44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 7, 2023 10:00AM
- Feb/7/23 11:04:26 a.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, my hon. friend, the parliamentary secretary, said in his speech that emissions are going down. I have seen no evidence of that. We had a dip during COVID, but the expectation is that our emissions will go up. We have the worst record in the G7 since 1990. Our emissions continue to climb upward more than those of any other country in the G7.
At the same time, subsidies disguised as climate action are increasing. When the Liberals throw out the numbers for how much is spent on climate action, it includes carbon capture, utilization and storage, which is a subsidy for the fossil fuel industry. It helps them produce more oil by getting what they could not otherwise reach by shooting carbon dioxide down deep wells. We are seeing an increase in subsidies, where we have wasted $21 billion on the Trans Mountain pipeline. As a reminder, a billion is a thousand million; it is not just a little bit more. The hon. member will remember the Prime Minister promising in the 2015 election that he would never approve this pipeline. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
192 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Feb/7/23 11:51:20 a.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, first I want to thank my hon. colleague from Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke from the bottom of my heart for actually pointing out that nuclear makes no sense as a climate solution. Why is it, then, so heavily promoted? I would like to pull back the corporate veil. The big winner in this is SNC-Lavalin, as the projects are controlled by SNC-Lavalin. SNC-Lavalin bought AECL for $15 million in the Harper years and has its fingers in every pie, but it is will hidden.
I wonder if the hon. member has any comments on that.
101 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Feb/7/23 12:06:06 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, I really want to thank my colleague from British Columbia for bringing us back to what happened there in the summer of 2021. I do not think even colleagues who think they know about it really do. Over 619 people died in four days from a heat dome. In the same year, we had the atmospheric rivers. I know the hon. member for Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke spoke to this too, but the temperature record hit 50°C at its peak; this was in the backyard of my husband's family farm. My stepdaughter, who is in her mid-30s, nearly died.
We are still not preparing. We are still not understanding. In the context of my friend from Vancouver East's riding, people who are homeless were unable to get to cooling shelters because none were set up. They were kept out of parks, where they went for shade, for fear they might set up encampments. Again, the equity issues, the intersectional issues of the climate crisis are ignored in pointless debates about a carbon tax, which is a necessary but completely insufficient way of addressing the climate emergency.
194 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Feb/7/23 6:14:24 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise virtually in the House tonight to pursue a question I initially asked in question period. I asked it on November 14, 2022, just as COP27, the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, was under way in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt.
The Secretary General of the United Nations opened that conference saying that the world is “on a highway to climate hell, foot still on the accelerator.” That is the situation we are in today, and the question I put to the minister was whether the Prime Minister had chosen to stay away from Sharm el-Sheikh and COP27 knowing that we are one of those countries with the foot on the accelerator.
I want to concentrate more, in the time I have this evening, on the response I received from the hon. parliamentary secretary. His response was that we are doing wonderful things in Canada, that our foot is not on the accelerator, and that we can ignore what we are doing in expanding fossil fuel infrastructure with the shameful decision to buy the Kinder Morgan pipeline, spending public money on a project that violates indigenous rights, threatens the ecosystems of the 800 crossings of watercourses between Alberta and Burnaby, and threatens the ecosystems of the Salish Sea with a spill that would not be of crude oil but, even more impossible to clean up, diluted bitumen. We can set that all aside and ignore it because of all the wonderful things the government is doing.
The hon. parliamentary secretary pointed to $100 billion in climate spending and a $9-billion emissions reduction plan. Let us be honest about this. Let us stop pretending that spending billions of dollars will protect our children and grandchildren from an unlivable world. When the UN Secretary General spoke of climate hell, he was not being hyperbolic. It is the reality of the science we are looking at, and it is deeply distressing. In fact, looking at it soberly, it is terrifying.
One of the things we know is that the IPCC report from last spring, April 4, 2022, spoke of the opportunity we have to hold to the Paris commitments of a 1.5°C global average temperature increase, and as far below 2°C as possible. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made it clear that both of those goals, both of those avoidances of the worst, will not be possible unless global emissions of greenhouse gases hit their peak and then drop rapidly before 2025. We are at 2023, and we have less than 24 months to ensure that global emissions hit their highest-ever level and drop rapidly from there.
The Government of Canada continues to pretend that by spending money on electric cars and consumer heat pumps, which is a good thing to do, it can distract the Canadian public with the fact that it is spending $8 billion on more subsidies through something called carbon capture and storage, which, all around the world, has already been shown to be highly expensive and highly ineffective. We are also spending hundreds of millions of dollars on nuclear technology, which is not a solution to the climate crisis.
We are putting money, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, into what we now own, a pipeline that we are all shareholders in, the Trans Mountain pipeline, for a horrible total of $21 billion. In other words, the government is spending more on putting the foot on the accelerator on the highway to climate hell than we are in avoiding that disaster.
610 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Feb/7/23 6:21:58 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, when the parliamentary secretary and so many Liberals before him use words like “bold and decisive” to describe the Liberal climate action, they probably believe it, but just for honesty's sake, let us take out “bold and decisive” and put in what it is, “incremental”. These are incremental things, like Christmas baubles on the Christmas tree, but they do nothing to ensure that our kids will have a livable world.
I do not envy my friends, such as the hon. Minister of Environment and Climate Change or the Prime Minister, but they have run out of time for wiggle room and run out of time for procrastination. I have been working on this issue since 1986, and governments before them have used up all that time.
We are now in a crisis, and the contest is between what is politically feasible and what is scientifically necessary. We are still playing with our children's future by betting on doing too little and leaving it until too late.
176 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- menumenu
- notificationsnotifications
- home
- mailmail
- searchsearch
