VIDEO: Elizabeth responds in the House to the Speech from the Throne

We had an amazing experience at the opening of this Parliament: the visit by our King, King Charles III. I agree with the main theme of the Speech from the Throne, which is the need to build Canada strong. However, there are some details that were not mentioned in the Speech from the Throne.

I look at it and think, yes, of course, let us build a stronger Canada. It was the moment of the November 2024 election that made everyone realize the U.S. had once again put someone in the White House who showed no shame whatsoever about ripping up any agreement he had already signed, and who was prepared to break all sorts of laws and make all sorts of threats against us.

It was December 3, 2024, when then prime minister Justin Trudeau asked Pierre Poilievre, me, Jagmeet Singh and the leader of the Bloc Québécois to meet him to talk about what we could do as individual leaders of opposition parties working with the then prime minister to create a team Canada approach to deal with the threat. I signed up, and so did everybody else. We said we could all stand together. It made me proud to be Canadian that the leader of the official opposition, the leader of the New Democratic Party, the leader of the Bloc and the leader of the Green Party could all say, with the Liberals, “how do we work together?”. We continue that effort.

That was the one time we met in person. We continued, by the way, in early January and early February, meeting on Microsoft Teams to continue the effort of working together. Now we have a different effort, and I hope we can still work together, because it is terribly important that we stand united and are not bullied by what we could say right now is one of the world’s champion bullies. He is not the only one. Vladimir Putin is competing for world champion bully. There are others.

As far as the Speech from the Throne is concerned, there are some things I completely agree with. There are also, as I said, some details.

It is clear that our economy must change. It is not just about our economy, but perhaps also our culture as a country that is not really a country. There are 13 countries in our united nation.

We have a sense that there is less solidarity, I think, among the 10 Canadian provinces, three territories and the federal government than we find within the 24 separate sovereign nation-states of the European Union, at least within the oral history of my childhood with parents who were very much affected by the Second World War. The members of the European Union that now work so well together were, not that long ago, at war with each other. How is it that we, as one country, not only do not act like a country a lot of the time but also do not think like a country.

We need to start thinking like a country, acting like a country, because we are facing challenges. The threats are real. There are fundamental threats to our country and to our civilization.

I agree that we need, as the Speech from the Throne says, the largest transformation of our economy since the Second World War. We need it quickly. Over hundreds of years, Canadians have been known to be, and our economy has been somewhat limited to the idea of, a raw-resource colony, not just for other countries but increasingly for transnational corporations around the world that own a lot of our resources. From hewers of wood and drawers of water, we have become scrapers of bitumen and wasters of water.

We need to take action to put an end to this system of exporting raw resources instead of value-added products.

We could be doing more with our raw resources to make sure that we do not rip and ship, shipping out raw logs and shipping out unprocessed bitumen, failing to gain the opportunities of extracting value before we send our raw resources to other countries, where they get the jobs and we get the waste and pollution that is left behind as they take the resources for their benefit. This is an opportunity where we could actually rethink our economy and rethink the way we act together.

As the Prime Minister has said repeatedly, we can stop thinking about ourselves as 13 separate economies and think of it as one economy. What kind of economy is that? I am certainly hoping that we start thinking about a circular economy. We have signed on to numerous international agreements where that is a goal: that we want to be the kind of country where we are resilient, resourceful and sustainable and that we lift everybody up and leave no one behind. These are things we can do now, and it is terribly important that we actually do them.

I have a question about the Speech from the Throne. I am a little concerned because there is not a single reference to the Paris Agreement in this speech.

There were two passing references. The words “climate change” appear, not in full sentences, but they do appear twice in the document. However, there are no commitments, not even the minimum we had planned for meeting our international, legally binding obligations under the Paris Agreement. Of course we know that, while King Charles III read the speech, it was written by the Prime Minister.

These were words I would have liked to have seen in the Speech from the Throne. They were also written by the Prime Minister:

The carbon budget to limit temperature rise to below catastrophic levels is rapidly being exhausted…. If we had started in 2000, we could have hit the 1.5 degree C objective by halving emissions [in other words, cutting them in half] every thirty years. Now, we must halve emissions every ten years. If we wait another four years, the challenge will be to halve emissions every year.

That is from page 273 of the Prime Minister’s book Value(s). He wrote it, and it was published in 2021, so we have waited four years. It appears that the Prime Minister understands we have to cut our greenhouse emissions in half every year. This is a very steep challenge, and as he put it in Value(s), which I read and enjoyed, “the carbon budget to [stay] below catastrophic levels is rapidly being exhausted”.

He is not saying that this is a political commitment that somebody before him, as prime minister, took on and he is not very interested in it, although we might think that from the lack of details about what kind of climate action we are talking about in the Speech from the Throne, and why now we are suddenly finding it acceptable that everybody talks about expanding oil and gas as though that were a nation-building project as opposed to a sunset industry.

We want to protect the workers and the communities in those industries, but we have to actually be looking at what is a nation-building project that protects our future. We desperately need an east-west, north-south electricity grid so we can make good use of, and share across provincial boundaries, energy and electricity that is far cheaper than what many provinces now have. Their consumers are stuck with bad decision-making by their provincial utilities.

There are huge opportunities before us. It is, as the Prime Minister says, a “hinge moment” in our history.

We must do more and we must reduce greenhouse gases to protect our future and our grandchildren’s future.

I would just like to say that I will vote in favour of the Speech from the Throne, but I wait with bated breath to find out what the government actually thinks is a climate plan, because so far all it has done is cut the one measure that was working.