- Member of Parliament
- Member of the Board of Internal Economy
Deputy House leader of the government
- Liberal
- Kingston and the Islands
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 68%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $112,228.33
- Government Page
- Mar/22/24 12:35:37 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I have three petitions.
The first is with respect to environmentalists throughout the country, who are calling upon the Government of Canada to move forward immediately with bold emissions caps for the oil and gas sector that are comprehensive in scope and realistic in achieving our targets as set out for 2030.
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- Feb/1/24 11:04:36 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I certainly agree with my colleague from the Green Party on this. The reality is that this false narrative or red herring reminds me a lot of the one that we hear quite often from Conservatives about Canada's fossil fuels being the cleanest in the world, as though that is some reason why we should not seek to do better. Rather than doing something about a problem, their solution is to exploit our resources because they are slightly more cleaner than other jurisdictions.
We know that what it really comes down to is that Canada is a leader. We are a G7 country. We benefited from the industrial revolution immensely. It is to the benefit of every citizen in our country, like all our other G7 partners. We have an obligation to the world to be at the forefront, to lead the charge in terms of changing our environmental practices throughout the globe.
This idea that we can somehow dismiss the issue away because we are a bit better than some other countries is a huge red herring. It is what we hear time and time again from Conservatives and it is getting pretty stale.
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- Nov/2/23 4:09:05 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am not sure if I can help the member understand, because she thinks that EV batteries will spontaneously explode and does not think that electric cars work in the winter. If that is where I am starting from when trying to help somebody understand something about environmental impact, I do not think I am in a good place, and I probably will not be successful.
What I will say is this. When we talk about why we are doing this specifically, despite the fact she probably will not understand, it is because we know that oil is the dirtiest form of energy and we need to get off of it. What we are trying to do is give relief to Canadians so they have the ability to move toward a heat pump, which is astronomically cleaner than oil. That is the objective here.
Conservatives always like to talk about half of the equation. They like to completely leave out the other half, and the other half is helping people transition to heat pumps.
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- May/15/23 12:29:58 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-5
Madam Speaker, I take note that this debate on a time allocation motion about an environmental protection act really has nothing to do with the issue the Conservatives keep raising.
The only thing they can talk about, when it has to do with the environment, is Montreal and what it does with its sewage system. If they really wanted to help Montreal, perhaps they would talk about helping Montreal with infrastructure to upgrade the capacity, so it is no longer put in those types of situations.
That seems to be the go-to when it is anything related to the environment. We are talking about a piece of legislation that will significantly overhaul the way we look at environmental protection in our country for generations to come. I am wondering if the minister can talk about, and I know that she already has, and highlight some of the specifics of what this legislation will do to improve the quality of life of Canadians for generations to come.
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- Feb/7/23 1:50:49 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is another day and another wasted Conservative opposition motion. I will note that this is the seventh time within the last year that the Conservatives have brought forward a motion that is either a carbon copy of this one or something very similar. I guess the Conservatives will not take no for an answer from the rest of the House, which continually votes against this.
The reason I find this to be so amazing is that every single Conservative sitting in this room right now, every single Conservative elected to the House of Commons in the last election and every single Conservative candidate who ran in the election in 2021 ran on pricing pollution. They all ran on it. It was key.
It took the former leader of the opposition something like 500 days to come up with a plan on the environment, and all he did was copy what we have, although he tweaked it a little and made it more like an air miles program whereby people got reward points and could get environmentally friendly products. That was their plan. That is what they ran on. They all ran on pricing pollution. I hate to say it, Mr. Speaker, but so did you. Everybody ran on pricing pollution—
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
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- Dec/8/22 4:36:13 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, perhaps they are embarrassed.
However, here is the best part about it. I will read what members of the Conservative Party said when they released this plan prior to the last election.
The member for Durham, as we know, brought forward the plan, because he was the leader at the time. He said, “We recognize that the most efficient way to reduce our emissions is to use pricing mechanisms.”
The member for Calgary Centre, who I know has asked questions challenging this in the House today, said, “I think it's an evolution for parts of our party—but there's also many parts of our party that have been pushing forward for environmental solutions of all types.” This is a sitting member who is supportive of it, and this was what he said when he ran in the last election.
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
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- Oct/20/22 3:20:27 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Brian Mulroney spent a decade pushing the U.S. government to improve legislation to control acid rain. When George Bush came along, he agreed to it and adopted what Brian Mulroney, a Progressive Conservative, had been pushing for a decade. Let us just think about that. Brian Mulroney had a massive impact and effect on environmental policy throughout North America. That was a Progressive Conservative government.
Unfortunately, what we have here is something completely different. There is no possible remnant of Brian Mulroney and the representative from my area, Flora MacDonald, left in what is across the way.
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- Sep/27/22 3:59:46 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Winnipeg North.
Here we are, once again, debating this concept of a price on pollution. Like the member for Winnipeg North said a few moments ago on a question that he had, the Conservatives are just flip-flopping back and forth on this issue repeatedly. It is like Groundhog Day when we get here to discuss the price on pollution.
I am going to read something for us. This is a proposal and it is called the “Personal Low Carbon Savings Account”:
Canada’s Conservatives will work with the provinces to implement an innovative, national, Personal Low Carbon Savings Account.... Canadians will pay into their Personal Low Carbon Savings Account each time they buy hydrocarbon-based fuel. They will be able to apply the money in their account towards things that help them live a greener life. That could mean buying a transit pass or a bicycle, or saving up and putting the money towards a new efficient furnace, energy efficient windows or even an electric vehicle.
This is from the 2021 platform that the Conservative Party of Canada ran under. Here we are, just around a year since that election, and once again Conservatives are back to railing against this idea of pricing pollution, when all of the members who sit in the House ran on this very platform with the words that I just read out to us. They ran on the idea of pricing pollution.
We get to this place and, once again, Conservatives are trying to suggest that pricing pollution is not the solution, trying to play, in my opinion, to the lowest common denominator here, to enrage people in order to get them to react in a certain way to government policy, but it is policy that they agree with. It is policy that 14 out of the 31 OECD countries agree with. Pricing pollution is the solution to dealing with carbon.
It is very simple. It is just about saying that it is not free to pollute. It is just like when one is manufacturing a product and one has waste that is produced out of the product. If we take that waste, what do we do with it? Sometimes we can recycle it if we are lucky. Sometimes we can recycle it at a premium and we are actually making money, but sometimes we have to pay to recycle it. Sometimes we have to pay to put it in a landfill. It is the exact same concept.
We heard members from across the way, earlier today, talking about a market mechanism or trying to influence the way that people make consumer decisions. Well, it is also the way that corporations make decisions. I will point out to us that this is not just about individuals making decisions.
Umicore is going to be breaking ground just outside of Kingston, actually in a Conservative riding, the riding of the member for Hastings—Lennox and Addington. This will be the largest battery manufacturing plant in North America for electric vehicles. They are set to break ground in 2023 and be fully into production by 2025.
The Prime Minister came to the announcement of that opening back in the summer of this year. Who was there? The member for Hastings—Lennox and Addington, a Conservative member, who was so excited to see this new opportunity in her riding, as she should be.
What I found really interesting though is that the question was asked of the CEO of Umicore as to why they had picked Loyalist, which is right outside Kingston, instead of the other options. Another option was Detroit, Michigan, and there was another location in the States. They were debating and deciding among this short list of locations.
The president for Umicore said that one of the defining reasons why they chose Ontario and, in particular, Loyalist was that they were a company that was producing a sustainable product and they wanted to make sure that sustainable resources went into the sustainable product that they were making. Because the vast majority of their production is done with electricity, they knew that the electricity in Ontario was cleaner than the electricity in the other two locations they had to choose from.
Now we are seeing corporations making decisions based on sustainability. It is no longer an issue of just individuals talking about making the smart, green, energy-efficient choices. It is about corporations investing and saying they want to go and be located where they have access to energy that is not produced in an environmentally unfriendly way.
I go back to the point that we have been through three elections now in which we have been talking about this. In 2015, we ran on the idea of pricing pollution. We were elected and we implemented the idea. Conservatives railed against it. In 2019, the electorate had the opportunity to weigh in on that legislation. The electorate decided that it was in favour of seeing through pricing pollution, because we know that the majority of the parties in this House support pricing pollution.
What happened in 2021? The Conservatives kind of came around and the previous leader, the member for Durham, said that they seemed to be losing the war on this front and perhaps people are in favour of pricing pollution and do not think it should be free, so he put it in their platform. He said they would run on this concept and tweak it a bit to be more like a rewards program, which is what they did, but they still ran on it. Still the electorate said no, the Conservatives' half-baked kind of pricing scheme that they were proposing was not good enough and the electorate was going to stick with the plan that had already been put in place and adopted.
Here we are, years later, five or six years into this since the legislation passed, and we are still debating this. We have been through multiple elections since then. I cannot understand why the Conservatives continually rail against this.
I heard the member for Cumberland—Colchester talk earlier today about letting provinces determine their own fate instead of forcing these schemes on them. That is exactly the point. The whole point is that we have set standards. This was done back in 2017 when the legislation passed. We said we were going to establish standards and that if the provinces' own programs met those standards then they did not have to have the federal government's backstop.
In fact, many provinces and territories meet the standards, including British Columbia, Northwest Territories, Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. All of these provinces meet the standard and do not have the federal backstop of pricing pollution.
Some of the provinces are somewhat there, such as Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario, and the balance do not have anything in place and therefore needed that federal government backstop. It is a way to be equitable across the country and all provinces and territories with regard to how aggressive we have to be on this, but it is about letting provinces determine their own path, providing they can meet those requirements. That is exactly what we have seen. For the member for Cumberland—Colchester to somehow suggest that this is not in the provinces' hands is just disingenuous.
One of the things that Conservatives routinely leave out of this debate is the fact that, yes, the price of carbon will go up, but the rebate also goes up. That is why this is a market mechanism. That is why this is not a tax. It was never intended to be a tax. It was always intended to be a market mechanism to encourage decision-making, not just among individuals but also among corporation stakeholders, away from carbon emissions and toward cleaner and more environmentally sustainable options that could in turn produce a cleaner economy for us. Therefore, it is extremely important that when we have this discussion and when we talk about this, we need to remind people that the rebate goes up as well.
I would remind members that the rebate in particular will be going, primarily because of the decisions that are made in terms of the purchasing, to those individuals who need it the most. That is what we have seen and that is what the data supports. We know that ensuring that we are providing that money back will continue to ensure that people have options to pollute less by making the decisions they make.
It goes without saying that I will be voting against this opposition motion. We are well beyond this discussion. We have had it a number of times before and we have had three elections on this, including one in which the Conservatives supported pricing pollution.
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- Apr/25/22 12:44:46 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, this government has set an ambitious goal of seeing all vehicles that are currently being sold in Canada be net-zero-emitting by 2035 as a commitment toward environmental sustainability and moving toward the electrification of vehicle fleets throughout Canada.
I am wondering this. Could the member comment on the importance of that in order to reach our sustainability goals?
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