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- Saanich—Gulf Islands
- British Columbia
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Madam Speaker, given the history of trade unions in this country, can the member make the case, quickly, for how passing Bill C-58 is good for economic stability in Canada?
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- Nov/21/23 6:29:15 p.m.
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There are a few issues, Mr. Speaker, but since I have to pick one, I have to say that I am surprised to find no mention in this fall economic statement of the need to allocate more funds to the Canada greener homes grant, which is a program designed to make each home more energy efficient with the help of each homeowner. It is bizarre, because considering the recent announcements on carbon pricing and home heating costs, it is clear that this program is urgently needed, but most of the money has already been spent. The coffers are empty. We need a program that will allow every homeowner to green their home by making it more energy efficient, but no such program can be found in this economic statement.
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- 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, would my hon. friend from Calgary Nose Hill support one of the things that many of us in opposition are calling for, which is a guaranteed livable income, so that no one would be in such a desperate state that they would actually think of taking their own life because of economic pressures.
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Mr. Speaker, I think the hon. member is well-meaning in his suggestions in terms of economic development, so I do not mean to suggest anything other than good intentions.
However, the reality of the Trans Mountain pipeline is that it is neither economical, nor are there markets, nor is there anything long term for any part of our population. I will say to him that in terms of the hearings that were held before the National Energy Board, the Kinder Morgan corporation put forward that it plans to create through its project fewer than 100 permanent jobs. It also put forward that it was going to be the 100% backstop for costs. The corporation then carved off its Canadian operations, kept the money it had raised towards building the pipeline and used it to pay off the debts of the parent corporation, at which point it told the federal government it was not going to build it. There is no case that it is economically viable.
Meanwhile there are many nations all along the pipeline route that want it stopped because it violates their rights under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. I would just suggest to the member that the particular example he gave is rather fraught.
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- Nov/21/22 7:05:35 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, as predicted, government spokespersons raise the good things they are doing, and they are good. Heat pumps are good. More charging stations for electric cars are good. We pile them up, and we have a drop in the bucket. Then we see the buckets of money going into violating indigenous rights and to forcing through the Trans Mountain pipeline, which is only halfway built and the most dangerous terrain is yet to come.
They spent $21 billion of public money on a project. The International Energy Agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and every international energy review has said not to put any more money into expanding fossil fuel infrastructure. It is, in the words of UN Secretary-General António Guterres, “moral and economic madness”, but the Canadian government is committed to madness.
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Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague nailed it. The reality is that this fall economic statement has virtually nothing new on climate at all.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to parse the hon. parliamentary secretary's question a bit more by saying that there is no case for new nuclear installations in order to avoid climate hell. There is a case for maintaining existing operating reactors and phasing them out when they come to the end of their natural lifespan.
I encourage everyone in this place to examine energy alternatives by a couple of a firm criteria, such as the tons of carbon eliminated per dollar invested; the jobs created per dollar invested; and how long it is, from the moment it is given approval, before energy flows from that development.
Even excluding the unsolved problem of nuclear waste, the link to nuclear proliferation in the military and the risk of accidents, and even if we put that all to the side and say we are prepared to believe we will escape all those problems, it does not make economic sense to go nuclear.
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- Nov/3/22 6:59:45 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Hull—Aylmer for his excellent question.
We are now in a long emergency, as a book title called it.
Madam Speaker, about a decade ago, there was a book by James Kunstler called The Long Emergency, which predicted that we were going to see our economy significantly rocked by what will happen as fossil fuels become more expensive as we move away from fossil fuels. The Long Emergency was about where we are now: real costs are increasing, a real dislocation.
That does not mean ongoing inflationary trends. It does mean thinking about how a society flourishes despite these very unusual headwinds. They are unusual now because they are new, but they are not going away. We have to think about that and make sure that we design our economy and our economic signals of what makes us better off. The GDP is not a good measurement to help us chart a course through an ongoing climate emergency. We need to chart our course.
I think this is a global challenge. At the end of the Second World War nations met at Bretton Woods to figure out what are the global and shared financial institutions to help us get through that. We need new institutions and a review, a new Bretton Woods, that would help us with both the post-COVID impacts on our economies and the current climate impacts on our economies.
We cannot rewrite the laws of atmospheric physics and chemistry. We can easily rewrite the way we want our economy to work if all the economies and central banks of the world get together and say, “This is what we are looking at. How do we protect the citizens and the communities of all, and, I would hope, the non-human species of Mother Earth?”
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- Nov/3/22 6:56:46 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, a couple of years ago, the Canadian Labour Congress published a piece on the new world of work.
What does our economy look like for workers when we look at artificial intelligence? We have a gig economy that has already made many people insecure in the jobs they have. I completely agree with my hon. friend. What we are seeing is that as people retire, we have a demographic bubble of boomers who are leaving the workforce and we do not have enough people coming up behind us. That is why we are looking in this fall economic statement at increases in immigration and hoping that those people are trained professionals in the workforce. Construction workers particularly are mentioned in the statement.
We could do far more to prepare for artificial intelligence by moving to a guaranteed livable income as quickly as possible to protect our economy from the coming shocks. Then people could choose, knowing that they have just enough income to be above the poverty line, to maybe work a bit in the gig economy, maybe have a garden at home and maybe spend more time volunteering in the community. We would be a healthier society and better able to withstand any shocks that are coming once we adopt a guaranteed livable income.
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Mr. Speaker, actually, the current information that we have from the Parliamentary Budget Officer suggests that our debt-to-GDP ratio is not disturbing to the Parliamentary Budget Officer.
It is interesting to note the statistic that the member shared of 61,000 employees hired, because when I look at Environment Canada, there was a 10% budget cut in 2012 in Parks Canada, and those people have not been replaced. Some employees have been replaced in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, but I look at departments where we are not keeping up with the work, particularly in science-based departments.
Also, I do want to express the concern that most of what we see in terms of inflationary trends has been generated externally. Most of it has been because of the spike in fossil fuel prices caused by Putin's illegal war in Ukraine. There are many elements to our current economic distress, and I do not think that government debt drives most of it.
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