44th Parl. 1st Sess.
April 9, 2024 10:00AM
- Apr/9/24 1:07:19 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the world has experienced its hottest March on record, marking the 10th straight month of global temperature records being broken, according to the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service. That is a fact.
To my residents in Vaughan—Woodbridge, next week, on April 15, the Canada carbon rebate lands in their back accounts, lands in their mail and returns fuel charge proceeds to Canadians. Dollar for dollar, what we collected is remitted to the provinces, to those individuals. The average family of four in Ontario receives $1,120. We know that eight out of 10 families, where the backstop has been put in place due to lack of action on the provincial front, are better off. Specifically, middle- and lower-income families are much better off.
We owe it to our future generations, to my kids, to all the parents sitting in the House and to all the Canadians who have kids. We need to leave a strong economy and a healthy, clean environment. We have a plan. The opposition does not have a plan. They are full of hot air. We saw it this morning. I say that respectfully; they are full of hot air.
When it comes to fighting climate change, if we look around the world and look at the policies being adopted, whether it is in Australia, China or Europe, they are all moving to decarbonization. We know the world is going that way. We either get on the bus or stay off the bus and be left behind.
I thank my colleagues for giving me their attention today as we discuss an issue that is vital for the future of our country and our planet. Forest fires and other natural disasters are being exacerbated by climate change.
Over the past few years, we have seen an increase in the number and intensity of these phenomena, with disastrous repercussions on our ecosystems, our communities and our economy. The figures are alarming. In 2023, we set a new record, and not in a good way.
Last year, 8.8 million hectares burned, breaking the 1989 record of 7.6 million hectares. Our projections show that the situation is going to get worse if we do not take meaningful action immediately. Global warming is also causing prolonged droughts and heatwaves, creating favourable conditions for fires to spread.
In addition, the number of forest fires is increasing as melting glaciers and shrinking snow cover free up land that was previously covered in ice. These events are having a direct impact on our infrastructure, our agricultural systems, our water resources and the health of our communities.
The total cost of climate-related natural disasters in Canada is already significant, and it is steadily climbing. There were nearly $3.1 billion in claims related to natural disasters in 2023. In addition, more than 1.5 million high-risk households are unable to get affordable flood insurance.
Climate change cannot be denied, and its effects are indisputably being felt across the country. This is an urgent problem.
When I speak with my constituents, I tell them that we have to deal with climate change and we have to deal with the climate crisis. We know that we have a plan in place. The other party does not. It does not and it does not want to. It does not want to deal with problems. It does not want to deal with the crisis. It has these clichéd slogans that do not work and that spread misinformation. We know that we need to deal with this issue. We know that the economy is going that way. The global economy is going that way. We know that there is only one planet. We also know that there is a transition.
Yes, I absolutely support all of the energy workers out there working in Saskatchewan, Alberta, B.C. and Newfoundland and Labrador. We need that energy, absolutely. At the same time, we need a plan in place that takes us to a net-zero world, whether that is through electric vehicles or electrifying our energy system here in Canada. We see, all over the world, that this is happening. We need to do it smartly.
When the other side pontificates about “axe the tax”, that is nonsense. Conservatives do not have a plan. They just want to rage farm. They want to scare people. They want to provide misinformation. As an economist, I know that the price on carbon is not causing inflation. It is a statistical fact, yet they still want to propagate that.
Unfortunately, some people continue to deny the reality of climate change and minimize its impact on wildfires. However, the science could not be clearer: Global warming is an indisputable reality. We must act decisively to mitigate its impact and protect our communities.
That is why the Government of Canada has put in place a suite of measures to fight climate change and mitigate the risk of wildfires. A big part of that is putting a price on carbon.
A price on carbon is central to reducing emissions, whether it is on the industrial side or on the consumer side. Yes, we need folks to have alternatives, electric vehicles and thermal pumps or heat pumps. We need to make sure that our electricity system is moving toward being fully renewable and that our small businesses have the opportunity to lower their energy bills through smart programs.
We need all that stuff in place, but we need a plan in place. That is what is called responsible leadership. That is what a government is elected to do, to provide responsible leadership. It is not clichés. It is not misleading folks that climate change is not real, for God's sake, and not even believing in climate change and saying that there is no issue out there, when we just had the month of March as the hottest month on record for that month.
We need to be smart. We need to go where the puck is going or, as my daughters would say, where the soccer ball is. We need to make sure that we put those goals in the other opponent's net, i.e., have a competitive economy. That is what we need to do while we support those hard-working energy workers who are out there doing what they need to do, and I support them.
At the same time, we need to foster economic growth and job creation in clean technology sectors like renewable energy and energy efficiency. In provinces where the federal fuel charge applies, eight out of 10 families will get more money back through the Canada carbon rebate than they pay for carbon pricing.
Eight out of 10 Canadian families are made better off under the pricing pollution system. Folks may not want to believe that. That is fine, but it is the truth. In Ontario, on April 15, families in Vaughan—Woodbridge and across this beautiful province that I live in, and Canada is beautiful of course but Ontario more so, will receive their carbon rebates. I want to make sure that they know that.
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- Apr/9/24 1:21:40 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, there are times that I think we should do away with the video and the actual televised elements of not only the House of Commons but of committees as well, because it has become performative in nature. However, after listening to the comments from the member for Miramichi—Grand Lake, I am quite glad that this is televised so that Canadians can see the way in which members of Parliament engage in what is a really important topic around how we put forward credible plans to fight climate change, to reduce emissions and to follow the science that has been very clear around the world.
I have heard comments, particularly from the opposition benches today, that start to call into question whether they believe there is an imperative to fight climate change and reduce emissions. I look forward to the opportunity for them to ask me questions on that piece.
This is a really important national conversation about the mechanisms we are going to use to fight climate change, but let us get back to basics about why we are doing this.
As I mentioned, the science is very clear that there is a global imperative to try to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the global warming that is coming as a result. That goal, which is internationally recognized by countries around the world, is to try to keep global warming to 1.5°C or less, but certainly below 2°C. This is recognized as being an existential threat to the way in which we have been able to enjoy this planet, our communities and our country up until this point.
Some of the comments from my colleagues in the House raise the question about whether we are all on board on that initiative to reduce emissions, but let us just assume for a minute that the majority of Canadians are. We know the majority of Canadians know that science is real, that climate change is real and that we need to do something.
How do we go about incentivizing that change? I would submit that there are three ways to reduce emissions in the country. We can subsidize activities, whether they be new innovation or technology, to try to bring down emissions. We can regulate the activity. We can put in a pricing mechanism and allow the ingenuity of the private sector and the markets to reduce emissions.
By the way, each one of those comes with a particular cost. If we subsidize the activity in question, there is a cost to taxpayers. We can regulate, and I will give an example. In my home province of Nova Scotia, we have a goal of being off coal-fired electricity by 2030. The compliance cost associated with that objective comes with cost downstream to consumers. On carbon pricing mechanisms, the Conservatives love to talk about the price signal, the cost. They never talk about the way in which the money under the federal backstop is returned back to households and businesses. This is missing from the actual entirety of the debate, if we want to have reasonable and informed conversation about this.
Of course, we could do nothing, which I know some members in the House may agree with, that there is nothing to be done here. However, I have a statement from the Insurance Bureau of Canada that says that in 2023 alone, there were over $3 billion worth of insurable losses in the country as a direct result of extreme weather. That is a reality. The science is clear on the cost of doing nothing. I do not think any moral imperative would allow us to do that. Nor would the fact that this has a true cost to Canadians today.
Last year alone, my riding had massive flooding. We rebuilt a bridge. Let along the human cost, as we lost four people in my riding, but I do not want to exaggerate that or make that a political point, let us just look at the actual cost of rebuilding in our communities. Each one of us paid out of our pocket to be there on that. Each one of us is paying out of our insurance premium to clean up after the frequency of the storms that are happening more and more often as a result of this imperative. Therefore, we have to do something.
This government, as part of its emissions reduction plan, has said that we want to have a strategy to reduce emissions by 40% by 2030 versus 2005 levels. A carbon price forms a third of that goal. A carbon price is inherently a small-c conservative policy. I chastise some of my Conservative colleagues on why they do not believe in the power of using the private sector and using markets to reduce emissions, as opposed to government programs or regulations. Why do they not want the power of that to happen?
Economists are telling us it is the cheapest way to reduce emissions, but opposition members have made it their mission to denigrate the idea of carbon pricing without providing any alternatives on how they would actually go about this mission.
The motion before us today talks about calling an emergency meeting with the Prime Minister. I have the letter that the Prime Minister sent out about 10 days ago to the premiers, who had been writing to him about the federal backstop as a pricing mechanism. The end of the letter says, “We...remain open to proposals for credible systems that price pollution that reflect the unique realities of your regions and meet the national benchmark.”
The Conservative motion today should be encouraging the seven premiers in the provinces where they oppose the federal backstop to get together and have a conversation to come up with a different pricing mechanism. I guess it comes back to why carbon pricing matters. What is being lost in the national conversation is that there are billions of dollars of clean energy investment in our country that rely upon the fact that the price signal exists. If we sit down with any CEO who is exploring projects around decarbonization, he or she will say that the price signal forms an important basis of their investment decision.
Premiers across the country, including in my home province of Nova Scotia, have a price on carbon at the industrial level. Danielle Smith has talked glowingly about the fact that industrial pricing is a key mechanism to fight climate change and reduce emissions.
I find it ironic that the premiers will support that type of pricing, but they are unwilling to explore what else can be done. We know that the reason a federal backstop is imposed is because provinces had the opportunity to introduce their own pricing plans and either failed to do so or put forward a plan that did not meet the national stringency.
There is a unique opportunity for the seven provinces that have signalled discontent with the federal backstop to work together to establish, perhaps, a national cap and trade. It is something equivalent to what Quebec has with California, where there is an ability for larger emitters and the price signal to be higher up stream to allow us to focus on larger emitters without having that same price impact at the pump.
The premiers hold the pen on what is possible. They do not need to write to the Prime Minister. They need to write to each other. They need to get in a room and see if they are serious about putting forward a credible, carbon-pricing plan. The reason it has to be in each province is going back to the point I made around the economy, and that is the jobs that are associated with economic investment in the country.
When I look at this opposition day motion, I do, for the record, support the idea of a first ministers meeting. It is really important to get down to the facts of what is and what is not around this conversation. I do not think it has to happen tomorrow. Let us let the premiers come up with a pricing plan and let us get back to what this was about. The Prime Minister has said that if they do not like the federal backstop, there are options. They can either do it alone or they can work together to come up with what that might represent. I support that.
As a member of Parliament in this place, I did a lot of work on this side of the House to amend the federal backstop, not because I do not believe carbon pricing is an effective mechanism to reduce emissions and not because I do not believe that the rebate system back to households is inherently a bad idea, but I wanted that national policy to reflect rural and regional Canada in a way that I did not think it was doing in its original form.
I would invite my Conservative colleagues, if they do not believe in the federal backstop, to present a climate agenda themselves. They use the term “technology not taxes” without any conversation about how we pay for the technology, which the Leader of the Opposition talks about, and they negate the fact that, under the federal backstop, the money actually goes back to households.
The Conservatives will often go to the Parliamentary Budget Officer's report and look at the economic cost, so to speak, heading out to 2030. The PBO has made it very clear that he was comparing that plan versus doing nothing. He has made it very clear that both the cost to households directly and indirectly, the energy-embedded costs, still leave a majority of households better off.
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- Apr/9/24 4:41:54 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague, the parliamentary secretary, for giving me the opportunity to make a brief speech on today's motion. I thank him profusely.
I have been here for the full day of debate. Let me break down what the supply motion today from the Conservative Party deals with. It posits that we have a carbon tax crisis and suggests that the solution is to bring the premiers to Ottawa, or somewhere, and have a first ministers conference.
I am going to try to address two very large and complex questions in the next 10 minutes. One is the climate crisis, and associated with that, the role of carbon pricing. The other is the nature of our federation, the role of first ministers conferences and what else might work.
The first thing to do is to clearly state that there is no carbon tax crisis. The real crisis, the real urgency, is global warming and climate change. It is almost too late. Time is running out.
We have a very large climate crisis, which threatens all aspects of our lives in Canada. In British Columbia, in four days, 619 people died in the summer of 2021 because of a heat dome. Those were preventable deaths, but 619 people still died, according to the B.C. Coroners Service, which studied those deaths. In the same season, we had wildfires that also compromised our health and threatened lives.
That fall, we had the atmospheric rivers that were responsible for billions of dollars of infrastructure needing to be replaced, which was a huge hit to the economy. We also had the other side of the country dealing with hurricane Fiona, which lifted houses up along the shore of Port aux Basques and deposited them in the ocean. In other words, we have had loss of life, as well as unprecedented fires and floods that threaten lives.
We are seeing a climate crisis that requires us to pull together, yet how do we behave in terms of the question of a first ministers conference? I look at the European Union and at Canada, and I think we have a crisis where, for some reason, we cannot even think like a country. We act like a vulcanized group of federations that do not like each other very much. We have 10 provinces, three territories and one federal government, and we do not have our act together nearly as well as the European Union does.
It has 27 separate sovereign nation-states that are not part of the same country. In fact, they have countries that were, in my parents' lives, at war with each other: Germany and France. The European Union has 27 nation-states and 24 official languages. From the very beginning of addressing the climate crisis, going back to Kyoto in December 1997, the European Union came with a collective pledge, divvied it up among all the nations and started achieving it. Every single European nation more than achieved their Kyoto targets to well below 1990 levels, while Canada continued to soar above 1990 levels.
When Putin invaded Ukraine, the European Union said, “We'd better help Ukraine and make sure it can get electricity, because clearly Putin wants people to freeze.” It took a matter of weeks for the European Union to tell Ukraine it was going to plug Ukraine into its electricity grid. We cannot get Quebec hydroelectricity into Nova Scotia, where the electricity is still generated by coal, because we cannot get Hydro-Québec to work with Emera in Nova Scotia to deliver zero-carbon hydroelectricity. We cannot get our clean electricity from southern Canada up to Nunavut so it can stop burning diesel. Why is this? We do not seem to be able to coordinate very well.
I will look at the history of first ministers conferences. We had a lot in the past, and maybe it is not the best way to get action. If we look back at the Mulroney government, action on acid rain was not taken by pulling everyone together into the same room. Mulroney's genius on this was to get one deal at a time bilaterally. If they were going to shut down the pollution that causes acid rain, they started with the easiest of the provinces, the one that polluted the least but was having a lot of damage. Prince Edward Island was the first bilateral deal between the federal government and a province, Canada-P.E.I.
The last one was the federal government and Ontario, because Ontario's Inco smelter was the single largest point source of acid rain causing pollution in all of North America. One at a time, we got deals with each province all the way across; the Mulroney government then told the Americans that it was coming to them with clean hands. It had already cut its pollution in half, so the Americans should do the same; in that way, they could clean up acid rain.
Mulroney did have a lot of first ministers meetings as well. If we look at his history on this, Pierre Trudeau had five first ministers conferences, some of them historic. Repatriating the Constitution was a rather big first ministers meeting. Former prime minister Mulroney, whom I have mentioned, had 14 first ministers conferences; Jean Chrétien had seven. However, they came to a grinding halt under Stephen Harper, who, over a nine-year period, had two, one in 2008 and one in 2009. The current Prime Minister, over a nine-year period, has held three. It is not a great record in terms of collaboration, but at least there were far more first ministers conferences than under Stephen Harper.
Are first ministers conferences the way to go? How do we do it? What is the best way to get our country to think like a country? Today, April 9, happens to be the 40th anniversary of the day that the House unanimously passed the Canada Health Act. I was reminded of this fact by our former colleague and friend Jane Philpott, who has written a book about how we need to collaborate for health care.
We do not have a carbon tax crisis. I would say we have an affordability crisis right across Canada. There is no question. The carbon tax plays, according to every economist, a minuscule role in the affordability crisis. We have a health crisis. Family doctors are not available to everyone. Is health care a right in this country? That would be a good place to have a collaborative first ministers conference. Could we do that? We certainly have a climate crisis. How do we address that? How can we get ourselves to pull together?
Canadians pull together when the climate crisis hits home. When people are out of their homes because of floods or fires, we know Canadians pull together. We still have no national firefighting force or plan for it. We do not have water bombers sufficient to deal with the summer of climate crisis fires that we can expect to see. There is so much more we could do if we tried to figure out how to get collaboration to occur.
One thing we need to do is agree that electrifying almost everything is one of the best ways to reduce emissions, and the best way to make that reliable is to treat the grid like a battery. Let more people produce. Let more people into the market. Let indigenous nations produce solar and wind. Let coastal communities produce tidal and wind power and sell it into the grid, and when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining, pull it out of the grid.
Going back to Europe, Denmark's excess wind is sold to Norway. Norway takes that excess wind power, pumps it up into reservoirs and lets it flow down to create electricity when the sun is not shining in Denmark. This is not rocket science. For God's sake, as Canadians, we know we are the same people and the same communities. We basically love each other, and we have to start acting like a country, because the climate crisis threatens our kids' future in a real way that carbon pricing does not. Carbon pricing, at long last, has gotten some reduction in emissions. However, the truth of the matter is that, for so long, the government in Canada, regardless of Conservative or Liberal, has been so busy trying to build up the fossil fuel industry and throw it tens of billions of dollars in subsidies that we have not confronted the problem.
The problem is big polluters. We need to address that. We need to move off fossil fuels. We need to do it quickly while we still have time to save our future. We need to tax the excess profits. So far this year, Shell has had $28 billion in profits and paid it out to its shareholders. For Heaven's sake, this is not rocket science. We can get this right. Let us move this debate to solutions.
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