- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Green Party
- Saanich—Gulf Islands
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 61%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $112,862.18
- Government Page
- Nov/21/23 6:09:48 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank all of my colleagues in the House. After reading this important fall economic statement, like many of my opposition colleagues, the member for Elmwood—Transcona in particular, I am disappointed. We have an opportunity to do important, urgent things, but it is being ignored, overlooked. Why? I do not understand it. As the other members have already said, we have the ability to do this. Our fiscal position would make it viable, but it is being ignored.
We are disappointed that there is not more in this fall economic statement on the urgent crises facing Canadians on health care, housing, affordability, and especially on the multiple ways in which the climate crisis is costing us. It is referenced in the fall economic statement that one reason food prices have gone up is from multiple climate events, which have caused crop failures, and that caused prices to go up. Putin's invasion of Ukraine has obviously caused energy prices to go up.
However, one key reason food prices have gone up is that climate events around the world are causing breadbaskets to produce less. Places that produced a lot of food are now producing less. There are ways we could have used this moment of fiscal restraint to improve our climate record.
This may be the last chance I have to speak at any length about the climate situation before I am no longer able to speak in this place. That is not because of a health issue, but we do not allow Zoom from foreign countries, and I cannot participate virtually from COP28, which will take place in Dubai from November 30 to December 12. It usually runs late so perhaps December 13.
This is a moment when the Government of Canada should really be looking in the mirror. I mean, usually we would stop with the G7, because Canada has the worst climate record of any country in the G7. However, the United Nations just released a report on the eve of COP28, which assessed the climate records and performances of every country on earth and the gap between rhetoric and action. Out of every country on earth, not just the G7, Canada is maintaining the horrific record of being the worst. On the gap in the United Nations' “Emissions Gap Report 2023”, Canada has a 27% gap between promises and reality. The next worst is the United States with a 19% gap, then South Korea with an 18% gap and the U.K. with an 11% gap. All the countries of the developing world, known in UN parlance as the G20, have a 4% gap.
What do these gaps amount to? The Paris commitments that we took in 2015, which are legally binding commitments, were not to any particular target of x% reductions against x year, because the incoming Liberals in 2015 kept in place the Harper target from May 2015. It was a weak target, but it was not replaced until 2022, so there were seven years of the same weak target. The Liberals are not close to hitting the previous Conservative government's weak target.
We often say in this place that Canada has never hit a single target it has put forward on climate, but I will be more specific: We have never gotten the direction right. When we say we missed the target, it is like we were on a dartboard with the typical bull's eye effort and, “Oh darn, we were close”. If we were firing darts, the bartender had better duck, because we have never gotten the direction right. When we promise that our emissions will go down, they go up.
What we are shooting for in the Paris Agreement is hanging on to global civilization. There was an opportunity in the eighties and nineties, which my colleague from Elmwood—Transcona talked about, when his dad was in this place, the very Hon. Bill Blaikie, who was the environment critic for the NDP in the eighties when I first knew him. He talked about global warming and what we had to do to avoid losing our glaciers and avoid warming temperatures around the world. We had a chance to avoid all those things. We no longer have the chance to say that we can avoid the climate crisis.
Our addiction to fossil fuels and our greed are driving those in big oil, who say they know science but do not want to talk about it because all they care about is delivering profit to shareholders. That is not good law. In Canada, the law requires that corporations think of other things and that directors of corporations consider all stakeholders. By the way, future generations should count for something, but we have, in the last number of decades, lost the opportunities we once had to avoid climate change and global warming altogether because of greed, the addiction to fossil fuels and a commitment to developing them and continuing to shovel money to the wealthiest in the world. The billionaire class has a priority that we do not understand when compared to our own children and grandchildren.
Right now we had an opportunity to pay attention to this report from the United Nations on the eve of COP28 and reflect any of its urgency in this economic statement. We lost that chance too. I am always torn between anger and grief. How do I talk to my kids about this anymore? How many of our kids do not want to have kids because of what they see in this world? The opportunity was there for the Minister of Finance to cut costs.
We need to take a “green scissors” approach. We need to cut costs and save the billions of dollars that are currently shared among fossil fuel companies and no one else.
This fall economic statement talks about responsible fiscal management, yet, at the same time, the government continues to pour billions of dollars into fossil fuels through funding and subsidies. Why not stop the $31‑billion Trans Mountain pipeline project, which flies in the face of indigenous rights and impacts the future of our children and our own grandchildren?
We could cut costs and have more money for the things the government says it cares about: affordable housing, reducing costs for Canadians and cutting the costs of forest fires from one side of the country to the other. I noted a reference in the fall economic statement at page 6, which looks at what has happened to global economic activity and the contracting of the Canadian economy. It says, “part of this decline was tied to temporary factors, including a record-breaking wildfire season”. I do not think that is so temporary.
We have not hit a new normal. Some people are attempting to use that language. We are experiencing precursors of what will only get worse. As I started to talk about, our commitment in the Paris Agreement for all countries all over the earth was to avoid going above a 2°C global average temperature increase and try to hold to 1.5°C. This latest report from the United Nations says we are on track to over 3°C.
These are not political commitments. These are moral commitments based on the science that says if we do not act now, the window closes on our kids having a livable world. Many colleagues in this place talk about their fear of what the Conservatives would do after the next election. I have certainly heard from people a lot about that. It is so extreme that people are prepared to ignore the fact that those who are responsible for condemning our kids to an unlivable world are sitting on this side of the House in the Liberal caucus. We cannot ignore the reality that it has been on their watch, with the people who claim to be climate leaders. The Liberals should thank the Conservatives for the only thing that makes the Liberals look good, for every time that the Conservatives have stood up to say that they do not want any carbon pricing.
A better argument could be made. We could do things other than carbon pricing to reduce emissions. As I said, we could start cancelling billions of dollars to fossil fuel companies. We could put in place what the hon. member for Kitchener Centre has put forward in Motion No. 92, an excess profits tax on the obscene profits and war profiteering of big oil. We could do that, but we cannot continue to ignore it.
I know there are many Conservative members of Parliament who care about the climate crisis and their own kids. They want to be able to stand up and talk about that, but it is not the current brand. I know there are many NDP members who would also want to cancel the TMX pipeline, but then they would get in trouble with Rachel Notley. This is an insanity that we are in right now.
I want to say that there are some things in the fall economic statement that are good, and it is about time. I am grateful that, at least, they are finally cracking down on Airbnb and the profiteering on short-term rentals that takes affordable housing out of our markets. I am glad to finally see that it takes the GST and HST off of mental health services, particularly for therapists and for going to talk to a psychotherapist or to a counsellor. I cannot believe it has taken so long. Astonishingly, that is it for measures for public health in this fall economic statement.
Again, the Green Party has consistently, in every platform over many elections, called for a national pharmacare plan, not filling in the gaps for people who do not have access to drugs. We are the only country in the world with universal health care in which coverage of pharmaceutical drugs is not automatically included. If we did that, as we know from the Hoskins study or the report that came out of a number of major universities called “Pharmacare 2020”, it would save us billions of dollars each year in the health care system. That is not mentioned either.
When we look at what is here, there are many good words about caring about affordable housing and co-operatives, as well as co-op housing as a way of going forward. However, we have tent cities springing up all over the place in this country. Greens believe that it takes the kind of concerted effort that takes place after a major disaster, when people are living rough. What does one do? What did we do as a country? Can we remember? It was a long time ago when the Halifax explosion occurred. I know the hon. member will remember the stories of that time. Obviously, he was not there then, but within months of that explosion, the Government of Canada and the Government of Nova Scotia built housing for thousands of people because it was an emergency.
Now is an emergency, and I hope that we will see better. The Minister of Finance ended her speech by saying that “better is always possible.” Better is possible but not very likely, unless we raise holy hell about the crises we face.
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Madam Speaker, it is an honour to join the debate today virtually to continue the discussion of Bill C-56, which aims to and claims to address the dual affordability crises of the affordability of housing and of food and groceries.
There is no question on any side of this House that we are seeing very difficult conditions for most Canadians, and particularly for anyone who is not in the billionaire class. We are seeing very difficult conditions in affordability, particularly for those who are not in the housing market yet and need to find ways to meet increasingly challenging costs of rent, and, for those who are in the housing market, the increasingly high costs of maintaining their mortgages as interest rates rise.
It is with some irony I remember that during the early days of the COVID crisis, and I would say probably it was in 2020, we had at the Standing Committee on Finance the then Governor of the Bank of Canada, Stephen Poloz, appear. Some of the members said to him that we were spending this money and asked him what would happen afterward. They asked if we would suffer inflation. I remember the former Governor of the Bank of Canada said, on inflation, “That's a problem I'd love to have.” They were so certain at that point inflation was not the threat and deflation was the threat.
What happened? It was not that his analysis was wrong; it is that conditions changed dramatically. Why are we seeing rising food prices? Let us look at food for a minute and then look at housing. Bill C-56, while well intentioned, would not make a big difference for Canadians in the cost of housing or food. That is not because the Liberal government is malevolent, but it is because it has taken the wrong approach, as have the Conservatives. We really need to look at this and ask if we can really fight what we are seeing in rising costs or if we should make sure we top up government revenues, sources, such that we can provide the sources of income and revenue to Canadians so they can survive what is coming at them economically.
Let us step back and look at this. Certainly, the fact we went from a fear of deflation to inflation was an unexpected event. Putin's attack on Ukraine had the effect of driving up oil prices all around the world. The attack on Ukraine also had an impact on food prices, because, as we all know, Ukraine is part of the breadbasket of the world and provides grain in massive exports, which have been significantly challenged by blockading Russian ports.
Occasionally we have grain deals that let grain go through, but there is no question the biggest impacts on driving up prices in Canada in our grocery carts have been Putin's attack on Ukraine, the rising costs of fossil fuels as a result, and the supply chain disruptions in growing food and shipping out grains. This is combined with climate crisis events, which have created droughts, which affect access to food, and which have created extreme weather events. As an example, there are the extreme weather events that affect the island of Mauritius where most of the vanilla is grown. There are massive typhoons that keep hitting because of climate change, which drives up, by the time it goes through the supply chains, the cost of ice cream in Canada because vanilla costs more.
We are looking at a complex web of pressures that have driven up prices. If we look for guidance on what we are now experiencing, there was a 2005 book called The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century by James Howard Kunstler. He accurately predicted what we are experiencing: war, climate crisis and instability in fossil fuel production as we hit peak oil. That is what he was looking at in 2005 when the book came out.
We need to look at this and ask if we are able, with Bill C-56, to confidently say to Canadians that this will bring prices in their grocery carts down. I do not think we can, and I do not think anyone wants to say that or hold out this false hope to Canadians. We actually need to look at what we are facing. The climate crisis will drive up the price of certain foods. As long as the war in Ukraine persists, we are looking at cost impacts throughout our economy. In fossil fuel production, where Russia has hit Ukraine, it has also had an impact on fossil fuel production and on excess profits to the fossil fuel sector.
Let us step back and examine it. The approach of this bill is to create more supply for rental housing, which is good as far as it goes. I do not think any of us on any side of the House object to the idea that we should take the GST off the construction costs of building more affordable rental housing. Will that solve our housing crisis? Not when we allow short-term vacation rentals, such as the Airbnb sector, to continue to suck up what we have as available homes, making them inaccessible to people who want to live there. We must provide a very different model for how we use buildings that should be homes because they have become investment properties. The more we can take speculation and investment interests out of housing, the better off we will be, which is why the Greens have been calling for ages to get rid of real estate investment trusts, which operate to make money off housing in a way that was never intended.
I completely agree with the hon. member for Courtenay—Alberni, who mentioned in his speech the importance of co-op housing. We need to return to that.
It is a complex question on two key issues. Looking at this, we can approach rising prices by saying that we are going to do what we see in Bill C-56, and I am certainly going to vote for Bill C-56, which is trying to get a Competition Act extension to look at the lack of competition in the grocery food sector. This is good as far as it goes, as the big five control too much, but that does not go to our immediate problem, neither does getting rid of the GST on building rental housing. We need to make some rather large structural changes, like not having our GDP growth depend so much on rising home prices. Breaking our cultural addiction to rising residential home prices would make a big difference.
What do we do in the short term? We need to turn to excess profits taxes on the oil and gas sector and grocery chains. We did this with the Canada Revenue dividend during the COVID crisis. We should return to it and extend it so it applies to excess profits in the oil and gas sector and grocery chains. The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimates that if we extend the Canada dividend to just oil and gas excess profits, we would have $4.4 billion more.
We need to make sure Canadians have the money in their pockets to be able to keep a roof over their head and have nutritious food for families. That really means bringing in a guaranteed livable income. How do we afford a guaranteed livable income? We essentially did it with COVID benefits, which rolled out quite quickly and did not require needs testing. A guaranteed livable income would protect the most vulnerable in our society from increased energy prices, housing prices and grocery prices. How can we afford it? We bring in an excess profits tax on the oil and gas sector and grocery chains, as well as continuing it on banks and insurance companies. The key to this is in Motion No. 92, introduced recently by the hon. member for Kitchener Centre. We need other MPs to support an excess profits tax, so I would ask members to sign on as seconders to the motion.
We have to stand back and say that we cannot guarantee people that the climate crisis is not going to affect food prices, because it is. Until we have an end to Putin's attack on Ukraine, what we are really seeing in the oil and gas sector is war profiteering. We must not allow these multi-billion dollar multinational corporations to rake in billions in profits, which is really impacting people who can barely afford to make it to the end of the month.
With my remaining 40 seconds I will say this. Let us step back and use a different lens. Let us tax where we need to tax excess profits and get that money into the hands of Canadians who need it.
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- May/11/23 12:48:45 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I think that today's motion raises another question: Over the next few years, there will be a significant increase in the number of refugees who are displaced by climate change and the resulting crises.
I think we need to change the definition of refugee to reflect this real likelihood of an increased number of people determined to come live in Canada because their islands are being submerged or because they live in regions that have become too arid for agriculture.
I would like to know what my colleague thinks of that possibility.
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- Nov/3/22 6:41:31 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank all my hon. colleagues for their keen interest in ensuring we have quorum. I want to particularly thank the hon. member for Whitby, who I know had to interrupt a very important meeting on climate finance.
I want to recognize that one of the pieces of this fall economic statement will be much improved when we move ahead with climate finance reforms. I particularly want to mention that, from the other place, we will eventually, I hope, be seeing Bill S-243, which would ensure that the climate and the financial sector line up and align with climate goals.
I will go back to what I was saying before. When we look at the situation in which we find ourselves, Canadians do need help in the short term. The source for that help must be going after the excess profits of large sectors, such as the fossil fuels sector, the financial sector, the banking and insurance sectors, and the grocery store chains, if it can be established that those are indeed excess profits, as has been alleged so very effectively by colleagues in the New Democratic Party.
We do know that there are things we can do to weather storms by taking care of each other. Looking at this financial update, it is very notable.
I believe this is the first time I have read a document prepared by Finance Canada that does not treat the climate crisis as an environmental issue that we must spend money on.
For the first time, in this fall economic statement, in the government's explanation of the current problems, crises and challenges, it is clear that the climate crisis is not just one of the problems, it is one of the causes of our economic situation.
For the first time, in reading this fall economic statement, it appears that, increasingly, Finance Canada recognizes a threat to our economic health, and a cause of the instability globally that we face, is the climate crisis. References in this fall economic statement are not just for having a fund, but I am pleased to see investment tax credits to more clean-tech development. I will flag that small modular reactors should not be on that list, but rather for solar, wind, low-flow hydro, geothermal and other technologies that allow us to avoid waste of energy, all of this is really good stuff, but that is not what I am talking about.
I am talking about where Finance Canada notes that the disruption of supply chains are caused, at least in part, by climate crisis events, such as the disruption of supply chains when goods could not get to market when the water was so low in the Mississippi River that Canadian bitumen could not reach refineries in the U.S. There were interruptions to supply chains created by things such as atmospheric rivers that wiped out the roads to the Lower Mainland of Vancouver, and we are still paying.
This fall economic statement points to the costs that will continue to be experienced, and the need to help Atlantic Canada and eastern Quebec, which have ongoing costs and need help to recover from hurricane Fiona. We still have billions of dollars from last year's fall economic statement to help British Columbia recover. After that set of atmospheric river events we had last fall, members should recall that every single land connection route to Vancouver, the largest city in western Canada, was disabled for a period of time, and that had an effect on supply chains.
Supply chains are affected by the climate crisis, and so too are the large economic events created by the climate crisis. In real terms, droughts in other countries around the world drive up food prices for what Canadians pay in the stores. The climate crisis is not a separate environmental issue that requires spending, but it has actually become, and has begun to be seen in Finance Canada, as part of the fabric of the economic situation in which we find ourselves.
I will go further. I said earlier that this is not our classic demand-driven inflation. Largely, what we are experiencing now is a supply-driven increase in costs because of Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the climate crisis events, which are, in real terms, making things cost more. When things really cost more, the tools we have in monetary policy and the Bank of Canada raising the rates will not have the same salutary effect as when we were dealing with an inflation crisis in the early seventies and then prime minister Pierre Trudeau brought in emergency wage and price controls. That is not what we are experiencing now. We have real cost increases because of a real war and because of a climate emergency. The costs and prices are uneven and all over the map.
Therefore, when we look at the threats to our economy of the climate emergency, we have to realize we need to do much more. This is clear from the way this document is prepared, whether or not it is being said out loud yet in Finance Canada. I have never read a document from Finance Canada, ever, that had so many references to the multiple ways in which the climate crisis is impacting our economy, all of them negative.
I look to one point, though, and I think we are ignoring an opportunity we need to seize. The hon. Minister of Finance's introductory remarks point to a moment back in 1903 when then prime minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier told the House we could not wait and it was the time for action. He was referring to the challenge of building a transcontinental railway. For the moment, I will skip over the cost in human lives and the impact of seizing indigenous lands in building that railway, but let us just say right now that we have a similar challenge, and we are ignoring it: How do we link our electricity grids together?
The essence is a 100% carbon-free, not carbon-neutral but carbon-free, electricity grid, with electricity moving through it from, for example, solar power. Alberta will be the big winner in solar power. Cheaper electricity can be produced by solar in Alberta than anywhere else in the country. There is our existing hydro in B.C., and I wish to goodness we were not talking about Site C, but we can do much more with renewable energy across Canada, and the storage system we mostly need is that our grid should work. It should work east to west and north to south.
We are not talking about that in this fall economic statement. We are not really addressing it anywhere, because we run up against the perennial problem of federation. We cannot ship beer across Canada, and we cannot ship electricity. We cannot get electricity from Manitoba Hydro across from eastern Manitoba to western Ontario, because we do not have interties, and that area, I happen to know well, is important boreal forest. We should have interties, but that is indigenous land. If we honour UNDRIP, which we must, it requires free, prior and informed consent before we even start drawing lines on the map for the electricity grid.
We know there are private sector entrepreneurs already who see the way they can get electricity from Hydro-Québec to Nunavut. We have to think big, and we have to recognize that, just as in 1903 the challenge was building a trans-Canadian railway, we need, as a modern industrialized country, to have a trans-Canadian electricity grid, because the grid is the battery.
I will just give one short example. In Europe, with separate nation states within the European Union, they actually coordinate and work better together than our provinces and territories work with the federal government. It is appalling, but true. Denmark produces so much excess wind energy that it sells its excess wind energy to Norway. Norway buys the cheap, green wind energy from Denmark, and if Norway does not need the energy that day, it pumps that energy up into existing reservoirs, which is called pump storage and is one of the technologies mentioned here. It stays there until Norway needs it. They open up the sluices; the water follows gravity and it drives the turbines, and then, when the cheap wind energy comes over from Denmark they pump it back up.
It is elegant. It is simple. It is an international exchange of electricity that we cannot do in Canada because we do not have the interties, and it is a big project. It needs to be mentioned and it needs to be thought through.
I will close on these points. This increase in costs that Canadians are feeling is not from our normal inflation. It is not demand-driven. It is not normal inflation in the sense that it is not demand-driven primarily, although it is partly. It is largely being driven by a war in Ukraine.
We Canadians support Ukraine. We believe that President Zelenskyy's bravery and that of the Ukrainian people must be reflected in our solidarity with them. However, in that solidarity, we must do much, much more to achieve peace and push for it. This is relevant to the fall economic statement because so much of the increased prices we are experiencing here are because of Putin's brutal, illegal, immoral war on Ukraine.
We must use every lever as a soft power to push for peace talks and push for ceasefires. It is not good enough to say “We stand with Ukraine” and “Slava Ukraini”. We have to do more for peace because we are a country that can do that. We may have to say to our NATO allies that if belonging to NATO means we really cannot help Ukraine, maybe we do not belong in NATO. If NATO cannot work for peace and work for nuclear disarmament, maybe it is time to ask our NATO allies this: What good is an alliance that cannot protect Ukraine because of nuclear weapons inside NATO and inside Russia that threaten us all?
We have to face the real costs that are going up. We have to face multiple crises at the same time to avoid a global food crisis and avoid a global water crisis. We must do more in this country as global leaders on climate change.
That means stopping the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and converting that Crown corporation into other uses that are actually beneficial for Canadians, such as building resiliency across this country and building the infrastructure we need. We do not need the Trans Mountain expansion. In the words of António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, it represents “moral and economic madness”. So too does expanding the drilling off the coast of Newfoundland in Bay du Nord. So too does continuing fracking across Canada while pretending that Canadian liquefied natural gas is somehow better than coal.
We must face the economic reality, the reality of the war and the reality of climate change. We must face all these realities.
We can actually avoid the worst of climate change by changing course quickly. We can follow the indicators that the Minister of Finance has given us in this budget and say that by spring 2023, let the budget stand for Canada laying down the marker that we move according to science. Let us move off fossil fuels, protect the workers in that sector and make sure that Canadians are in a house that can stand the coming storms.
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- Jun/16/22 10:22:42 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I really appreciate the question from my hon. friend from Ottawa West—Nepean.
These are not separate crises. If we look at the role Putin has played in undermining our own democracy, the Russian government has been using disinformation websites for quite some time to undermine democracies by provoking a whole series of false narratives. Donald Trump was a puppet of Vladimir Putin, disrupting democracies in the western world, increasing incivility in the way we deal with each other and increasing the risk of white supremacy, which is an example of something that threatens our democracy.
We cannot take these things as separate and siloed. We need to defend democracy and attack autocracies and fascist states. In doing that, we need to be conscious of the fact, to be biblical like David Beasley might want me to be, that we cannot serve God and Mammon at the same time. We have to identify the enemy, and the enemy is multinational corporations that seek to profit from every one of these crises.
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- Jun/16/22 10:14:04 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I want to start by thanking the hon. member for Vancouver Granville for sharing his time with me.
I recognize that we stand on the traditional and unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people.
This debate has been encouraging in that we recognize that there is a looming food crisis and food instability globally, but also dispiriting in that we seem to think we can bite off little chunks of it as an incremental set of issues within one silo called “food”. We are, in fact, facing multiple crises that influence each other and must be dealt with together.
I just pulled some clippings I have. I remember when the pandemic was first getting up and running and I flipped this article I found in The Guardian to the person who was then our Minister of International Development. She was also on it, saying she was getting to the World Food Programme. The article is from The Guardian, April 2020, and the headline is “Coronavirus pandemic 'will cause famine of biblical proportions'”. It quoted at length from David Beasley of the World Food Programme. That is where we started from: the pandemic causing huge risk of global food insecurity.
Then, of course, the climate crisis made all those issues worse, as it has from the beginning. I mean, the Arab Spring was caused by the geopolitical instability that created the wars in Syria and Libya. That came from prolonged drought, which meant that there were food breakdowns. There was a food insecurity crisis, and it created war. Now we have climate change galloping and galloping, and persistent droughts. Just this last season, we saw droughts in sub-Saharan Africa, droughts through the U.S. prairies, droughts through the Canadian prairies, and now we have an overlay of war.
I want to stop for a moment and say something about David Beasley, because I think it is really interesting. I got to know him through the U.S. presidential prayer breakfast. He is a Republican. He is a former Republican governor from the state of South Carolina. He lost his seat as governor of the state of South Carolina when he changed his position on the question of whether the Confederate flag should fly above the capitol. When he took down the Confederate flag, he lost his seat. As I may have mentioned, as a very dedicated Christian, he has put his talents where they are of most use, that being as the head of the UN World Food Programme. He knows what he is doing.
It is urgent that we save lives, and we do not save lives through dribs and drabs. Canada must commit at least the $600 billion that the World Food Programme says we need.
However, I will turn to another source right now. The question is, how do we, as humanity or as politicians, deal with more than one scary thing at a time? Are we capable of doing it? The word I want to use is “polycrisis”. It comes from Professor Thomas Homer-Dixon, who now runs a program called Cascade Institute in collaboration with scientists around the world. I just want to read something from the Cascade Institute website, because I think it helps us:
Humanity faces an array of grave, long-term challenges, now often labeled “global systemic risks.” They include climate change, biodiversity loss, pandemics, widening economic inequalities, financial system instability, ideological extremism, pernicious social impacts of digitalization [such as cyber-attacks], mounting social and political unrest, large-scale forced migrations, and an escalating danger of nuclear war. Compared to humanity’s situation even two decades ago, most of these risks appear to be increasing in severity and at a faster rate....
With one minute left, how do we address polycrises? I suggest that we do not address them as if it is normal business. It is not status quo. This requires that when the G7 meets later this month, when NATO meets, or whenever world governments meet together, they stop thinking that we are going to get out of this with incremental in-the-box thinking. We have to get way out of our boxes. We have to treat the global food insecurity crisis as an emergency and try to save tens of millions of lives while we can. We have to address it as part of the attack on Ukraine and defend Ukraine, but also ask Ukraine to take the mines out of the harbour in Odessa and tell Russia to take away its blockades because grain must move across borders.
We have to treat this as a geopolitical emergency and as a crisis of the human family. We can only do it all together.
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- Jun/16/22 10:02:50 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I totally agree that the climate crisis and the food crisis are connected, but not in the way that I think my friend believes.
The more we ignore the urgency of the climate crisis and the more we perpetuate some role in our future for the use of fossil fuels, the more we exacerbate a growing climate crisis that drives increasing drought. It means that the U.S. prairies and Canadian prairies will face drought. South Saharan Africa will face drought. This drives more food insecurity and drives more geopolitical instability, which drives more migration.
We have to find solutions that work for all the crises we face and drive for solutions that work for them all at once. We cannot pick one over the other.
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- Jun/16/22 7:02:46 p.m.
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Madam Chair, we have complex crises and emergencies: the climate crisis, the pandemic, an energy crisis, the war. All of them are affecting food insecurity. When so many complex systems present themselves in crises, there is more we can do than provide food aid, as his department can do. How do we think strategically to actually confront these multiple crises?
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