Hon. Mary Coyle: Senator Gold, on November 8, I attended a COP 27 panel at the Canada Pavilion on the importance of deep blue carbon. We know that the ocean is the most significant global storage depot of carbon on earth. It holds 50 times more carbon than the atmosphere, soaking up more emissions than all the world’s rainforests combined and that the North Atlantic is the most intense carbon sink on the planet. Of carbon, 90% is deep blue carbon, and the panel identified this as the “deep blue hole” in the Paris Agreement — a problematic gap.

Senator Gold, Canada’s Ocean Frontier Institute, led by Dr. Anya Waite, is spearheading an international initiative to observe, understand and predict the ocean carbon system in order to make more fully informed climate decisions. Other nations are aligning with this vision, and international conversations at COP 27 supported the creation of a North Atlantic carbon observatory.

Senator Gold, as Mark Carney and others have said, we cannot mitigate what we cannot measure. Will Canada take a leadership role in supporting this critically important climate initiative?

Senator Batters: Thank you for mentioning my home province of Saskatchewan and the wonderful people there in your speech. I just wondered if, when you were in Saskatchewan, you had an opportunity to see the world-class clean coal technology and carbon capture technology that Saskatchewan has developed and is trying to promote around the world, and the very hopeful future that brings for not only the people of Saskatchewan and Canada but potentially the world. In fact, I’m not sure if you knew this, but a very interesting statistic that I recently heard is that if China used Saskatchewan’s clean coal technology for only 15% of their coal plants that they’re developing and bringing on stream all the time, that would actually erase all of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions every year. I wonder if you’ve heard anything about Saskatchewan’s clean coal technology and the hopeful future that brings.