44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 7, 2023 10:00AM
- Nov/7/23 12:38:04 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, this is an incredibly important part of what we need to be talking about, moving forward to energy that is more economic and more environmentally friendly. However, what this motion is really addressing, though, is the fact that we need fairness for all people across the country, for people who are dealing with an economic crisis that is stressing them out and making it harder for them to decide on whether to pay for food, or heat or medication. The motion specifically focuses on this.
We have offered other ideas and motions that deal with those broader conversation, but we did not want to put all of that into a big motion, because it gets harder for people. This is what we are focusing on today. I look forward to continuing to work with every member in this place to move toward a greener economy that has environmental friendliness at the heart of it.
156 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Nov/7/23 12:39:09 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak in support of our party’s opposition motion.
This is what real climate action looks like: climate action that does not divide people, but brings people together; climate action that gives families and individuals struggling to make ends meet a break, while also reducing our carbon emissions; climate action that asks the big polluters, who have seen record profits, to pay for it.
We are in the midst of two different crises that must be addressed: a climate crisis and an affordability crisis linked to growing inequality.
Last spring and summer, we were confronted directly by the impact of the climate crisis. Record-setting wildfires covered large parts of the country, causing provinces to declare states of emergency and many residents to flee. Smoke blanketed cities across the country, including Winnipeg, where poor air quality kept people indoors and posed a danger to people with pre-existing health issues, including asthma.
What we saw over those months was a window into our future if we did not treat this climate crisis with the urgency it deserved. We cannot allow extreme weather events, which put the lives and health of people at risk, to become the new normal. It is not normal; it is a consequence of our failure to act.
Meanwhile, a growing affordability crisis is forcing a growing number of people in our communities to choose between groceries and rent, to choose between heating and eating. Grocery prices have soared, far outpacing the general rate of inflation and wage growth.
In Winnipeg Centre, which has the third-highest child poverty rate in the country, food bank use is climbing. In fact, according to a report by Food Banks Canada, food banks in Manitoba have seen a 30% rise in demand. In March of this year alone, there were 57,000 food bank visits, more than 20,000 of whom were children. Life is getting harder and harder for people who were already struggling to get by.
Who is not struggling? Canada’s big oil and gas companies. The top five Canadian oil and gas companies reported $38.3 billion in profits for 2022. That is an increase of more than double compared to their profits of $16.9 billion in 2021. That is shameful.
Suncor alone made over $9 billion in profit during 2022, an astonishing and shameful amount. Where is this money going? It is not going toward fighting climate change or making life more affordable for people. It is going to reward its shareholders and CEOs.
Speaking of CEOs, I want to talk about Imperial Oil. Brad Corson, the CEO of Imperial Oil, is the highest-paid executive in the Canadian energy industry. His pay almost doubled in 2022, up to $17.3 million. Imperial Oil is currently under formal federal investigation for a months-long tailings leak at its Kearl oil sands mine in Northern Alberta. Documents filed by the company showed it knew that tailings were seeping into groundwater for years before contaminated fluid was reported on the surface.
When my constituents miss a shift at work, they get their pay docked and they risk getting fired. When the CEO of Imperial Oil presides over an environmental catastrophe, he gets his pay doubled. It is an insult to hard-working people all over the country whose wages have not budged for years. That is just one reason why we need a windfall tax on the excess profits of big oil and gas companies.
Why a windfall tax? It is about ensuring that the big polluters, which are worsening the climate crisis, are paying for the action needed to address it. Right now, we know that is not happening. Major loopholes in the carbon pricing framework mean that oil and gas companies only pay a small fraction of the cost of their pollution, while 80% to 90% of their emissions are exempt. To take one example, Suncor, which I mentioned previously, only pays one-fourteenth of the full carbon price.
It would also generate significant revenue that we can invest in lowering people's energy bills, with home retrofits that reduce emissions and make life more affordable. How significant? The parliamentary budget office estimated that a windfall tax would generate $4 billion over five years. This could fund a program to make heat pumps and other retrofits free of cost to families that would otherwise not be able to afford them.
A windfall tax, as we know, is not a radical idea. The European Union, the U.K. and India are among those that have implemented one. Why? It is common sense. At a time when energy companies are making record profits and people are struggling to pay their heating bills, we need to turn a portion of those excess profits into relief for consumers. We can also use revenue from a windfall tax for a massive expansion of energy efficient home renovations for low- and middle-class Canadians. Home retrofits and heating pumps are a win-win-win. They reduce emissions, lower people's utility bills and create green jobs.
In Winnipeg Centre, many people would like to make these changes to their homes, but they simply cannot afford the upfront cost. This program should not be restricted to folks who only use a certain type of fuel to heat their homes. Whether they use home heating oil, natural gas, electric baseboard heating or anything else, they should have access to a program that lets them reduce their carbon footprint and reduces their monthly power bill. It is about how we get to net-zero emissions and how we bring millions of people along in the fight against the climate emergency.
Life is hard enough already for families and individuals in my riding who are working three jobs and skipping meals so their kids can eat. These are not the people who should be paying more to address the climate crisis. It is the big oil and gas companies and their CEOs who are fuelling this crisis, and we should be sticking them with the bill. We are running out of time to get this right.
Dividing people up by region and putting all the burden on individuals, as the Liberals are doing, will not get us there. Neither will burying our heads in the sand and refusing to even offer a climate plan, which is the Conservative approach. In fact, the Leader of the Opposition, the corporate champion from Carleton, is silent when it comes to the obscene profits being made by his oil and gas buddies. It is no wonder, because when he was sitting at the cabinet table, his government handed out $55 billion in tax cuts to wealthy corporations, including oil and gas companies.
It is time for a new approach, one that finally asks the big polluters to pay their fair share of the costs, one that gives families and individuals who are struggling real relief from the rising costs driving them deeper into poverty and despair and one that makes energy efficient upgrades available to millions of households that want to do their part for our planet but cannot because the costs are too high. Today’s motion is exactly the kind of new approach that is desperately needed. I urge the government and all parties of the House to support it and put us on a pathway to real climate action that lifts people up and gives them the help they need.
1254 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Nov/7/23 1:41:43 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, Canadians are facing the double crisis of affordability and climate change. It is no secret that Canadians from coast to coast to coast have been demanding action in the face of extreme weather events. There are countless numbers of families right across this country who were disproportionately impacted by wildfires, floods and terrible natural disasters that shocked entire communities. Those instances are not just one-offs. This is truly a pattern of disaster that is growing in intensity and growing in costs. I mean that. When I say costs, they are huge. Those are some of the largest costs in relation to our GDP that we have seen in decades.
According to the Parliamentary Budget Office, for example, extreme weather events caused our GDP to be 0.8% lower than it should have been if we had combatted climate change more appropriately. That equals to about $20 billion to $25 billion less on reported GDP. That is funding that could have gone to supports for people, such as seniors and young people, and to supports for hospitals. It is nearly Remembrance Day, and it could have gone to supports for veterans. That is real capital, real money, that is just being drained because the government lacks the courage and the will to implement real climate solutions.
On the other side, we have an official opposition party, with an official opposition leader who denies climate change even exists. That is plummeting us even further into a deficit. Imagine if we had, for example, even worse outcomes next year. God forbid we would have worse outcomes with worse wildfires and floods, and the number would get worse. It would be even worse if human lives were lost. I hope we can prevent that. We need real climate solutions and real serious leadership when it comes to climate change.
I would be lost if I did not mention that this is not the first time New Democrats have called for real solutions to climate change in addition to real solutions to fight poverty. There were many times and many occasions when we tried to do that.
It is not lost on me that Remembrance Day is coming very soon. I want to remind Canadians about a defining moment in our history when we rose to the challenges of global crises like we are seeing in terms of climate change. We do not have to look that far in our past to know that we have the solutions to combat things that would take away our future. That includes combatting the climate crisis.
Canada, early on, when it was a young country, was seen as a relatively small and poor country, a country that could not levy resources in order to tackle huge issues, but we proved the world wrong once before. Canada can play a role in being a global leader and ensuring everyone has a dignified, clean and safe future.
Tommy Douglas reminds us of a story of great Canadians who enlisted in our military in 1939 when Canada declared war on the terrible, fascist Nazi regime in Germany. For the first time in our history, we utilized the Bank of Canada and made it financially, fiscally and materially possible to feed, clothe and arm over a million men and women, and we put them in uniform.
At home, we did something even greater: We put everyone to work. The government organized over 100 Crown corporations. We manufactured things that had never been manufactured before. We gave our farmers and our fishermen guaranteed prices, and we produced more food than we had ever produced in peacetime. In addition, we created one of the largest merchant navies in global history. We did all that without borrowing even one dollar from outside Canada. We were able to do that. Our collective consciousness, our united effort and our true Canadian spirit were unified in order to fight the terrible fascist regime in Germany.
If we can utilize and restore our own will to ensure that we use the same resources to fight against poverty, social injustice and, yes, climate change, then we can in fact change our future for the better. We can change it for the next generation. New Democrats are calling, in this motion, for very serious solutions to very serious problems. It is no secret that climate change is having disproportionate impacts on our economy. It is also no secret that Canadians are struggling to get by. They are struggling to make ends meet and to pay the basic bills, which they have been working hard to pay their entire lives.
We are talking about something as simple as home heating in Canada, which we all need. The previous New Democratic member spoke about the important differentiation between needs and wants of Canadians. It is important that we delineate what those needs are and that we provide relief so those needs are met.
One relief measure is to ensure that the GST is removed from home heating. That is important because we made a tax commitment in this country to ensure all necessities would not have a tax burden on them. People need to eat and also need to heat. We need to make sure those important measures are dealt with.
I invite my colleagues, from both the Liberal and the Conservative benches, to think about that critically and to say that we can do something good for Canadians. Earlier this week, New Democrats supported a motion by our Conservative colleagues that called for the removal of the carbon tax from home heating oil.
We hope the Conservatives would support the removal of GST from all home heating as well. We think that is a better and a stronger policy. It would also ensure that more Canadians would have more money in their pockets, which is something that Conservatives talk about very often. I would invite them to support that very important measure.
When it comes to making sure we have a plan to reduce our liability and to reduce our dependence on higher forms of carbon-emitting fuels, it is important that we utilize technology. Every time we talk about or debate climate change in the House, the Conservatives rise to say their solution is “technology” without ever mentioning what that “technology” is.
When we have technology present for Canadians, like a heat pump, for example, that is growing in popularity, use and weatherability in Canadian climates, we see Conservatives reject those proposals. Why?
The NDP has real proposals and real solutions on the table that could save Canadians thousands of dollars, and our country millions and billions as decades move forward.
Finally, it is so important that we finance this, but we cannot finance this crisis on the backs of Canadians. Canadians did not make this crisis. They are showing up to work every single day and doing the hard work. They are trying to make ends meet for their families and doing everything right, but they are falling further behind.
All the while, those who claim to play by the rules get away scot-free by evading taxes. It is time that our country does what is right, and reins in the huge windfall profits of oil and gas companies. We have seen that kind of courage in this world once already. During the pandemic, we saw the Conservative government in the United Kingdom bring in a windfall tax because they saw what we all saw. The fact is that we are seeing unstable oil prices and, currently, some of the highest commodity prices in a long time, which are increasing huge revenues for governments, but not enough, apparently, to invest in real climate solutions to mitigate what could be future damages to our economy.
I would remind members that not long ago we saw massive issues in British Columbia. There were floods that essentially cut off an entire province by way of the supply chain to the rest of Canada. That had a real cost to Canadians. The impact was in the billions of dollars.
On top of that, we also saw consequential seasons of wildfires, drought and serious related issues that continue to exacerbate the economic impact of climate change on Canadians. This costs Canadians real money. Real, tangible money in their pockets is being lost because these disasters continue to destroy communities and ways of life.
We have the ability in our country to be as courageous as those veterans, years ago, who said they would serve our country so that tomorrow would be a better day. We have a chance to honour those commitments, to do what is right today for the next generation and to ensure that this motion passes. Then, we could have real, tangible solutions so that our kids would know we are taking the climate crisis seriously, so that our economy could stabilize by ensuring we have good revenues, and we could finally see a day when the affordability crisis would be under wraps from the efforts of this chamber.
Then, we could show Canadians that we can unite and do what is right. I invite all members to do what is right. Our children are watching.
1542 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Nov/7/23 2:42:14 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, as I have said a number of times, it is shameful that the party opposite has no plan to address a crisis that is facing all of humanity. I would tell colleagues that, in the modern age, having recognition and acceptance of the realities of climate change is critical to having an economic plan that can be relevant for the future.
What we hear is that the Leader of the Opposition will cancel the Volkswagen battery manufacturing plant, that he opposes offshore wind and hydrogen development in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, that he would get rid of the Canada Infrastructure Bank and that he would eliminate the small modular reactor project at Darlington. He is opposed to everything. At the end of the day, he has no plan for the economy and he has no plan for the environment—
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
147 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Nov/7/23 2:44:14 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, over the past few years, we have witnessed the impact of the crisis on media outlets across the country. That is why we introduced support programs.
I am obviously very shaken by the news of the 547 jobs lost. We will keep working on the various proposals. We are examining every option for supporting the media.
We now see the results of the Conservatives' constant filibustering in an attempt to prevent us from modernizing our laws. Had we been able to do it in 2020, when we first introduced the bill, those jobs might not have been lost. That is entirely on the Conservatives.
106 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Nov/7/23 2:53:10 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, we are seeing announcements at every turn, photo ops and great speeches, but despite all that, the commissioner of the environment is giving the Liberals a failing grade on the climate crisis. Canada is going to miss its target because we are still waiting for the oil and gas emissions cap. Under the Liberals, more public money is going to fossil fuels than in any other G20 country. That is unbelievable.
When will the Liberals wake up and take this crisis seriously? Will that be when the planet goes up in smoke?
94 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Nov/7/23 2:59:18 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, as I have said a number of times, it is important to actually have a plan to address critical affordability issues in a long-term way, but also to continue to address the climate crisis. Those are the measures that we have put into place.
I have to say again that I find it the height of hypocrisy that my hon. colleague across the way, who ran on a platform that included putting a price on pollution, gets up in the House today and actually says what he is saying. It is the height of hypocrisy.
98 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Nov/7/23 3:00:24 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, I think every party in this House is concerned about affordability issues, but the only party in this House that does not care about the climate crisis is the Conservative Party of Canada. It is the only party that actually has no plan to address it and does not even believe that climate change is real.
Yesterday, the Leader of the Opposition essentially said he would walk away from Canada's climate targets. He would walk away from every member of the international community. He would walk away from our children's future. He would walk away from a clean economy that would actually create jobs and economic opportunity across the country. Shame on him.
117 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- menumenu
- notificationsnotifications
- home
- mailmail
- searchsearch
