- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 66%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $148,586.11
- Government Page
- May/30/23 1:54:24 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to start by saying I will be splitting my time with the member for Burnaby South.
Let me start by going back to what I think is important. What we have before us today is a motion that sets a way forward for dealing effectively with the real problem of foreign interference in our democracy. Let us go back to what that motion actually says because most of the debate has said nothing about that.
The first thing it does is call on the right hon. David Johnston to step aside from his role as special rapporteur. Having issued his interim report, he says that he intends to keep working, but even in that report he says that the fact that he is there is an obstacle to a public inquiry.
Very clearly, I think Parliament will end up calling on him to step aside to make way for the public inquiry New Democrats have been talking about now for weeks. We were the first ones to put forward a motion at PROC, and the first ones to put forward a motion in this House, calling for a full public inquiry.
What is different about the motion this time is that we have specified in the motion that we should have all-party agreement on who should lead that public inquiry so that we maintain the public confidence that, for whatever reasons, the right hon. David Johnston has lost as the special rapporteur. Let us get all-party agreement working through PROC on the person, and let us get all parties working through PROC, the committee of Parliament, on the mandate to review foreign interference from all states, not just China. The last part is, of course, that this report come back before the next election.
That is what it is. It is a clear plan for how we proceed from today, something that I expect we will be voting on tomorrow. We will see where that leads us. This is a difficult problem for Canada because we are an immigrant nation with large diaspora populations from many countries around the world, and inevitably those people keep close relationships, not just with their families but also with their culture and their countries of origin. Many maintain dual citizenship. Obviously, there will be those close relationships, and they are not inappropriate in and of themselves. People want to maintain their culture and their contacts, and many governments promote building those relationships.
What becomes a problem is when that relationship building crosses a line into interference in our democracy. We have clear evidence that that interference has taken place, as I said, not just by China but also by India, Iran and many others. What we need here is a study that shows us both the scope of the problem and how we could effectively respond to it. I do not believe there is any way to get that without the public inquiry.
There is a separate interference concern that I have always held, which is not subject to this motion and not subject to the special rapporteur, and that is the concern about interference of private interests from abroad in Canadian democracy. We had a very serious example of that having taken place with U.S. dollars supporting the convoy that was parked outside the House of Commons, which was calling for the overthrow of the Canadian government. There were more than 51,000 donors, documented, from the United States, giving several million dollars to that attempt to interfere with our democracy. That, unfortunately, is not covered. What we are talking about here is state interference in our democracy, which is a serious problem.
Unfortunately, the report from David Johnston only muddied the waters. From the beginning, this respected Canadian was put in an impossible situation. His report leaves many questions unanswered, including who changed key briefing documents for the Prime Minister, and it leaves some unasked. How could we get a report without even talking to Elections Canada about what happened?
The waters have been further muddied by the refusal of the Conservative and Bloc leaders to accept a briefing on foreign interference, as though this would somehow silence them, yet we have heard very eloquently today from the member for Durham, the member for Vancouver East and the member for Wellington—Halton Hills, all of whom have received confidential briefings, yet were able to speak very clearly on the important issue of foreign interference after those briefings.
The last thing I want to say is that I have difficulty understanding the arguments of the Conservatives and the Bloc that the NDP needs to bring the government down over this issue. If we were to bring the government down over this issue, we would go to an election where we have done nothing about foreign interference, where we do not know how big it is or how to respond to it. This motion we have proposed today clearly specifies a public inquiry should report back before the next election, so we would have a chance to counter that foreign interference and not go directly into another election with the same problems that we have seen before.
I hope to see all parties support this motion, but frankly, I do not expect to see the government support it. It has been stonewalling the public inquiry from the beginning.
Where will we be after Parliament votes? I hope this will pass. I hope the special rapporteur will then step aside. The government should then realize there is no point in further stonewalling a public inquiry and will then work with the other parties to get that public inquiry going as soon as possible.
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- Feb/7/23 11:37:04 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak, once again, on the important topic of climate change. Unfortunately for the Conservatives, I think we have had seven motions on the carbon tax and not a single one that talks about the problem of climate change.
We know that even if we had stabilized climate change in 2015, the costs already would have taken $25 billion off of GDP growth in Canada. Therefore, the economic costs of not acting on climate change are quite large.
We can talk about economic costs all day long, but we also need to talk about other direct costs like fires and floods. We need to talk about health care costs, increased lung problems, asthma problems. We need to talk about the results of fires with respect to smoke, and drinking water quality, as toxins are released into the atmosphere and end up in our drinking water.
In all those things, we also need to talk about the actual losses suffered by families and individuals.
We had a huge heat dome in British Columbia and across western Canada in 2021. In the week from June 25 to July 1 of 2021, the B.C. coroner's office estimated that there were 619 heat-related deaths, 619 families losing loved ones as a result of an event, which the Columbia Climate School of Columbia University studied very carefully and laid squarely at the feet of climate change. It said that there were two factors that caused that heat dome. One was the disruption of the jet stream and the other was the warming of oceans and of the soil.
Instead of expecting something like a heat dome once every 100 or 200 years, the Columbia Climate School at Columbia University now says we need to expect those kinds of events once every 10 years.
During that week, the village of Lytton set a new record for a temperature in Canada, 49.6°C. The next day, after setting that record, a wildfire swept through the town, killing two people and destroying the entire town of Lytton. More than 200 homes were lost.
We can talk about large numbers in climate change, but when we actually look at what happens to individuals, to families and to communities and what will happen increasingly often as climate change proceeds, it seems misdirected to spend all our time talking about a carbon tax, misdirected for two very good reasons. One is, again, the fact that the larger impacts of climate change will cost far more than any climate-related carbon tax. I have not even talked about things like the drop in agricultural yields and the loss of fisheries that are coming up, all of these things we see on the horizon as a result of the climate change.
I forgot to say at the beginning, Madam Speaker. I will be splitting my time with the member for Vancouver East, so I apologize for that.
When we are talking about the Conservative motion today, the Conservatives continue to repeat and bring back their slogan, and I hesitate to repeat it myself, which has something to do with something tripling.
In fact, we know that nothing has actually tripled. In fact, we know that where families will face increasing costs directly through fires and heat-related costs, they will also face it in increased insurance premiums for their home insurance, as insurance companies attempt to recover their losses from these climate disasters.
In fact, if we look at the increase in the carbon tax, which is designed to reduce our emissions and has been proven as one of the most effective ways to do so, on April 1 of this year, the tax will increase from $50 per tonne to $65 per tonne, and I do not see any system of math where that is a tripling.
When we look at the increase of the tax on a litre of gas, it goes from 11¢ a litre to 14¢ a litre. Again, there is no tripling there. Also, that is way less than the inflated profits that the oil companies have been squeezing out of all of us during this climate crisis.
Focusing on the carbon tax seems misdirected at best, especially when over half the households in Canada are not affected by the carbon tax when it comes to things like home heating.
In British Columbia, we have a different scheme. Therefore, taking the carbon tax off home heating would nothing to relieve costs for British Columbians or Quebeckers, who also have a different scheme.
I will politely call this a sleight of hand with figures. We know right now that eight out of 10 households get more back on their rebates than they pay in carbon tax. The Conservatives like to cite a parliamentary budget office report, which talks about 2030 and about estimates of what might happen in seven to eight years from now. Again, speaking about tripling and using figures like those being used here is at best inaccurate.
What has the NDP said about things like home heating costs? At this time of inflation that is certainly a great concern. I remember that one of the times this motion came forward we asked the Conservatives to accept an amendment to their motion to support removing the GST off home heating for every household in Canada and they refused. They were so focused on the carbon tax that they refused a measure that would have helped every Canadian household meet both the costs, specifically of home heating, and the generalized squeeze that they were finding on their incomes and on their ability to make ends meet at the end of the month.
In his opening speech on this motion today, the Leader of the Opposition talked about nuclear power. I have heard some other members in the House, including some on the government side, talking about nuclear power as if it somehow provides some kind of solution to climate change. The member for Carleton said that it would be a good way to combat emissions. Let us take a look at that backward-looking, rear view of the world.
Nuclear power is far too expensive and far too slow to provide any solutions to our emissions crisis at this time. We need to reduce emissions right now. The average planning time to construct a new nuclear facility is over 10 years. That is from start to finish. We know when construction delays are factored in that the actual time for a new nuclear plant to come online around the world now is about 15 years. That is way too late to address the climate crisis we are in now. Let us say we ignore that and nuclear power were to go ahead. What would it cost to build nuclear power as opposed to renewables?
If we take the all-in costs right now, the best figures I could find for solar and wind power, including the cost of storage and the cost of the networks that must be built, is about $2,000 per kilowatt hour of production for renewables. That has dropped 69% over the last decade. Technology is improving and with economies of scale, the cost of renewables continue to drop each and every year.
Over the past decade, nuclear costs in contrast increased 25% in that same period. There is no indication that those costs will drop any time in the future. If we are talking about large-scale nuclear power projects, the costs are estimated at over $10,000 per kilowatt hour. That is five times the cost of renewables. That is five times as much energy one could produce for the same investment from renewables over nuclear, and of course it could be done now instead of in 10 to 15 years.
If we are talking about what some people like to talk about, the new technology of nuclear, which is small-scale nuclear reactors, the cost for small-scale reactors is estimated at $16,000 per kilowatt hour. That is 16% more than a large-scale project and eight times mores than renewables. Therefore, by any stretch of the imagination and by any measure we want to use, it is foolish to talk about nuclear energy as a solution to our climate crisis. Instead, we need to be talking about renewables.
The other part, which I have been interested in ever since I became a member of Parliament, is that these jobs in renewable energy use many of the same skills that workers have in the current energy industry in places like Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland. We need to focus on investment in those renewables and investment in creating those well family supporting jobs in renewable energy.
We cannot really ask ordinary working families to pay the cost of this transition with their jobs and with their houses. We have to ensure that those new jobs in renewable energy, those sustainable jobs, will be in place for workers as we head into a future where hopefully we can avoid the climate disaster that is on the horizon.
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