- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Green Party
- Saanich—Gulf Islands
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 61%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $201,868.20
- Government Page
- Jun/12/24 6:20:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am afraid that I have to express deep distress that the hon. member thinks that we are moving to clean electricity regulations. One cannot have clean electricity when the federal government is allowing Ontario to bring more fossil fuels online to fuel an electricity grid that had been largely decarbonized by the previous Liberal government under Kathleen Wynne. It is a terrible shame, when we want to move to clean electricity, to allow more fossil fuels on the grid and to fail to move to ensure that the Atlantic Loop proceeds so that we can shut down coal in Nova Scotia, still its number one source of electricity generation.
Is the government serious about clean electricity and a functional north-south-east-west grid or is it just a bumper sticker?
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- May/6/24 3:09:29 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, unfortunately, and contrary to what the Minister of Environment just said, Canada is not on track to meet our target for 2030, which is expressed to the United Nations as 40% to 45% below 2005 levels, only conveniently forgetting the range into 45%.
On top of that, we are still spending more money to support fossil fuels than to decarbonize: $34 billion on Trans Mountain; another $5.7 billion on fraud, carbon capture and storage; and under-spending when the government promised it was going to spend money on climate. We are at least $14 billion behind that promise.
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- Apr/15/24 1:03:30 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am sure my hon. friend from Lakeland was asking rhetorically if the word “treason” was too strong. Let me just put on the record the word “treason” is far too strong.
For my dear friend from Lakeland, I do not think anyone would ever imagine the MP for Lakeland was cowering. We are friends but we do not agree on this.
Let me just point out the many ways in which I found her speech varied. From my understanding, there is a global shift away from fossil fuels. The recent report from the International Energy Agency verifies that of energy spending globally, renewables are increasing the pace at which they are a greater investment globally, and this is an investment for people who want to make money on their investments, than investments in fossil fuels. Germany reached the lowest level of coal use in its history, while having renewables over 50% last year. Sweden brought in a climate carbon tax in 1991 and has expanded it.
Let us try to agree on shared facts and movement about climate action.
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- Feb/26/24 6:04:25 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I do hope that we will see the Minister of Finance move to tax the windfall profits of the oil and gas sector. We do know how to do it. It is not complicated. The Minister of Finance is already doing it in applying it to the excess profits that have been occurring in the banking and insurance sector.
Surely we can align our policies to move away from fossil fuels and ensure that we get support to Canadians without going deeper in debt, without expanding the deficit, by bringing in more revenues. That is how one balances the budget. Bring in more revenues from excess profit taxes and from wealth taxes on what is going to offshore tax havens, making sure that we deliver for Canadians affordability on a planet on which we can survive and on which our children will survive.
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Madam Speaker, it is an honour to rise tonight and pursue the discussion of a very complex piece of legislation. It did not start out being complex, when our colleague initially put it forward as Bill C-234, but I appreciate the opportunity to speak to it. Of course, this is the greenhouse gas pollution pricing act as it relates to on-farm use of fossil fuels. It has now been amended in the Senate to exempt one of the larger uses of fossil fuels on farms. Of course, farm communities are not pleased; however, I wanted to step back.
This piece that would now be exempted under the Senate amendments is the on-farm use of propane fuel for grain drying. In other words, activities that take place in buildings are now no longer exempt from the fossil fuel exemption that came through in the first version of Bill C-234. As the Green Party members and I voted for Bill C-234 in its first iteration, I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity, if I may, to explain why we voted that way and what I think we should do for a fundamental reconsideration of the way we price carbon on farms so that it has some intellectual and scientific coherence.
Let me first start with why we voted for Bill C-234 in its first iteration. I recall really clearly when carbon pricing came forward, which we favour, to be very clear. We think we have to monetize carbon. If we treat pollution as something free, nobody will pay attention to what it really costs society, what it really costs humanity to treat the atmosphere as if it were a large, free garbage dump for our pollution. That is clearly not acceptable. We moved forward, accepting that there would be, unfortunately, a patchwork, because some provinces had already moved forward.
British Columbia brought in Canada's first carbon tax, a well-constructed and logical revenue-neutral approach to carbon pricing. There have been changes, and some provinces brought in their own versions. What the current Liberal government brought forward was essentially a backstop; for those provinces that did not have their own systems, the federal government brought in a carbon price that would apply everywhere to try to equalize the pricing among all the different provinces and have a system that remained revenue-neutral.
British Columbia brought in the revenue-neutral carbon tax under the government of previous premier Gordon Campbell, who pretty much represented the right wing of B.C. politics. Nevertheless, it was a really well-designed carbon price. The revenue-neutral part of it was that, as British Columbians, we got tax cuts that were how we received what citizens now actually receive as a rebate check in those backstop provinces. This became a bit more complicated than it perhaps needed to be.
When the Liberals brought this in, they said they were not going to apply it on farms; farmers would not have to pay the carbon tax. At least, that was how it was communicated. When farmers realized that they were not paying a carbon tax on the diesel they put in their tractors or the farm equipment they use, but they were paying a big one on grain drying, they became quite concerned. That is the source of Bill C-234. We felt, in principle, that once the farming community has been told that carbon tax will not apply to them, one should stick to that.
It also happened that, because of the climate crisis, the need for grain drying increased. This is one of those things that may sound counterintuitive, of course, but we had what farmers in the Prairies referred to as “the harvest from hell” that winter. I am going to back up and say that I know it is not the first time we have ever had the need for grain drying. We have had wet harvests before. It was not a novelty, but it was particularly bad. They were still trying to get crops out of the fields when there was snow on them. Grain drying became much more intense, and the use of propane for grain drying actually increased. That is when farmers said, “Well, wait a minute. We were supposed to be exempt from carbon pricing.”
Before diving into what has happened to Bill C-234 since then, I want to step back and ask this: If we wanted to monetize carbon and, preferably, keep farmers who are essentially land stewards on board with the need to respond to the climate crisis, how would we do that? I would say that the reason farmers should be particularly on board with measures to reduce greenhouse gases and avoid an ever-worsening climate crisis is that, if there is one economic sector that is a big loser and at risk in a world of climate crisis, it is agriculture. In the Prairies now, there is a multi-year drought. Some of my friends who are farmers on the Prairies say not to call it a drought. They say to call it “aridification”, because it is just going to keep getting drier as a result of climate trends and global warming.
With respect to the impact on the cost of food, we talk about inflation in grocery prices, and a good chunk of that is the impact on certain agricultural products because of extreme climate events. Whether droughts or floods, extreme weather events wipe out certain kinds of food. The price of vanilla went sky-high because of the impact of storms hitting Madagascar, as but one example. Of course, grains all around the world started costing a lot more because of a combination of Putin declaring war on Ukraine and crop failures caused by extreme climatic events.
As someone who wants to see us all pull together, it was distressing that one component of Canadian society would be alienated from efforts to act on climate by what felt like and, I have to say, looked like a betrayal on a promise. This component is severely impacted by the climate crisis and, therefore, should be onside with doing something to keep it from becoming ever worse; at the same time, it is a part of our society that plays a big role in how carbon is sequestered. If the Liberals say they are not going to apply carbon taxes on farms, then farmers are surprised to be paying a walloping carbon tax, how did that happen? I am sorry to say this to my Liberal friends, but it is because the Liberals do not really understand a lot about farming; when they made the promise, they did not realize that fossil fuels used on farms were largely used in buildings to dry grain.
It is fine to exempt tractors and on-farm equipment, but here we come to the crux of what I wish we had done, which we could perhaps still do: We can enlist farmers as the creative land stewards they are, as farmers sequester carbon through their practices and on-farm activities, such as zero-tillage agriculture, getting rid of summer fallow, and making sure they are doing more perennial and fewer annual crops. Farmers are massively effective at sequestering carbon in soil, and guess what? We talk about planting forests as a way of sequestering carbon and carbon sinks in forests. Those things are real; that is true.
However, right now, and largely because of climate change, our grasslands are better at sequestering carbon than our forests are. Why? The soils hold an enormous quantity of carbon. Climate conditions causing forest fires wipe out the carbon we were sequestering in forests, releasing it by the millions of tonnes into the atmosphere. It is not just in the summer; every province in this country started having wildfires that were out of control in the spring, in May of last year, and all the way through late fall and some into the winter. When forests burn, we lose all the carbon.
Here is something interesting, and scientists are looking at this a lot: When grasslands burn, we do not lose all the carbon. Most of that carbon is stored well below the soil, in the root systems that do not burn. Therefore, if we are offsetting for greenhouse gas, I generally think we are better not to plant a tree but to plant a billionaire; I usually say that in jest, just to make sure everybody understands that. We are better off protecting the grasslands.
Where ecosystems exist with grasslands, it is better to sustain them and keep them robust, which means this: What if, instead of just having carbon pricing on the fuel they burn, we pay farmers for every tonne of carbon they sequester? What if we had an actual balance sheet on carbon pricing, thanking and rewarding farmers who have taken on board protecting ecological services, such as wetlands, protecting biodiversity and making sure they are restoring the health of soil, improving the profitability and the health of the food, and keeping carbon out of the atmosphere?
I say thanks to farmers.
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- Feb/5/24 4:22:44 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is a common misconception that liquefied natural gas is somehow good for the climate. The recent decision by the U.S. White House to pause LNG investments to protect the climate is an illustration of the point that, especially where LNG comes from fracked sources, the release of methane means LNG is not only not better than coal but also, on the entirety of its production life cycle, LNG has just as much carbon as burning coal. It is just that it is emitted at a different point in its life cycle.
I ask my hon. colleague from Langley—Aldergrove if he would not agree that it would be better to just call it fossil gas instead of pretending it is somehow a natural product that is distinguished from other fossil fuels.
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- Nov/2/23 6:55:05 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I agree with my colleague that we need to have a sensible discussion in this place. The climate emergency is not going away; it is galloping on and threatening lives.
When we talk about affordability, we need to recognize that climate emergency events make life less affordable for everyone. In fact, they threaten our very lives, livelihoods and communities. We need to take the climate crisis far more seriously than we do. This means that the Liberals cannot continue to do one thing for climate and another for fossil fuels at the same time, all the time, and think that amounts to climate leadership. It does not.
We need to cancel the Trans Mountain pipeline. We are building it with public money. We are violating indigenous rights while building it. If it is finished and starts shipping diluted bitumen out in tankers in larger numbers, it is not a question of if but when there will be a major spill, despoiling the Salish Sea in ways that can never be cleaned up.
Please, for the love of God, we must take this seriously.
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- Oct/27/23 12:10:41 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, with the Liberal climate policies increasingly looking like Swiss cheese, the Greens have practical solutions, and one of them is motion M-92, from the member for Kitchener Centre, to have an excess profit tax on big oil. This was just costed out by the Parliamentary Budget Office, confirming there would be $4.2 billion available, if the Liberals move to tax the big polluters.
When will the government move to create an excess profit tax, as it has done for banking and insurance, on the fossil fuels sector, in which the five biggest companies raked in $38 billion last year? When will we tax them?
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- Oct/17/23 10:06:38 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise virtually today to present a petition of deep concern to residents of Saanich—Gulf Islands. The petitioners note that the Paris Agreement, which Canada negotiated back in 2015, calls for, in its language, a “just transition” for workers in the fossil fuel sector in the transition to end the addiction to fossil fuels.
The petitioners go on to point out that the workforce of oil and gas workers is highly skilled, with many skills transferable to the renewable energy sector, and they call on the government to bring forward a plan for a just transition for fossil fuel workers. They specifically reference an existing strong piece of work, which was a task force on just transition for Canadian coal sector workers. The 10 recommendations from that extremely important piece of work are recommended to this House as the basis for work in this area.
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Madam Speaker, my hon. colleague from Lakeland is probably the only one in the House who will not be surprised by what I am going to say, which is that Bill C-69 was not in the interests of environmental assessments in Canada. It was so poorly designed. It was all discretionary. There were no timelines.
The only thing that made environmentalists think it was a good bill was that Jason Kenney called it the anti-pipeline act. It could just as easily have been called the pro-pipeline act because it is discretionary and lacks the basics that have been in our environmental assessment law since the mid-1970s through to the early 1990s, when former prime minister Brian Mulroney brought forward a very good environmental assessment act.
My hon. colleague from Lakeland knows that we will disagree on the notion that we want to expand oil and gas demand across the world and that there is any such thing as responsible oil and gas. There are only fossil fuels, and burning them destroys our future.
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- Sep/19/23 10:10:35 a.m.
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- Re: Bill S-5
Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise today to present a petition that deals with the pressing issue of the climate crisis. Specifically, the petitioners zero in on the government's commitment to ban the export of thermal coal.
Coal, and particularly thermal coal, is the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. As Canada has, unfortunately, a sorry record of increasing greenhouse gases since we pledged to cut them, the petitioners call on the government to take the necessary measures to regulate the export of thermal coal under the existing legislation, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.
Amendments that went through the House in Bill S-5 are not considered in the petitioners' motion here, which I will read. Petitioners wish that the government act expeditiously to put thermal coal on the priority substances list and then, as quickly as possible thereafter, to add it to the toxic substances list under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, to allow the Minister of Environment to take the steps to regulate it and for the Minister of Health to also take steps under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act to stop the practice which has been continuing from the Port of Vancouver. As ports along the west coast of the United States ban the export of thermal coal, U.S. thermal coal is moving out of our Port of Vancouver.
The steps that the petitioners wish us to take would expedite the government's living up to a pledge the government made in 2021.
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- Jun/8/23 1:31:15 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my dear colleague from the Bloc Québécois and all members of the Bloc for raising this debate today.
The federal government's answer is that it is already doing things to protect the climate, but obviously it has yet to reach any of its targets because it is still favourable to new products that come from fossil fuels. We have only to think of the Bay du Nord project, as well as other projects in the Arctic and in Newfoundland-and-Labrador.
What does my colleague think of the fact that the government says one thing and does the opposite?
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- Jun/5/23 4:04:36 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I know the tactics behind concurrence debates, which push Routine Proceedings out a long time. Let me set that aside. The Conservative strategy on delay is also in the media.
I do want to take my friend up on the idea that government is responsible for the high prices of fuel and food price increases. It is very clear that Putin's attack on Ukraine created volatility and higher prices for fossil fuels globally. It is also very clear that the climate crisis interrupts food supply chains, as do other events. I would say to the hon. member that there are many things I would criticize the government for, and they are very different than what my hon. colleague would criticize them for, because the government has not done enough to address the climate crisis. It continues to think it makes sense to build a $30-billion pipeline.
However, is my hon. colleague's position really that all of the increased prices in Canada have nothing to do with Putin's attack on Ukraine, have nothing—
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- Apr/26/23 7:04:42 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is easily researched that the Government of Canada charges less tax on oil and gas companies than the United States does, and this is in a period of time when we are still subsidizing oil and gas. While I do appreciate the comments from my friend, the hon. parliamentary secretary, we are still subsidizing oil and gas, with increased subsidies in budget 2023, by providing more access to government funds for carbon capture and storage. If those in the industry want to use that method, they should pay for it themselves. We are also introducing a new approach to use fossil fuels in producing hydrogen, which should only be produced from renewable sources so that it is truly green energy.
We have enormous potential in Canada to move to a green economy and to decarbonize, but not if we keep shovelling money at companies that are already experiencing obscene levels of profit.
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- Apr/17/23 4:33:35 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the people we do not want to leave behind are our own children and grandchildren, and at this point, we are running over them as we continue to support fossil fuels.
This budget expands subsidies for fossil fuels by accepting the notion that we can use fossils to create hydrogen. We do that with so-called abated sources. Those are basically weasel words for saying we are going to use fossil fuels to create hydrogen. At the same time, we are expanding access to carbon capture and storage as public subsidies to private sector interests to expand and continue fossil fuels.
Could the parliamentary secretary explain how the Liberals can talk out of both sides of their mouth on climate?
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- Oct/28/22 12:12:18 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I rise today to present a petition from constituents that relates to the climate crisis.
The petitioners point out that Canada signed on to the Paris Agreement, which in its text includes a commitment to a just transition for fossil fuel sector workers. This is consistent with Liberal Party platform commitments that have yet to be realized.
Oil and gas workers and coal sector workers were promised this kind of economic support to get them through the transition away from a dependence on fossil fuels, so the petitioners call on Canada to work with fossil fuel sector workers to create a plan, particularly for oil and gas workers, and to follow the recommendations that have been put forward by the government's task force on just transition for Canadian coal power workers and communities.
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- Oct/24/22 1:51:08 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-5
Mr. Speaker, obviously I would disagree with the hon. member for Dufferin—Caledon, and so would some members of his caucus, who favour carbon pricing.
I want to correct the record, because, I am sure unintentionally, he has misstated the progress Germany has made in reducing greenhouse gases. He used the claim that 70% of Germany's electricity was still coming from fossil fuels. It is too high, but it is 30%. Renewables represent 50% of Germany's electricity grid. The result is that, yes, it is true, Germans pay very high prices for energy, but they have reduced greenhouse gases to 40% below 1990 levels, while Canada is 20% above 1990 levels. Therefore, we should have another look at Germany's path.
I want to expand on something the hon. member talked about, which is the capacity of Environment Canada to meet the challenges under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act in Bill S-5. There was an observations paper that was attached to the amendment from the Senate. I would ask whether the member for Dufferin—Caledon noted that in that observation paper the Senate asks whether the government will expand resources to Environment Canada to be able to fulfill the act's promise.
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Madam Speaker, my sincere thanks to my colleague.
We have to think about preparing for future hurricanes, floods and heat waves.
In my province, British Columbia, more than 700 people died last summer because of climate change and heat waves. At this time, we are not ready to deal with disasters, which really damage our economy. We must eliminate subsidies to fossil fuel industries and plan to stop producing fossil fuels here, in Canada, with a plan to protect communities and workers. It is a long list.
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Mr. Speaker, I appreciate very much my hon. friend from Foothills correctly stating Green policy, because we do support Bill C-234. We think that what happened here was that the government's intention was to not put a carbon tax on farm fuels, and then we had that extremely flukey weather situation. We had farmers with wet grains, and they had to spend a lot more money than usual to dry the grain. To catch the additional costs of that fuel should have been covered in exemptions, so we completely support the member.
One quick point as well is that Green policy is to ban the importation of all foreign oil. That has been our policy for many years, and the hon. leader of the official opposition mis-stated it earlier today.
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- Sep/26/22 8:19:19 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia for her speech. I could not agree with her more: It is impossible to speak about this terrible hurricane without mentioning its cause, that is to say climate change and our dependence on fossil fuels.
The waves that swept houses into the sea were like something out of a sci-fi movie. It is almost unbelievable, but that is today's reality. Climate change is less intense today than it will be tomorrow and in the coming years. Sea surface temperatures south of Nova Scotia have risen continuously because of climate change. It is the warm water that made the hurricanes stronger and more destructive.
I would like to ask the member if she agrees with me that we need to end our dependence on fossil fuels as soon as possible and, at the same time, set up a system to help people adapt. As she said, the government lacks the courage to do that.
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