44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 2, 2023 10:00AM
- Nov/2/23 10:36:21 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the petition, signed by residents of Saanich—Gulf Islands, starts by recognizing that Canada is legally obligated, under the terms of the Paris Agreement, which was signed and ratified by Canada, to the goal of attempting to hold the global average temperature increase to no more than 1.5°C. We are now at 1.1°C, and we are already seeing dramatic and devastating impacts of the climate crisis.
The petitioners therefore call on the Government of Canada to take bold climate action. They particularly call on the government to do the following things: set ambitious targets for reduction of emissions; set a national price on carbon; arrest growth in oil sands and other fossil fuel production; end the export of thermal coal from Canada, which was a promise made in the 2021 election; and invest in the transition to a carbon-free, decarbonized economy, one with strong and sustainable jobs and a strong postcarbon economy.
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- Nov/2/23 10:37:36 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I present a petition today on behalf of members of my community who indicate that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned us repeatedly that rising temperatures over the next few decades will bring widespread devastation and extreme weather. They also note that we are certainly feeling the impacts in Canada today, with increased flooding, wildfires and extreme temperatures and that addressing this climate crisis requires drastic reduction in greenhouse emissions to limit our global warming to 1.5°C. The petitioners also indicate that the oil and gas sector is the largest and fastest-growing source of emissions, and in 2021, the federal government committed to cap and cut emissions from the oil and gas sector to achieve net zero by 2050.
The petitioners call on 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 the necessary targets that Canada has set to reduce emissions by by 2030.
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- Nov/2/23 10:41:14 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I rise today to present a petition from my constituents. They point out that the impacts of climate change are accelerating in Canada and around the world; Canada's current GHG reduction targets are not consistent with our fair share to meet the global goals agreed upon in Paris; subsidizing fossil fuel production is not compatible with the stated goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions; and the government's continued support of fossil fuels puts our future in danger.
They, therefore, ask the government and the House of Commons to fulfill Canada's obligations under the Paris Agreement through a just transition off of fossil fuels that leaves no one behind, eliminating federal fossil fuel subsidies and halting the expansion of fossil fuel production in Canada.
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- Nov/2/23 11:12:29 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am confused. We have heard the opposition talk about the fact that the Alberta NDP has been pushing back against what the government has done, yet the Alberta NDP put forward an emergency motion in our legislature that said that the legislative assembly recognized that carbon dioxide emissions contributed to a changing climate. They talked about wildfires, evacuations and extreme weather events. Then they went on to talk about the fact that we needed to apply the same programs across the country for home heating. However, the Conservatives in Alberta voted against it because it had references to the need for a climate plan.
We have not heard this from the Conservatives yet. What is their climate plan? Could the member tell me what they plan to do to deal with the biggest crisis of our time right now, the climate crisis? As far as I could tell from her speech, she does not even admit it is real.
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- Nov/2/23 1:31:23 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to join in the debate today. In Saskatchewan, in 2021, total GHG emissions were 67.1 million tonnes. Saskatchewan's GHG emission intensity dropped 18% from 2005 to 2021 because of innovations like carbon capture and sequestration. We have stored over five million tonnes of carbon in carbon capture over the last five years.
My question for the hon. member is this. Seeing that Premier Moe has come out and said that Saskatchewan residents are not being treated fairly, obviously the expression “a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian” is not true for the Liberals anymore. What is her response to Premier Moe's statement that he will not collect carbon tax anymore, and to the fact that Saskatchewan has lowered emissions per capita more than any other province over the last five years?
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- Nov/2/23 1:35:22 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, this is what I would say to the hon. member. I live in downtown west Toronto. That is where my riding of Davenport is. My constituents want the federal government to keep moving as aggressively and urgently as possible to reduce our emissions to meet our targets. I think they understand that the transition costs money. I think that they are very pleased with our plan for a price on pollution and that anything else we can do to continue to provide support to Canadians as we transition to meet our 2030 and 2050 targets would be supported.
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- Nov/2/23 1:36:34 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the CPC motion is to drop the carbon tax not only on oil temporarily but also on all heating fuels temporarily.
Believe it or not, I actually have friends in the Conservative Party, who I think like me through my sometimes philandering political ways. My friends in the Conservative Party may be surprised to hear I actually approve of the carbon tax, and I am in favour of the announced Maritime exemptions.
The Leader of the Opposition took the rather unusual step of appearing on Thunder Bay TV a few days ago in order to tell the people of Thunder Bay that the members of Parliament for Thunder Bay are basically useless because we did not get the same kind of exemption for natural gas and propane as the people in the Maritimes got for oil. Now, people all across Canada get the exemption for oil.
In response to what the Leader of the Opposition had to say to this motion, let me start off by saying, and I think this is really important, most people know that 80% of people actually get back as much as, or more than, they pay in carbon tax. In addition, people in rural areas get 10% on top of that. Now, because of this announcement, that will be going up to 20%, including in northern Ontario. That is certainly justified because people in rural areas are often dependent on fossil fuels. They have further to commute, and they cannot resort to using mass transit. I am in favour of all those things.
Why is the present plan withholding carbon tax on only oil and not on other fuels? There are good reasons for that, and I am going to talk about four reasons.
First, the cost of heating one's house with oil is more expensive than with other fuels, particularly in the Maritimes. I want to mention some figures from a recent CBC report on the subject. Home heating oil in P.E.I., with the carbon tax, costs $47.87 per gigajoule of heat energy. Propane in Ontario costs $39.33 with the carbon tax. Natural gas in Saskatchewan is $12.09.
To reiterate, that is a total of $48 for oil and down to $43 if we do not include the carbon tax, which we are removing. Propane is around $39, and natural gas is around $12. The bottom line is that people who heat with oil have to pay a lot more to heat their homes than people who heat with other fuels.
Second, there are other differences with oil. One is the fact that oil produces more greenhouse gases than other fuels. The best is natural gas, and the second best is propane. In terms of low-hanging fruit, the best bang for one's buck is to get people off oil and into a green transition.
Third, because the carbon tax is based on tonnes of CO2 produced, and oil produces the most CO2, the amount of carbon tax paid on oil is higher than on the other fuels.
Lastly, and this is an important one, when a lot of older homes were built, they had oil furnaces in them. As I grew up in Kaministiquia, outside of Thunder Bay, we had an oil furnace.
In the years since the 1960s and 1970s, a lot of people have transitioned to cheaper forms of fuel. The people who have not are often the people who could not afford to transition, and that leaves us in the ironic situation that the people who are least able to afford the fuel will have to pay the most. Both my party and I are not unsympathetic to such people, and that is why we are dropping the carbon tax for a limited period of time for those people.
In terms of a long-term solution for people on oil, certainly heat pumps are part of the solution. As oil is dirtier, getting those people to transition to green sources of heating is certainly something that is desirable from an environmental perspective. We already have a program that offers $10,000 for low- and middle-income families in order to buy heat pumps.
In addition to that, and this is the one difference in what people in the Maritimes are getting that we are not getting in Ontario, they are also getting an additional $10,000, which is $5,000 from the province and $5,000 from the federal government, if they want to put in a heat pump. That is because those provinces agreed to do it. If Ontario wanted to do it, I am told we, too, in Ontario could.
I think this is important: The Conservative Party is not just suggesting a temporary pause on the carbon tax on heating fuels. It wants to get rid of the carbon tax altogether. It wants to axe the tax. Frankly, I do not agree with that, and I find it a little difficult to believe. Why does it want to get rid of the carbon tax when, in fact, a lot of Conservative economists actually think the carbon tax is one of the most efficient ways, if not the most efficient way, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions?
Furthermore, a lot of Conservative economists like it because it is a market-based intervention rather than a regulatory intervention. Some of the many, perhaps they are not Conservative, but they are not really left-leaning, institutions that approve of carbon tax and carbon pricing include the American Enterprise Institute, a centre-right American think tank.
In 2009, in response to the question, “[What is] the better approach to climate change?” Its answer was, “A direct tax placed on emissions of greenhouse gases. The tax would create a market price for carbon emissions and lead to emissions reductions or new technologies that cut greenhouse gases.”
Of note, in 2023, like some other Conservatives, it seems to have changed its position.
Some other groups, again, not exactly left-leaning institutions, that support carbon tax are the World Bank in 2023, the Business Council of Canada in 2019 and the Ontario Chamber of Commerce in 2021. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce, in a 2018 endorsement, said, “Carbon pricing is probably the most effective mechanism of emissions reduction.”
Subsequent to this, it emphasized that the carbon tax should be flexible and competitive. Certainly with this, we are seeing some flexibility.
Even the Conservative Party, in the last election, ran on a platform that included a carbon tax. I know that members of the Conservative Party deeply believe in their convictions, but it appears that when the political winds blow another way, their convictions seem to blow away, too, and they have to come up with new convictions. Now, they actually oppose it.
I am somewhat shocked by the Conservative opposition to the carbon tax, particularly given what would seem to be the almost daily climate-related calamities we hear about, both in Canada and around the world. For example, a heat dome in B.C. recently killed over 600 people, mostly elderly people. Wildfires burned down the town of Lytton, B.C. and forced the evacuation of people in Alberta, Northwest Territories and—
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- Nov/2/23 1:49:53 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am assuming that he is asking me to interpret the motivation of the Conservative Party in bringing forward this motion. I cannot really comment on their motivation. As to removing the carbon tax on the GST, I do not really have much comment on that.
As for who is going to benefit from this, and why we removed the carbon tax on oil, we clearly did it because the people who pay the highest price for oil and who are the least able to afford it are people with oil furnaces.
The NDP should appreciate that we are targeting people who are the most adversely affected while maintaining our position that the carbon tax is, again, one of the most effective ways of dealing with climate change and of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
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- Nov/2/23 5:13:04 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise again today, but it does feel like Groundhog Day. It must be a dozen times that we have had this same debate on the carbon tax since the member for Carleton became the leader of the Conservative Party. It is ironic because the same party ran on putting a price on pollution in the last election, and now, for probably the twelfth time, we are having this debate about cutting it.
The Conservatives are masquerading about this being an affordability measure and the reason that the cost of living challenges are high right now. However, earlier this week on the finance committee, we heard from the Governor of the Bank of Canada, who said that the price on pollution was only responsible for one-sixth of one per cent of the inflation that we are seeing right now in Canada. Also, since 2020, the carbon price on home heating oil has only increased by 12¢ a litre to a total of 14¢ a litre, while the average price for home heating oil is now 75¢ higher.
Canadians are overwhelmingly feeling the impacts of geopolitics and fossil fuel inflation, but this is not because of climate policy. What is boosting the price of fossil fuels in Canada? What is responsible for that other 63¢ a litre, which is five times more than the price on pollution?
That, of course, would be the illegal and unjustified war of aggression that Russia is waging in Ukraine right now and what that has done to global energy markets. It is sad we are not hearing the leader of the Conservatives stand up for Ukraine or in support of the people of Ukraine in repelling this unjustified invasion.
Also, OPEC is taking on measures that are constricting the supply of oil. However, rather than criticizing these measures, the Conservative government in Alberta rolled out the red carpet for Saudi Arabia and, indeed, said that we should follow the advice and projections that Aramco has for fossil fuel use in the future.
Obviously, the Conservatives say nothing about the record profits of the fossil fuel sector, which is soaking up that extra 63¢ a litre, and it is gobbling that up at the expense of everyday Canadians. We know that, since 2022, the oil and gas sector in Canada has made a $30-billion increase in profits, or a 1,000% increase since 2019.
We know that putting a price on carbon is the most efficient way of reducing emissions. It is why the right-of-centre government in British Columbia, the former B.C. Liberals, brought this measure in and, of course, the current Conservative MP for Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge was part of that team. The economy of B.C. has been one of the strongest in the country ever since.
While B.C. has its own system, the federal system is set up in a way that offsets the costs such that eight out of 10 Canadians get more back than they pay. This is not just a measure of influencing behaviour and a climate measure. It is an affordability measure. This, of course, is one of the reasons Canada's current emissions reduction plan has allowed Canada to reduce emissions by more than any other G7 country since 2019. Obviously, we have a long to go after the Conservatives did absolutely nothing for a decade. They not only did nothing, but also caused embarrassment to Canada around the world by undermining climate policy globally.
Members know the saying, “If you tell a lie enough times, eventually even you will believe it.” The Conservatives live in a post-truth world, and they must think that, by repeating this, they can eventually convince Canadians of the same as well. Not only is the argument they make on carbon pricing factually incorrect, but the Conservatives will also say that we have not met a single climate target, which is disingenuous because our targets on reducing emissions have always been 2030 and 2050, and we are making significant progress in getting there.
The Conservatives say that we have not reduced emissions, but by the measures we brought in, we have done the equivalent of taking 11 million cars off the road annually. They do not actually want people to have lower heating bills. They want them to be strapped in to ride the roller coaster of volatile fossil fuel prices.
In contrast, we know that we need to decarbonize how we heat our homes and how we transport ourselves. Studies have shown that a Halifax resident can save over $1,400 a year by switching from oil heating to a heat pump. Just yesterday, I spoke to a fellow British Columbian who was able to get over $20,000 in grants from the federal government, from the B.C. government and from Vancity to be able to purchase and install a heat pump in B.C., so there is already a lot of support for these types of measures. Together with switching to an electric vehicle, we know that families can save as much as $10,000 a year.
Our government is intent on making sure this happens with a series of incentives and programs. It is working. We know that just last year in British Columbia over 18% of new vehicles sold were zero-emissions vehicles.
Unfortunately, the only climate plan we are hearing from the Conservatives is that we need to burn more fossil fuels. Yes, it is hard to believe that we need to increase our production of natural gas as a way of reducing emissions. They say to use technology, but what technology would that be? Is it any technology that is actually available today?
They are not going to talk about any of that technology. They are going to talk about technology that is unproven and that maybe a decade from now we will be able to use. The Conservatives talk about things such as small module reactors and carbon capture, which have not been proven and are not ready to use today. This is what we call greenwashing.
Instead, we see the Conservatives giving new meaning to cancel culture. We have seen the Government of Alberta very recently put a six-month moratorium on the renewable energy industry, which has been growing rapidly in the province and represents a $33-billion economic opportunity. We have seen, in this very House, the Conservatives filibuster and oppose the changes to the Atlantic accords that would create the foundation for a vibrant green-energy future, including with offshore winds in Atlantic Canada.
I will say that this is because the Conservatives do not actually believe that climate change is real. In fact, this is exactly how they voted at their policy convention just two years ago. I would also posit that they do not actually care about affordability because, if they did, they would be saying something about the record profits that are being made, and they would be standing right here with us on measures that would ensure that people can get off the use of fossil fuels for home heating and for transportation.
Rather, this motion and the dozen motions that we have debated in the House on the carbon tax are just a distraction from the real reason that the cost of energy is high in Canada. The Conservatives would rather keep Canadians strapped into the volatile roller coaster that global energy prices are right now. We know that they are going to be a challenge as we live in a very uncertain world.
We are focused on reducing emissions. That is why we are rolling out this heat pump program and why we have been implementing all these different measures as part of our emissions-reductions plan. It is also why I will be voting against this measure.
We need to make sure that we utilize the most efficient program that we have at our disposal for reducing emissions, which is, of course, having a price on pollution. This is a measure that Conservatives used to believe in. We know the government of Stephen Harper was on board with this idea, and the Conservative Party ran on this in the last election. In my home province of B.C., we had a right-of-centre government that brought this in, and none of the doom and gloom that some people said would happen ended up happening.
With that, I look forward to some questions and comments from my colleagues.
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- Nov/2/23 5:26:47 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to thank my neighbour and colleague from North Island—Powell River for the question.
Indeed, we are seeing the impacts of the climate crisis right across the country this year, particularly with record wildfires. It has caused untold economic and human harm. It is incredibly tragic to see. That is why it is so important not only that we do everything we can to mitigate emissions, and the carbon price is a key part of that, but also that we make sure we continue to adapt to a rapidly changing climate.
As we do that, we need to make sure that we keep affordability front and centre, and that is why we are offering a rebate, so that eight out of 10 Canadians will get back more than they pay. At the same time, it is very much up to the provinces and territories that have their own systems as to how they want to operate carbon pricing in their jurisdictions.
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- Nov/2/23 5:27:53 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today and implore colleagues to support the common-sense and fair-minded motion before us today. For those watching at home, the motion reads:
That, given that the government has announced a “temporary, three-year pause” to the federal carbon tax on home heating oil, the House call on the government to extend that pause to all forms of home heating.
The motion is about the carbon tax, but it is ultimately also about being fair to all Canadians, regardless of region and home heating source. That is what this motion is asking for: fairness.
It also acknowledges something else, in direct response to the assertion made this morning by the member for Thunder Bay—Rainy River. He asserted that the carbon tax is working and that it is worth the immense cost to the constituents in his expansive riding, many of whom pay a lot to do things such as heating their homes and getting around.
I want to lay out for the House that the carbon tax is not working and is not worth the cost. In the heart of this motion is the fact that, after eight years of Liberal government, not only is the carbon tax not working, but it is also exacerbating the inflationary crisis and financial hardship for Canadians. This is another reason Conservatives have put the motion forward today.
Ahead of our Wednesday morning caucus meeting and as winter temperatures began to set in across the country, the Leader of the Opposition announced that Conservatives would in fact force a vote in the House of Commons on Monday to extend a three-year carbon tax exemption to all forms of home heating in every part of Canada. The exemption was announced by the Prime Minister last week for Atlantic Canadian home heating oil.
I know that the temptation for Liberal and perhaps NDP colleagues will be to continue to toe the line the Prime Minister took this week and vote against this motion. Perhaps the Bloc will as well. This line was that no additional carve-outs on the carbon tax would be forthcoming.
However, that position would be a mistake, both morally and politically. If anybody in this chamber cares about public support for climate action, the inflation crisis and, frankly, keeping their jobs, they should vote in favour of this motion. Here is why: While inflation and the cost of living remain the top electoral concerns for Canadians, a very recent survey by Leger suggested that about 70% of Canadians are worried about climate change. However, support for keeping the Liberal signature climate policy, the carbon tax, only registers with the support of 18% of Canadians.
The reason for the vast delta, that gap between public concern for addressing climate change and support for the climate tax, is something that few NDP, Liberal or Bloc intelligentsia appear to have considered. This blind spot is now both biting them in the rear politically and preventing Canada from meeting its emissions targets.
What is the reason behind that gap? It is that the carbon tax is failing to move consumer preferences away from high-carbon products and practices in the way Liberals promised it would, and Canadians know it. In the middle of a generationally high cost of living crisis, all Canadians, even those very concerned about climate change, are unwilling to pay for a policy they know to be ineffectual. Put differently, people will only choose alternatives to things such as driving carbon-powered vehicles and heating their homes with carbon-based fuels if other options exist and if those options are readily available and affordable.
Those circumstances may be partially available in more temperate and highly populated regions of the world, but that is not so much the case across the rest of our country. Even though the Liberals, the NDP and, frankly, the Bloc, seem to be content with keeping the tax in this scenario, Canadians are not choosing to purchase alternatives; in most parts of Canada, they do not widely exist and are completely unaffordable.
If one is ever in the beautiful riding of Calgary Nose Hill, I encourage them to come and drive up a piece of road called Centre Street, which turns into Harvest Hills Boulevard. There is a beautiful laneway along a big chunk of that for a light rapid transit. For 10 years, I have been imploring different levels of government to build out light rapid transit in that corridor. That would pull 50,000 cars off the road every day. Yet, we do not see leadership from the Liberal government on building out this type of critical infrastructure that would actually deliver social inclusion for my community, and could materially reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Instead, we see this dogmatic adherence to a policy that does not work. This concept is simple to grasp for even the most politically disconnected Canadians, particularly when they fill up their car and pay a carbon tax, but have no public transit alternatives and pay a carbon-based home heating bill for six months of brutal cold with no other option.
There are LRT debacles in Ottawa. I encourage everybody to try to take the LRT to their place here in Ottawa tonight. I wish them good luck. Edmonton, Calgary and the greater Toronto area are perfect examples of this situation.
Another good example is that after nearly a decade of wasted time, greenhouse gas emissions and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the administration of the carbon tax, the Liberals have not managed to deliver alternatives to things like heating oil. The measures the Prime Minister announced this week, a decade late and thousands of dollars short, would not even pay for a Big Mac value meal for rural Canadians each month. Earlier today, the NDP member for Timmins—James Bay said as much in the debate when he said that in Canada, heating homes is not a luxury. He is right. It is not a luxury, it is a necessity. If people cannot heat their home, they freeze.
The Liberal member for Kings—Hants also said something similar when he said that if Canadians do not have the money to make a change to a different form of heating, then they are stuck. Stuck is a great way to describe the situation many Canadians find themselves in right now.
The question Canadians now want answered is how the Liberals and their coalition partners in the NDP plan to get them financially unstuck after a decade of failure. A decade of Liberal rule has also shown people that the federal government is not, putting it mildly, particularly good at building out the infrastructure, like public transit, beefed-up electrical grids or a national system of EV charging stations needed to do things like pull gas-powered cars off the road.
The Liberals expect people to pay a carbon tax, with no alternative. They expect people to pay a carbon tax on home heating, with no alternative. That is the record of eight years of Liberal government. The carbon tax is not working and yet the Liberals expect people to pay for it in the middle of winter, on their heating bill.
However, the Liberal government does seem to be good at one thing, blowing a lot of tax dollars and political attention on waste and scandal, like the SNC-Lavalin scandal, the WE charity scandal, the ArriveCAN scandal and the foreign interference crisis. None of those things would bring inflation under control or address climate change.
The Liberal government's record on both fronts is abysmal, and it does not want to be held to account on that front. The government is not meeting its climate targets. It is just taxing Canadians with a policy that does not work.
Further to this point, this week's serious whistle-blower allegations regarding allegations of gross misappropriation at Sustainable Development Technology Canada, an agency that is supposed to spur the development and deployment of emissions reductions technology, will undoubtedly further erode public trust in the Liberal government's capacity to provide lower-cost alternatives to carbon fuels.
I want to read from this article, because I do not think people at home have heard much about this scandal. It just broke this week. Somebody named Doug McConnachie, assistant deputy minister at Innovation, has been working with whistle-blowers on this file, and they recorded him. This is what came out of the recordings when they were looking at the misappropriation of funds in this giant slush fund that is supposed deliver low-cost alternatives and combat climate change.
This is from a CBC article:
By late July, McConnachie was convinced certain spending decisions were badly handled, including the payments of nearly $40 million during the pandemic that was not based on precise needs and did not require follow-ups.
“It was free money,” he said....
I know there are a lot of people in my community who would like free money. This was free money designed to combat climate change that went to some Liberal cronies. We do not even know how, and the people who made these decisions still have jobs. The government has known about this for months or years. Those people still have jobs, and the Liberals expect us to believe that they care about getting inflation under control or that they care about climate change.
The article goes on: “‘It was free money,’ he said, before making an analogy with the controversy that affected Jean Chrétien's Liberal government in the early 2000s.” “Affected” is putting it nicely. It was brought down. “‘That is almost a sponsorship-scandal level kind of giveaway.’”
This is a fund that was supposed to address climate change in Canada, and it turned into, as everything else has with the government, a slush fund for Liberal cronies. People who care about climate action and care about getting inflation under control should not look at the Liberal government, because it does not care. Its members just virtue signal on these things and give away tax dollars to their friends while people are expected to pay tax on home heating in the middle of a Canadian winter. That it disgusting. That has an impact on climate change. Again, how do those people still have jobs?
Members do not have to take my word for all of these facts, because the results are laid bare in recent government reports that show that even with the carbon tax, Canada will still miss its 2030 emissions targets by close to 50%. I have heard so many Liberals get up today and talk about forest fires and the impacts of climate change, yet they are dogmatically supporting a policy that does not work and that, according to the Governor of the Bank of Canada at the finance committee, is affecting inflation in a major way. Tiff Macklem said this at committee yesterday. The Liberals are dogmatically adhering to a policy that does not work when they know that Canada is on track to missing its emissions targets by 50%. Canadians know this. They know the carbon tax is not working.
There is proof of these facts in recent political trends too. The Liberals' capitulation on the tax on home heating oil should have been viewed as an inevitability for even the most lay observer. The signs have been present for months. For example, in August, a Nova Scotia provincial riding that had been a safe Liberal hold from time immemorial was flipped by provincial Conservatives due in part to the unpopularity of the federal Liberal carbon tax.
Within the federal Liberal backbench there has also been extreme dissent over this issue, likely due to the sustained precipitous drop in polls that the party has seen. These incidents have followed nearly a year of high-profile campaigning by the leader of the Conservative Party against the tax. I have heard colleagues in the Liberal Party complain that we have brought motion after motion in this House to fight the tax. They are absolutely right. We are going to keep doing it, because it does not work and it is costing Canadians.
Now that same crisis has overlaid the tax and it means millions of Canadians are facing the prospect of choosing between heating and eating, never mind considering, as some of my colleagues are talking about, buying expensive alternatives that might not even exist in their regions. That is the most bourgeois concept I have ever heard. It is much like when the member for Edmonton Centre said that everybody can buy a heating pump. Does he not know that people in his own community cannot even afford their rent?
The Prime Minister's late-stage partial capitulation on removing the tax for heating oil but not other carbon heating fuels also risks creating perverse incentives, like the one mentioned by Rural Municipalities of Alberta, which suggested that the Liberals' partial tax exemption may generate higher demand for higher-emitting heating oil in certain circumstances. Keeping the tax's regional inequities will also further divide our country at a time when we need to unify. The world has changed, and those in our country need to be strong, not pitted against each other by inequitable policies that do nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in our country.
Contrary to the opinions of many left-leaning pundits, after eight years of climate failure and the creation of an inflationary crisis, no one here should continue to lean into this tax. It needs to go.
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- Nov/2/23 6:46:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise in this evening's adjournment proceedings. I am pleased to be able to rise to pursue a question I originally asked on June 7 of this year.
It was in question period and I had the honour to address my question directly to the Right Hon. Prime Minister. We could actually feel the smoke in Parliament that day. I do not know how many of my colleagues remember that, but on June 7, the forest fires across Canada had reached the inside of Parliament. As I said in my question, the Ottawa bubble had been pierced by the reality of the climate crisis. We felt it in the chamber. There was smoke in our eyes. Our eyes were burning and it brought home forcibly that we are in a climate emergency.
My questions to the Prime Minister were directly about what a government would do if it understood that it was an emergency. I know the Liberals continually claim that they have done more for climate than any previous government. That is possibly true. Certainly, the climate plan put forward under the government was never as complete or as effective as it could have been if Paul Martin's government had not been brought down on November 28, 2005. Money was in place in the 2005 budget and the plans were stronger and more comprehensive.
However, here we are and it is 2023. Time is literally running out. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has told us clearly that in order to hold to 1.5ºC global average temperature increase, which is not a political goal but a goal required by physics and chemistry to ensure a livable climate for our kids, global greenhouse gas emissions must peak and begin to drop rapidly by 2025.
That is why António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, has said that continued investments in fossil fuels and fossil fuel infrastructure is “economic and moral madness”.
We started talking about the forest fires this year. All around the world, scientists have tracked Canada with alarm. We had a fire season that started earlier and lasted later. In total, it burned approximately 19 million hectares. We also had floods that took lives in Nova Scotia. We also had fires that extended as far as evacuating all of Yellowknife. Both in total area affected and in the number of people affected and lives disrupted, nothing should have said so clearly to the Liberals as this forest fire season that it is not enough to put in place policies on one hand to reduce greenhouse gases, if we keep subsidizing fossil fuels with the other hand.
Now is the time to bring in an excess profits tax on the fossil fuel industry, which is bringing in $4.2 billion as Motion No. 92 would have it. Now is the time to cancel the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion before wasting a single additional dollar of public money. Now is the time to say that if we are serious about reconciliation, we do not drive that pipeline through Stk’emlupsemc te Secwepemc Territory. Now is the time to understand this is an emergency and we act like it.
From now on, we take it so seriously that building fossil fuel infrastructure and expanding fossil fuel production will stop, and stop now.
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