than where the Kyoto accord will actually go, but they are doing them in their own way. It is a made in the United States approach.

We are suggesting that we need a made in Canada approach so that we do not unduly destroy certain industries and opportunities that we have as a nation as we move forward. For us to sign on to an accord where the repercussions are so devastating puts us in a trading deficit and disadvantage with the United States, our largest trading partner, in a significant way that we may never come out of. It may spin us into a much different recession than that of the United States. If that were to happen, we may lose our currency. We as a nation are already upset about our 64¢ dollar. It was 63¢ and 62¢ less than a year ago and it could go down to 52¢ or 42¢. It could destroy the economy to that degree.

It is something we should look at very soberly. When we see the repercussions of signing on to an accord, the costs become unbelievable, but maybe that would not be all that bad. Maybe Canadians would say it is worth the price if we could really clean up the air. But when 95% of the CO

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in Canada is emitted naturally and we are talking about only 2% to 3% that is human made and we are going to reduce that by only 6%, even if we eliminated all our CO

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, it would have no effect on the world's climate.

Is that really going to achieve the goal? I would suggest the answer is no. That is why the cost does not match the gain.

[Kyoto Protocol, December 2nd, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I am sorry about that. I was referring to a title that would be put on this but it is my mistake.

Yellowhead was fortunate in that the member for Red Deer came to the riding in the spring to speak to the whole issue of Kyoto. He has a wealth of knowledge that the government would be wise to tap into. We asked him to come to the riding to discuss this issue.

The municipalities in my riding had been asked to give their endorsement and to sign on to the Kyoto accord. I asked those municipalities to come to listen to the member in order to be a little more informed before they made their decision. That is exactly what they did and thank goodness they did. They went away much more informed. I do not believe there is one of them that endorsed the accord.

We would be so fortunate to have a Minister of the Environment come to Yellowhead to explain the government side. I would love to see that happen so we could enter into a discussion with the hon. member for Red Deer at the same time. I know the Minister of the Environment would not be able to look the resource workers in the eye and explain why the economic uncertainties were good for the environment.

The Minister of the Environment has not told Canadians that 50% of electricity comes from coal burning. Yellowhead has some of the finest and cleanest coal burning companies in the world. Power plants in my riding have made great gains in the reduction of CO

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and are currently working in the clean coal technologies that will provide safe, reliable energy until alternative fuel sources are found. We need to find those as soon as possible because that is where the answers really lie.

Implementing new technologies takes time. Whether we are looking for cleaner coal technology projects that have been in the plans for 10 years now or more or hydro wind power or other technologies, large scale solar and so on, these take time to develop. That is where we will find the answers for the present dilemma we are in, and how into the 21st century we will be able to clean up our land, water and air.

Advancements in these new technologies are happening as we speak. It alarms me that the Liberal government would rather spend billions of dollars buying international credits than it would investing in Canadian solutions.

The energy sector has been one of the most vocal in expressing its concerns. It has experienced the pains of the Liberal government's economic meddling. This will affect every Canadian consumer and every sector in the country. The agricultural industry will see higher fuel costs. Kyoto tax measures will tax them as well. The cost of driving to destinations such as Jasper will be out of reach for many people. There is no question that Kyoto will have an absolutely devastating effect on many places, not only in my constituency or in the province of Alberta, but right across the country.

It is interesting that the Prime Minister is entering the discussion with the provinces on increasing the funding for health care. He just went into the dollars that probably will be put into health care. Because of the self-imposed deadline that is approaching and the debate we are having right now, it will be interesting to see whether closure will be used on the debate or whether we will truly have an open and wide debate on this very important issue.

We have a narrow window of opportunity to protect Canada's economy from the effects of ratifying this accord before Christmas. We need to take advantage of that right now. We need to think seriously about where the House is going, about what we are about to vote on and about the repercussions it will have on the nation from coast to coast.

[Kyoto Protocol, December 2nd, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, this is truly an interesting debate on which the nation needs to get as much information as it possibly can as we proceed further. The only thing that is clear about the national debate on Kyoto is that day by day Canadians are losing confidence in a government that has no ability at all to educate itself on the important issues and no capacity to make good policy decisions.

I would like to thank the member for Red Deer, because last week he spent over 11 hours in the House trying to explain this to all hon. colleagues and members in this chamber in a very thoughtful and thorough way as he analyzed what the Prime Minister's Kyoto commitment will mean to the economy and how the Prime Minister has sold out the protection of the environment for the sake of an international photo op.

In the Prime Minister's haste to commit Canada to an international agreement, he set out CO

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targets that we do not know if we can ever even meet, or even if we can afford them. He has missed one very important thing, which is that if Canada is to make any real gains in protecting the environment, it will take every province and every Canadian to buy into the strategy. We will have to do much more in the whole area of reducing pollutants in this country.

Herein lies the root problem, because the Liberal government has no plan for Canadians to buy into. They are being asked to buy into this Kyoto accord, an international agreement, but there are no targets there. They cannot grab hold of something and say that this is the plan, this is what it will cost, these are the timelines and this is what will happen. All we know is that there is a vague number, a percentage by the year 2012. Canadians do not know how it will impact them. They do not know if the targets are there and they do not know if this will ever have any impact on the environment. In fact, most scientists are saying it will not.

Since the Prime Minister first pulled the targets out of thin air in 1997, the government has done virtually nothing. It has missed an opportunity to inform Canadians about what the agreement really means and what it really means to them. It has failed to educate Canadians on what they can do to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. All that the Liberal government has achieved is to create one more battle with the provinces and send a chill of uncertainty throughout this country and throughout the economy.

I appreciate the valuable information and the feedback that I have received from my constituents in Yellowhead, who have expressed to me a broad spectrum of concerns on this issue over the last number of weeks and months.

There are a couple of things that have become very clear. First, we are all in agreement that something should be done to protect the environment. That is a motherhood statement. None of us want to leave our land, our air or our water in worse shape than we found it. We know that we have problems there and we know that something needs to be done. Second, there are many unanswered questions about how to implement Kyoto. What will it cost to implement? What is the government's implementation plan? Is this the most effective way to reduce energy consumption and pollution?

I am proud to represent the constituents of Yellowhead. I can say without reservation that ours is the most beautiful constituency and riding in Canada. We are known for our clean air, our rolling hills, our abundant wildlife, our breathtaking mountain scenery and our breathtaking mountains. We are also a major source of energy for the nation's cars and for our homes. Many of our communities are dependent on the energy sector for their existence. It would be irresponsible for me to support any legislation or motion without first knowing the effect it would have on those communities. That is why I am here this evening.

For five years the Canadian Alliance has been asking the government to table a Kyoto implementation plan so that Canadians could review it. Five years and 2,000 other dust-gathering international environmental agreements later, we have nothing to show for it. First we were told not to worry, that the Canadian economy would not suffer because of Kyoto. Now we have received a hastily prepared PowerPoint presentation, glossy documents and $10 million worth of slick, taxpayer funded ad campaigns proclaiming that Kyoto is the only way.

For Canadians, the absence of figures on the effect on the economy should raise all kinds of alarms. How it will affect our jobs should also raise many alarms for us, and the absence of any effort in an environmental plan to deal with the 45 smog warning days in Toronto should be absolutely alarming to us.

Right now the Prime Minister is asking Parliament for a blank cheque to implement the Kyoto accord. Since signing the original accord in 1997, the Prime Minister has had five years to inform Canadians and Parliament on how the government would implement a plan to reduce 6% of the CO

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emissions from 1990 levels. We are actually currently 26% over the target that the Prime Minister has committed us to.

I cannot support Kyoto unless there is a plan to ensure that the interests of Canadians are protected, and there should be no one in the House who is prepared to do that. While the intentions of Kyoto are good, we cannot afford to sign a blank cheque without knowing the costs to the economy and the benefits to the environment. That does not mean that we should just sit back and do nothing. Canada has an opportunity to re-establish its role as an international leader by offering the world a plan to reduce humans' negative impact on the environment.

I support a made in Canada plan, a plan that addresses not only CO

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but other pollutants such as smog and acid rain. I support the investment for research and development in alternative fuels and the cleaner use of existing energy sources. I support the educating of Canadians on how to reduce the energy that we use, on how to be much more effective and efficient in how we do that.

A made in Canada plan must include consultation with the provinces and discussion with our trading partners. That is sadly lacking in the Kyoto accord. I am sorry to have to tell the Prime Minister that trading carbon credits, as Kyoto calls for, is not the answer. That would do nothing to help the environment.

The Kyoto accord is bad for Canada because it will kill jobs and it will have a devastating effect on the economy. It is damaging to Canada's international competitiveness. It is divisive. It is useless for the environment and diverts Canada from the right strategy to address climate change.

The Kyoto accord will affect between 250,000 and 450,000 manufacturing jobs. They will be lost by the year 2010. The accord will cost $3 billion a year in international credits. Even taking into account the benefits to the conservation and renewable energy sectors, the cost would be well over $1,000 per man, woman and child in the country. These are not just simple numbers; they are actual lives of real Canadians that the Prime Minister is playing with. We are not talking just simple dollars and cents. The effect will be devastating.

Europe and the third world countries know that we will be legally bound to pay them billions to buy the credits to meet our emission targets. No wonder they are pressuring Canada to ratify the accord. Five billion of the world's six billion people are not subject to the Kyoto accord at all. Some of the world's worst polluters, such as Mexico, China and India, will not be bound at all by the Kyoto accord or the targets.

Recent studies done by Canadian manufacturers and exporters indicate that Canadians would have to pay up to 100% more for their electricity, 60% more for their natural gas and up to 80% more for gasoline if we were to implement the accord. We can imagine the devastating effects on a nation as large as ours. Let us take just one of those figures and say it is right, with a 100% price increase for gasoline. Or let us say that is stretched a little bit. Maybe it would be only a 50% increase. We can imagine, with the size of our nation, how that would impact air traffic, travel and the transportation of goods across the country. We can imagine how it would affect individual Canadians as they move across the country. Just this impact alone would be devastating, but we are talking about all of those other impacts and more.

The average Canadian household could face costs of up to $30,000 just to refurbish their house to meet Kyoto's stringent restrictions. Even the Kyoto-friendly figures from the David Suzuki Foundation show that the average Canadian family would have to pay $12,000 to retrofit their house to be able to conserve the amount of energy required to meet the efficiency standards set out by the Kyoto accord. Twelve thousand dollars may not be much to the Prime Minister and it may not be much to the environment minister, but to the hardworking, overtaxed people of Yellowhead it is a significant amount of money. They are seniors on fixed incomes in Mayerthorpe, struggling farmers in Evansburg and hospitality workers in Jasper who hold down three jobs. Retrofitting their houses or having to pay increased rents will push more Canadians into Liberal government imposed poverty.

Leading economists say that Kyoto could lead to a recession in Canada and, as in every recession, existing environmental programs would be seriously compromised. Efforts to protect our rivers, our lakes, our soil, our air and our endangered species would have to all be put on the back burner because of the effect of Kyoto and the devastation of the nation's finances. Kyoto would have a devastating effect on the entire Canadian economy. Manufacturing in Ontario would be scaled back or would move overseas or to a more competitive nation such as the United States. Oil and gas exploration in the Maritimes would likely dry up.

While I am concerned about the national economy, I am fearful of what effects my riding of Yellowhead would see. Meeting with constituents this past weekend, I noted that the uncertainty has already set in. Energy based projects have been put on hold in my riding. That is the reality. Jobs are being lost because of the reckless handling of this file by the Prime Minister and the environment minister.

The constituents of Yellowhead have seen this before, in the bundle of energy laws in the 1980s designed to nationalize the energy industry, artificially fix the price of oil and raise billions of dollars for the Liberals to spend on programs.

A key component of Prime Minister Trudeau's grand legacy, the national energy policy, devastated industries, communities and families throughout Yellowhead riding. New bureaucracies sprouted up and managed another resounding failure of state controlled involvement in the economy.

As parliamentarians, we know that Kyoto and the national energy policy are very different, but to the constituents of Yellowhead and to thousands of business leaders who lost everything when the current Prime Minister was the energy minister in the 1980s and was tasked with implementing the national energy policy, this is the only thing that they have to compare with what we are going through at this present time. They remember all too clearly losing their businesses and their homes.

During debate earlier this afternoon, the government side attempted to accuse the official opposition of fearmongering. In its fantasy world, it blames the economic uncertainty we currently are facing on our questions about how any plan would be implemented and what it would mean for investment in Canada.

I think that those kinds of remarks took debate in this place to an all time low. We are still asking these questions because we have not received any answers from the government. These are the questions we are hearing in the coffee shops in our ridings and in boardrooms across the country. It is a ridiculous line of logic: Do not ask the government about its blatant non-compliance because it might bring attention to its blatant non-compliance and lead to an economic slowdown.

Getting back to the lives of the people in Yellowhead, the member for Red Deer gave a list last week of the industries that would be the first casualties of the Prime Minister's faulty environmental policy. He might as well have been describing the entire economy of the Yellowhead riding. He talked about coal, oil, gas, mining, forestry, pulp and paper.

When the environment minister talked about the slowing economy, he was really pointing his finger at my constituency. For hundreds of bureaucrats and tax credit funded environmentalists fighting the possibility of implementing such a grand government scheme must make them just salivate. I can imagine it now: an army of hundreds of Kyoto-crats scurrying around the federal bureaucracy and around the country implementing Chrétien's Kyoto cutbacks.

Yellowhead was fortunate--