Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Archives | Elizabeth May

Elizabeth May responds to the Liberal government’s Speech from the Throne

Elizabeth May — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 20:07:30 +0000

2020-01-27 13:20 [p.446]

Madam Speaker, I am honoured to rise today for the first time this year and at the start of a new decade.

I would like to share my time with my colleague, the hon. member for Nanaimo—Ladysmith. I am very happy that all the members of the Green Party will have an opportunity to speak to the 2019 throne speech, as this is the last day of debate. I would like to thank the people who manage time within the Liberal Party, since my colleague, the member for Fredericton, will share her time with a Liberal member.

I want to start by saying, and this is not a formality, that we are on the unceded territory of the Algonquin people.

I want to acknowledge that we are here on traditional unceded Algonquin territory, and to them we say, meegwetch.

It is an honour to speak to the Speech from the Throne today. There is much in it that can carry one away with inspirational promises, with rhetoric with which we can only agree. For instance, I turn to this bit, which I particularly like: “From forest fires and floods, to ocean pollution and coastal erosion, Canadians are living the impact of climate change every day.”

The science is clear and it has been for decades. A clear majority of Canadians voted for ambitious climate action now. That stirs me to think I will vote for this, but I will not. I will not because the gap between the inspirational rhetoric coming from the Liberal administration and the reality of Liberal actions is so wide it induces vertigo. It is so deep that it is dizzying.

As an example of why I now feel this way, I turn to the 2015 Speech from the Throne, which I did vote for. I loved this promise and will remind people of it. Some of us who also served in the 42nd Parliament will remember the government’s promise to “not resort to devices like…omnibus bills to avoid scrutiny.”

I think we all recall that it was an omnibus budget bill in which the deferred prosecution agreement designed specifically for SNC-Lavalin was hidden. Now I read everything, as my colleagues know, so I actually saw the deferred prosecution agreement hidden in an omnibus budget bill. I wondered why it was not stand-alone criminal legislation to go through the Department of Justice, but I was persuaded by the notes and looking into it that nothing nefarious lay there. However, it was in an omnibus bill and I do regret that the deferred prosecution agreement amendment to the Criminal Code never went to the Department of Justice and to the committee studying justice bills, as it should have.

Another fun promise to remember from the 2015 Speech from the Throne was “the government will undertake to renew, nation-to-nation, the relationship between Canada and indigenous peoples, one based on recognition of rights, respect, co-operation and partnership.”

It was with some shock that I saw within months the Liberal government’s approval of Site C, ignoring the court cases and concerns of indigenous peoples, as well as the environmental impacts.

Approval of the Kinder Morgan pipeline ignored the fact that, even during the 2015 election campaign, the then leader of the Liberal Party, now Prime Minister, said that no project could be approved based on the inadequate and flawed process that had taken place while there were court cases, and strong and clear objection, from the Tsleil-Waututh, Musqueam, Squamish and WSANEC First Nations, whose territory I am honoured to live on. Muskrat Falls ignored the concerns of the Innu.

Quoting from the 2015 Speech from the Throne, many people will remember the following without being reminded, the promise “that 2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system.” One can see where concern arises. How much can we believe in the 2019 Speech from the Throne? I would like to believe it, but then we come to the reality of what is being pledged. We are seeing a commitment in this new Speech from the Throne.

In the throne speech the government said, and I quote, “The Government will set a target to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.”

In reality, our target is the same as the one chosen by the former Conservative government under Stephen Harper. The target has not changed by a single tonne.

Here we are with a government that says we can get to net-zero by 2050, and there are some questions. As many will know, we do not whip votes in the Green Party. I am so honoured to be joined by the member for Nanaimo—Ladysmith and the member for Fredericton. We cannot vote confidence in a government that does not have a climate target that allies with the science.

We know that the government has said that it is important to face the climate situation as a climate emergency. In fact, it was a Liberal motion passed by this House on June 17, 2019, in which the House agreed that we are in a climate emergency. The motion stated:

…the House declare that Canada is in a national climate emergency which requires…that Canada commit to meeting its national emissions target under the Paris Agreement and to making deeper reductions in line with…pursuing efforts to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

However, here we are with a Speech from the Throne that never once uses the term “climate emergency”.

We are in a climate emergency, but there is not a single mention of “climate emergency” in the throne speech.

The Speech from the Throne says that we have to address climate change. While the government says that we must achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, only a few paragraphs later we are also told that the government must take strong action to fight climate change and also work just as hard to get Canadian resources to new markets.

In other words, with the same vigour which the government wants to address the climate emergency, it will also use public funds in the neighbourhood of $10 billion to $13 billion to drive forward the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, which is a direct threat to climate action, as it also contemplates approving the Teck Frontier mine project. It also is ignoring its obligations under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the climate emergency by subsidizing and supporting the LNG projects where the gas pipeline is. At this very moment, the RCMP are in Wet’suwet’en Territory prepared to enforce an injunction that should never be enforced because it violates hereditary rights and traditional rights of Wet’suwet’en people.

Here is the reality, and it is a tough one. I have worked on this issue since 1986. I have seen government after government, well-meaning Liberals, well-meaning provincial New Democrats, well-meaning Progressive Conservatives, make climate commitments and then find it is too hard. Something political needs to be fixed before we can do the right thing to ensure our kids have a livable world.

Here is the tough choice, and it is not one that we can find wiggle room or some medium space to do a bit of this and a bit of that, with a pipeline here and an oil sands mine there, and still live up to climate commitments. The stark choice is this. Before the next election, we assembled in this Parliament must have Canada’s targets align with the advice of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That means we must at least double our targets until 2030.

We must now as humanity, as the world assembled through the multilateral process, change our economies in a transformational sense that gets rid of fossil fuels to ensure that our children, that human civilization can survive in a hospitable biosphere or we defend the fossil fuel industry. We cannot do both. We have to choose. I choose climate action and the Speech from the Throne and the government had better deliver.

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Why I voted against the NDP climate motion

Craig Cantin — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 01:46:31 +0000

Goodness knows, I wish the NDP had put forward a motion I could have voted for. We need a good debate on climate and we need a strong call for government action. But, I couldn’t vote for that motion.

Here’s the text of the motion:

That this House:

agree with many Canadians and the International Energy Agency that there is grave concern with the impacts of a 2 degree rise in global average temperatures;

condemn the lack of effective action by successive federal governments since 1998 to address emissions and meet our Kyoto commitments; and

call on the government to immediately table its federal climate change adaptation plan.

There are three clauses and I have trouble with each one of them. Before parsing the motion to explain the difficulties with all three clauses, let me point out the overwhelming problem: the motion does not call on Stephen Harper’s administration to do anything about the threat of rising greenhouse gases.

The action part of the motion calls for the government to “immediately” (that sounds good!) “table its federal climate change adaptation plan.” (whoops, where did the action go?)

An “adaptation plan” is all about how to adapt to climate change. I have long called, as has the Green Party, for a climate adaptation plan. But I would never call for an adaptation plan with no parallel effort to reduce the climate change impacts to which we will have to adapt. To do so is to announce we are throwing in the towel. We are abandoning efforts to reduce carbon pollution and will only do what we can to hold back rising seas, adjust to dropping water levels in the Great Lakes and Georgian Bay, plant drought resistant crops, brace ourselves for increased forest fires, loss of Arctic ice, permafrost melt, etc.

It is mind-boggling that the NDP motion failed to call for action. Did they forget that part? Were they worried a call for real action to fight global warming would create space for a public policy discussion about carbon pricing and a carbon tax? Or did they think “adaptation plan” meant some kind of GHG reduction plan? If so, they are out of touch with the key concepts of climate policy in place since the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Back to the top. The first clause is so sloppily worded it minimizes, rather than underscores, why 2 degrees global average temperature increase really matters. Why start the sentence with something as weak as “agree with many Canadians and the International Energy Agency?” Why not mention “consensus of the world’s climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the International Energy Agency, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the commitment to avoid a global average temperature increase of 2 degrees C that Canada made in the Copenhagen Accord.”

Weak drafting is one thing, but the next part is much worse: “there is grave concern with the impacts of a 2 degrees rise in global average temperatures.” There is grave concern? With the impacts?? That’s it? How about an accurate statement, like this:

“Scientists have concluded that for human civilization to have reasonable odds of avoiding collapse due to the catastrophic impacts of runaway global warming, concentrations of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere must be held below those levels associated with a 2 degrees rise in global average temperature increase, as compared to pre-Industrialized levels. In fact, in order to preserve Arctic ice, we should strive to keep global average temperature increases below a 1.5 degree rise.”

The way the NDP motion is worded it seems to assume we are going to have a 2 degree rise, and that there are grave concerns with impacts. It fails to connect 2 degrees with the triggering of runaway global warming, which is a much bigger problem than the immediate impacts of 2 degrees on its own.

Then there’s the second clause. This is a transparent attempt to wedge the Liberals on the issue. That’s politics and I guess I should be used to it by now. But when an issue is as important as whether our children have a liveable world, I am sick and tired of this petty garbage. The Liberals have a lousy record on climate. Chretien ratified Kyoto, full marks for that, but he did not put forward a plan. As Executive Director of Sierra Club of Canada, I spent years demanding action and criticizing the failure of the Liberals to act. Then Paul Martin did act and his environment minister, Stephane Dion, put forward a credible plan in 2005. And in 2006, Harper killed that plan. That one phrase would not have caused me to vote against the motion, if there had been a call for real action to reduce GHG. But predictably and tragically it reveals the real goal of the NDP opposition day motion: to make the Liberals look bad by writing a motion in a way the NDP knew the Liberals would vote against.

Why does that matter? Well, it’s like this. If you care about climate, you draft a motion in order to create the maximum possible opportunity for it to pass. You don’t play stupid games.

The NDP did the same thing last week with the Canada-China Investment Treaty motion. It rejected Liberal attempts to amend the motion such that the Liberals could vote with the NDP. At least then, the motion was clear and I had no problem voting with the NDP, but I was furious that an issue as important as blocking ratification of the FIPA with China was sabotaged for the shortest term possible partisan gain. (And I was furious that the Liberals voted with the Conservatives… I was in a very “plague on both your Houses” mood.)

The climate crisis is a threat to our very survival. It sickens me to see petty partisanship trump climate. For God’s sake, put forward motions that have a chance of passing and then twist arms in the Conservative caucus to get a motion that matters.

So that about covers why I couldn’t vote with the NDP. I would have loved to have seen a unified group of MPs from all the Opposition Parties rise on principle and (hoping against hope) some of the Conservatives who understand the need for climate action might have voted with us to give the Parliamentary call for reductions in GHG a chance of passing. But since tonight’s motion forgot to call for climate action, maybe we could take a run at a properly worded motion another day.

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