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Decentralized Democracy

House Hansard - 52

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
April 4, 2022 11:00AM
  • Apr/4/22 1:55:34 p.m.
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  • Re: Bill C-8 
Mr. Speaker, well, I have not seen the entire report so it is hard to comment, but with regard to his comments about fossil fuels and keeping them in the ground and emissions, let us talk about a few things. First of all, this is a global crisis, and where is the most environmentally friendly fossil fuel in the world? It is in Canada. If we want to shut down the Canadian industry, okay, shut that down, but it is going to get replaced because people are still burning fuel. What the Europeans found out when they could not get oil and gas from Russia is that they are still burning fuel, so where is it going to come from? It is the areas that are not environmentally friendly, which will actually increase the speed of carbon emissions in the world and provide cheap, dirty, unethical oil all over the world. We have a choice to make, and it is a very clear choice. We can have energy security here in Canada, with a very safe, green, ethical fund growing in Canada's oil and gas sector, whether it is in Newfoundland, Alberta or Saskatchewan, or we can get oil from Venezuela or from third-world dictatorships like Russia. What do we want? We have to decide, because right now the decisions that are being made do not make a lot of sense.
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  • Apr/4/22 5:09:34 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for this easy question. Having worked on the report published by the Ouranos group several years ago, which talked about the cost of climate change in Quebec, I would say that climate change is indeed very costly for society. There are certainly health costs associated with climate change, and some diseases are a direct result. Zoonotic diseases come to mind. There are also infrastructure-related costs. We need only think of flooding, erosion and permafrost. The government cannot see this, probably because its discount rate is too high. It is surely not a social discount rate, so it must be a private discount rate. By doing a cost-benefit analysis, the government would see that climate change is very expensive and that tackling it would be the better solution, both economically and environmentally.
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