SoVote

Mr. Taylor Bachrach (Skeena—Bulkley Valley, NDP)

Jun/1/23 10:28:31 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to read a brief passage to my friend from Mégantic—L'Érable. It states: We’ll finalize and improve the Clean Fuel Regulations to reduce carbon emissions from every litre of gasoline (and other liquid fuels) we burn, turning them into a true Low Carbon Fuel Standard. Our improvements will include: Basing our Low Carbon Fuel Standard on British Columbia’s policy to achieve a 20% reduction in carbon intensity for transport fuels.... That is from the 2021 Conservative election platform, a platform that my friend from Mégantic—L'Érable ran under. Now the member is saying the exact opposite, and I am wondering if somehow we can harness this Conservative policy weather vane as a source of renewable energy. What are his thoughts?

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Context: House Hansard - 204 - Jun/1/23

Mr. Taylor Bachrach (Skeena—Bulkley Valley, NDP)

Jun/1/23 11:59:26 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak to this motion. I am struck by the fact that we are here, yet again, debating a Conservative motion to cancel a climate policy. It is like Groundhog Day, except in this case, every time the Conservative groundhogs poke their heads out of the ground, the weather is hotter, the wildfires are more severe and the floods are more frequent. This is taking place, of course, against the backdrop that my friend from Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie described very eloquently. In Nova Scotia, wildfires are raging. In Alberta, there are still 61 wildfires. I checked the portal last night to see how many there are. To date this year, they have had 555 wildfires in that province, and it is only June. This debate is taking place against the backdrop of oil and gas corporations raking in eyewatering profits, historic profits, profits so great that the CEO of Shell, one of the biggest oil and gas companies in the world, said that we should tax them. Of course, these profits drive inflation and make life more expensive for average Canadians. This is the backdrop against which we are having today's debate, yet on Monday I listened to a Conservative colleague from Red Deer, a very decent guy, talk about how climate change is not real, how CO2 is not a problem, how the people who warned us about things like acid rain in the seventies and eighties were snake oil salesmen, and how, without climate change, we would not have rivers. This is the kind of discussion we hear coming from the party that has put forward the motion before us today. This particular Groundhog Day, the Conservatives' target is something called the clean fuel regulation, a regulation that the government has proposed to reduce the carbon intensity of liquid fuels, including gasoline and diesel. The fuel regulations account for 26 million tonnes of greenhouse gas reductions in the government's emission reduction plan, which, putting aside the merits of the actual policy, indicates that it is being called on to do some heavy lifting in reaching the targets. We know how much difficulty previous Liberal governments have had in meeting their targets. I think that Canadians should look at this motion before us with some skepticism. I will lay out a couple of reasons why. The first one is the language that the motion uses. I think we have a responsibility as parliamentarians to communicate clearly and accurately to the people who we represent when we talk about policy, particularly policy that is so important and that can be complex. The Conservatives are calling a regulation a tax, knowing full well that regulations and taxes are different things. We know this. If we call everything the same thing, it does not work. That is the purpose of language, to differentiate between different kinds of things. I cannot imagine why they would be doing this. The only two reasons I can come up with is, first, they don't know the difference between a regulation and a tax. That cannot be the case because I know that many of my hon. colleagues are intelligent and educated people, so that cannot be why. What could the other reason be? Of course in this place it is against the Standing Orders to intentionally mislead the House, so that cannot be the reason. I cannot think of why they would want to conflate two very different kinds of policies: taxes and regulations. Perhaps, Madam Speaker, you know what that third reason might be. The second reason I think that Canadians should be very concerned about the motion in front of us is because the party proposing it, the party calling for this policy of the Liberal government to be cancelled, to be axed, has not provided an alternative. This is a pattern that we see. We just heard it from our colleague down the way. They say, “Oh, no, this plan doesn't work. We need a real, effective plan.” They never bring forward that real, effective plan so we can evaluate it against the plan that the government has put forward. Granted, the government's plan has many shortcomings. It should be evaluated and it should be costed out, but the official opposition never puts forward a plan that can be costed out or evaluated. In fact, the one time that it brought forward a climate plan that could be evaluated, it contained a lot of the same policies the Liberal government has put forward. I would love to read some of those. I am going to get to that a little later in my speech. Of course, this motion rests heavily on and draws heavily from a recent report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, and the many challenges with that report have been well documented in the media and by climate policy experts. I wish that the PBO had provided an explanation as to why he chose the highest possible cost estimate, the uppermost bound, as the basis for his estimations of cost. The $531 per household is not the expected cost. It is the maximum cost. Of course, there are many things that could prevent that maximum cost from being reached. For instance, the update of electric vehicles could be faster than expected or the biofuel industry could advance technology and innovate at a greater pace. All of these things are not only possible, but likely. Most important is that the PBO's report was silent on the cost of inaction. There is something called “the social cost of carbon”, which in 2020 was estimated by our public service as being $54 a tonne. We cannot compare the costs of the proposal in front of us to cancel a climate policy against the option of no action at all. That is not a fair comparison. We are talking about an existential threat, a threat that everyone in the House has acknowledged in this debate and previous debates. Therefore, we can only compare the clean fuel regulations the government has proposed against alternative policies, yet the Parliamentary Budget Officer, in a footnote, states very clearly that it is outside the scope of his work to compare the clean fuels regulations to other alternative policies that may achieve a similar end. Finally, the PBO has not explained in adequate detail what other scenarios may take place. We know there is great uncertainty about the path forward when it comes to climate action and how this policy interacts with other policies. There is a great amount of uncertainty, and overly simplistic conclusions, such as the one we have received, do not serve the public interest. It is surprising, and this has been raised previously in this debate, that the Conservatives do not like market-based mechanisms because, of course, that is the party that worships at the altar of the almighty market, yet the two policies they criticize the most are both market-based mechanisms that leverage the power of markets to find the most efficient and the least-cost way to reduce emissions. This is what economists say is the path forward. Personally, I am agnostic. What I want to see are effective policies that drive down climate pollution and give our kids a chance at a decent, stable future. However, we do not hear policies like that coming from the Conservative Party. All we hear is criticisms of the policies that have been put forward by so many experts. I was looking at the 2021 Conservative election platform, and I want to read members a passage because I find it quite interesting. It says in that platform: We’ll finalize and improve the Clean Fuel Regulations to reduce carbon emissions from every litre of gasoline...we burn, turning them into a true Low Carbon Fuel Standard. Boy, that sounds very familiar. It goes on to read: Our improvements will include: Basing our Low Carbon Fuel Standard on British Columbia’s policy to achieve a 20% reduction in carbon intensity for transport fuels.... The policy from the government reduces the carbon intensity by 15%, yet in the last election, the Conservatives were proposing the same policy, but with a 20% reduction. Therefore, I am not sure how we get this weather vane of Conservative policy. As I proposed before, maybe that weather vane itself could be a source of renewable energy that could drive down emissions. If it were not for all the hot air, that might be an opportunity. I am perplexed. If not these policies, then which ones? When are the Conservatives going to put forward a plan? Having no plan is not an option at this juncture. These aspects should concern all Canadians, and we do need to focus on affordability, but we need to have a serious debate in the House about serious matters. I am deeply troubled by the fact that the Conservative Party continues to conflate basic concepts to confuse Canadians on a topic that has so much import for our country and our world.

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Context: House Hansard - 204 - Jun/1/23

Mr. Taylor Bachrach

Jun/1/23 12:12:22 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is a very good point. I took note of his motion. He will not be surprised to learn that I support increasing the protection of old-growth forests in British Columbia and around the world, because of course, they are important sources of biodiversity and play an important role in protecting our climate. On the topic of biodiversity, though, there is an important tie-in to the clean fuel regulation that we are debating today, which is that, if we rapidly increase the production of biofuels, we need to ensure that safeguards are in place so it does not impact biodiversity, especially when we are using wood products to create those fuels, and so it does not impact food security when we are using farmland to create—

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Mr. Taylor Bachrach (Skeena—Bulkley Valley, NDP)

Jun/1/23 12:28:18 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I was just on Wikipedia, and I note that my friend from Newfoundland and Labrador ran for the first time, winning by a narrow margin, in the 2021 election on a platform that included the following, and I will just read it: We’ll finalize and improve the Clean Fuel Regulations to reduce carbon emissions from every litre of gasoline...turning them into a true Low Carbon Fuel Standard [and] Our improvements will include: Basing our Low Carbon Fuel Standard on British Columbia’s policy to achieve a 20% reduction in carbon intensity for transport fuels... That member just ran less than two years ago on a policy that sounds to my ear an awful lot like the policy he would be cancelling with the motion before us. Can he explain the difference?

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Mr. Alexandre Boulerice (Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, NDP)

Jun/1/23 12:43:40 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to quote a document, which reads as follows: “We’ll finalize and improve the Clean Fuel Regulations to reduce carbon emissions from every litre of gasoline...we burn, turning them into a true Low Carbon Fuel Standard. Our improvements will include: Basing our Low Carbon Fuel Standard on British Columbia's policy to achieve a 20% reduction in carbon intensity for transport fuels”. That comes from the Conservative Party election platform, so it is rather strange for the leader of the official opposition to be rising in the House today to contradict his own political platform. I would like him to explain how he thinks he can lower greenhouse gas emissions by increasing the fossil fuel production.

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Ms. Marilyn Gladu (Sarnia—Lambton, CPC)

Jun/1/23 1:28:57 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise in the House and especially today for this opposition day motion, which talks about how the first carbon tax would increase the price of gas by 41¢ a litre and how the second, the clean fuel regulations, would add 20¢ more to that when sales tax is included. This will further exacerbate the cost of living issues that people are facing across the country. What I want to do today in my speech is talk about what the carbon tax will do, talk about what it will not do and talk about what real solutions should be offered. First of all, what does it actually do? It increases the price of things. It is not just the price of gasoline that is going up, because it is an escalator. For example, if we look at food, it has increased in price, on average, by 12%, but some items of food are up 30% and 40%. When we are talking about a farmer who is producing the food, they will have to use more diesel and fuel to heat their barns and take care of growing their products and drying them. There is a carbon tax on that. To make it worse, there is a tax on the tax. The Liberals are applying tax on top of that, and it is a substantial amount of money. We are talking about $150,000 for a farmer. That is a real thing that they obviously have to pass on to the consumer. Then they are shipping the product to a processing facility, and there is a carbon tax on that and a tax on the tax. Then at the processing facility, depending on the type of processing facility, there is a carbon tax on emissions. Then we are talking about shipping it to the grocery store. Again, that is another carbon tax and a tax on the tax. Then we get to the grocery store, and it has to be put in refrigerators. If the Liberal do not buy them, that is another expense, but then they are spending more energy trying to keep the products preserved. What is happening is this is hurting individuals. Before the pandemic, the data reported said that half of Canadians were within $200 of not being able to pay their bills. Let us think about that. Then fast-forward to where we are now, where we have added a second carbon tax that is estimated, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, to cost each individual $538 a year. Half of Canadians were within $200 of not being able to pay their bills every month, and now the Liberals have added $600 more. That is on top of the estimated cost of the already existing carbon tax, which the Parliamentary Budget Officer says, depending on the province we live in, is between $1,500 and $3,000 a person. By the time all these taxes, carbon taxes and the tax on the tax get to an individual, we are talking about $4,000 per Canadian. That is a substantial amount of money. If we break that down by month, we are talking $300 a month, which puts us way over the 50% of people who could not pay their bills if they had an increase of $200. The Liberals are going to say that Canadians get back more than they give, but we know that is not true. I have seen my climate action rebate cheque come to me, $128.55 four times a year. Adding that up, it is nowhere near $4,000. It is absolutely a misrepresentation of the facts to say the government is giving Canadians more back. No, it is not. I am getting calls at my office, continually, from individuals who are saying they cannot afford to pay their bills and are losing their house. I have a lot of seniors in my riding, and some of them have had to go back to work at 74 years of age in order to afford heating, gasoline, groceries, the whole thing. That is what the carbon tax is doing. It is adding to inflationary pressures that we already have from the out-of-control spending happening on the other side. That is what the carbon tax does. Let us talk a little about what it does not do. It does not reduce emissions. It is a tax plan; it is not an emissions plan. If we look to who has met their Paris targets, our neighbours to the south have met their Paris targets, and they did it through emissions reduction technology and switching to fuels like nuclear, LNG and lower-carbon fuels. These are actual, concrete solutions. They put capital incentives in place so that businesses would put emissions reduction technology in place. That is how they did it, and they did it in four years. If we look at where we are, we were supposed to reduce our targets by 30% from the 2005 level. The 2005 level was 732 megatonnes and we are now at 670 megatonnes. In 20 years, we have reduced 60 megatonnes, but the target we have to get to is a reduction of 538. We are nowhere near the plan. In the approach the Liberals have, they talk about tree planting. They are going to plant two billion trees. Do members know how many trees we already have in Canada? We have 318 billion trees in Canada and this is two billion more. More trees are always better, but the reality is that recent reports said the Liberals have planted less than 2% of these in years. It is because the program that was introduced does not work. I know a great group, Climate Action Sarnia-Lambton, that wants to plant trees. I approached the minister and said that we have lots of volunteers who are willing to come out. They have all the tools. We just need the money to get the trees and get them in the ground. Do members know what I heard? We have to plant 10,000 trees or we cannot get any money. We have to start somewhere with a program that works a little better than that. That is what the carbon tax does not do. I have heard this a lot in the discussion today during the debate: Well, what about the wildfires and what about the floods? We are seeing severe weather events and we are seeing them at a frequency that we have not seen before. However, Canada is less than 2% of the carbon footprint of the world. We could eliminate the whole thing and we are still going to get all of those wildfires and all of those floods, because we have countries, like China and India, that are building coal plants. China is 34% of the footprint. What would be better is if we exported Canadian LNG. We could reduce the global footprint by over 10%. We could reduce five times our existing footprint. That is real climate action. Instead, 12 LNG projects have been shut down by the Liberal government. The Germans approached us. Germany decided to go down the green energy path, and they found out that it was so expensive that they got rid of it and went back onto coal and LNG. They approached us to get a contract with us for $58 billion, which we refused. The Australians used to have a carbon tax. They got rid of it. It made everything more expensive and it did not help them meet their goals. We have a situation where countries are in need of our fuel. We are the most environmentally responsible producers of LNG in the world, but we cannot get anything built because a Bill C-69 project approval thing was put in place. We have seen the disaster that the government is making with the Trans Mountain project. It was supposed to be $7 billion and is up to $30 billion, and it is not even built yet. The carbon tax hurts Canadians. It inflates their costs. People cannot afford to live. They are struggling. I know that Liberal MPs are hearing this from their constituents and they need to listen. What we need to do is have emissions reduction technology, get on lower-carbon fuels, export them to the world and work together to get a better planet. That is what we need to do and that is the vision on this side of the House.

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Ms. Marilyn Gladu

Jun/1/23 1:39:45 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, let me talk as a chemical engineer about some of the things I have seen that are very effective at reducing emissions. When I was the director of engineering at Suncor, for example, we had emissions reduction programs in place for all the refineries. We were able to reduce our GHG emissions by 25%. We were basically capturing the emissions and recycling them. Then there is carbon sequestration. Canada is a leader in this technology. It is a great carbon sink. That is a way of getting there. In terms of energy, 40% of the energy in Ontario is nuclear. Of course, nuclear is carbon-free, so expanding into small modular nuclear reactors, especially in the emerging world, which is on coal and heavy carbon fuels, is a great idea. I also mentioned LNG supplanting coal. It is a lower-carbon fuel and is environmentally responsibly produced here.

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Mr. Adam van Koeverden

Jun/1/23 4:30:07 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it would be remiss of me to go on at all, but it is great to know that they are attentive, at least. Putting a price on pollution is both effective and an essential part of any serious response to the global climate change. That is why all parties in the House, all 338 members who were out knocking doors in the campaign in 2021, committed to a price on pollution in one way, shape or form. We all agreed at that time that climate change was worth fighting, and that there were monetary, economic instruments, such as cap and trade or carbon pricing, that actually do the job. Back in 2018, Ontario had just that. The Province of Ontario used cap and trade. It was a very effective way of combatting climate change and ensuring that our emissions are not unfettered. I strongly believe that pollution should not be free. We pay for our garbage when the town or city comes to pick it up. We pay for sewage when we flush things down the toilet. We should also be accountable for what we put into the environment and into the atmosphere. The more we burn, contrary to what the Conservatives ran on in the last election, the more we do not earn. The more we burn, the more accountable we should be. Accountability and personal responsibility is foundational to Conservative thinking. I am surprised they spent so much railing against something that Stephen Harper, Preston Manning and so many others have proposed as very good ways to ensure we are fighting climate change from an economic perspective. We have seen carbon pollution pricing work all over the world. In Europe, emissions are declining across industries thanks to carbon pricing. It has been working in Canada as well. We have seen emissions come down thanks to our carbon price. We have also seen it work in British Columbia for over a decade. I would also point out that the Liberals brought that forward in 2008, at a time when many members of the Conservative Party were in that caucus. They thought it was a good idea to price carbon back in 2008. Climate change is worse in 2023, so I do not know why they have changed their mind and are now proposing that we get rid of a price on pollution when it has been so effective in British Columbia and Quebec. In Quebec, of course, it is cap and trade, which is another effective way to do it. However, the federal approach to pricing carbon pollution is designed with a focus on affordability. The goal is to reduce pollution, not to raise any government revenue. It does not do that. That is why we direct all proceeds from the federal system to remain in the province or the territory where it came from, and is used to keep life more affordable and to take climate action. I actually have the PBO report open on my desk, on my laptop. I was looking at which quintiles, which groups of Canadians, might pay a little more as a result of carbon pricing. It is always the wealthiest Canadians that tend to pay a little more as a result of having an extra car or a larger car, having a larger home to heat or having a more carbon-intensive lifestyle. Perhaps they tend to travel more often on airplanes. None of those things are bad. It is not a bad thing to have a larger vehicle or a larger home, it just means that people are probably going to burn more fuel and would have to be more accountable. I will say it again, accountability and personal responsibility are foundational to Conservative thinking. I think it is very strange that the Conservatives are railing against this. Wherever federal fuel charge proceeds are returned directly to households, eight out of 10 families actually get more back through the climate action incentive payments than they face in increased costs. I would also just mention that, in the Toronto Sun recently, there was an article in which the Parliamentary Budget Officer expressed quite a lot of dismay at the misuse and mischaracterization of the report. The Parliamentary Budget Officer does really important work. Perhaps I will read a quote about the Parliamentary Budget Officer. It says, “Yves Giroux said the report has to be put into context alongside the costs of all other climate policies, including doing nothing.” The cost of doing nothing is actually the most expensive idea, and that is pretty much what the Conservatives have been proposing, asking us why we do not just do nothing, get rid of the price on pollution and do nothing, which is the way they would do it if they were in charge. Canadians do not want us to do nothing on climate change. They want us to stand up and make sure that we are fighting climate change and demonstrating to the world that fighting climate change and growing our economy go hand in hand. The Parliamentary Budget Officer said, “I am concerned at times about looking at just one aspect of the report...looking at the big picture...is highly preferable”. Doing nothing would be extremely costly. He indicated that carbon pricing, as I said, is an effective way to lower emissions and that we should be looking at the full report, not just selecting little bits and pieces, and saying for the highest quintile, it is going to cost them money. The wealthiest Canadians tend to drive the biggest cars. The Ford F-150, not the electric version, was the best-selling vehicle in Canada over the last couple of years. Canadians tend to drive larger vehicles for lots of reasons. That is not a sin, but there is a reason to be accountable. That is what I think people ought to understand. It is all about accountability and personal responsibility. In 2023, quarterly climate action incentive payments for a family of four are $386 in Alberta, $264 in Manitoba, $244 in Ontario and $340 in Saskatchewan, so we multiply those by four. These payments also go to households in the Atlantic provinces, where a family of four will receive $328 in Newfoundland and Labrador, a little shy of $250 in Nova Scotia and $240 in Prince Edward Island. Families in rural and smaller communities are also eligible to receive a 10% increase. It is also worth pointing out that they are tax-free, and families can do whatever they would like with those funds. Pricing carbon pollution, as well as returning the proceeds to Canadian families and businesses, is an effective and affordable way to combat climate change while supporting the sustainability of Canadian communities. By returning those proceeds from federal carbon pollution pricing to businesses and industries through decarbonization projects and clean technologies, the Government of Canada is also stimulating that green step forward towards innovation and a green and clean future through business. That includes over $2.5 billion to small- and medium-sized businesses through those types of grants. Canadians want to take advantage of the significant economic opportunities in the low-carbon economy, and that includes through clean fuels. Countries and businesses around the world are making a major shift to lower- and non-emitting fuels, and Canada is in a powerful position to be the producer of those fuels in the future. I am glad to see that we are taking steps in those types of innovations going forward. We expect those regulations will pay dividends, and the impacts are going to be positive on the overall ecosystem in Canada. I want to close by once again thanking all the brave firefighters across the country, who are doing really hard and extraordinary work. They are risking their lives for Canadians, as they save them and protect homes from the destruction and danger of these horrible wildfires in so many provinces and territories across our country.

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