On The Hill

For the past two months, several colleagues and I have been sitting long hours on the special legislative committee assigned to rewrite the government’s Clean Air Act. After a week of intense negotiations and late night sittings, opposition parties rallied around Liberal amendments to the bill. To the surprise of many, the renamed Clean Air and Climate Change Act was reported back to the House on Friday.

When the Clean Air Act was proposed by the government in the fall, I was very disappointed because it offered nothing new in our fight against climate change. The Canadian Environmental Protection Act, as amended in 1999, is already a robust toolbox.

The bill appeared to distract us from the fact that the government was not using its tools to negotiate with large industrial emitters, as the Liberal government had successfully done. Draft regulations to limit emissions were in place in fall 2005, yet the minority Conservative government threw them out the window once in office. When the government referred the Clean Air Act to the special legislative committee, I expected that the Minister of the Environment would come back with serious proposals to improve the legislation.

Instead, we saw and heard nothing from the government. Government members on the committee spent their energy denying the need to work rapidly towards our Kyoto goals. In the end, the government did not come up with one single substantive improvement to the Clean Air Act.

When we realized that the government had no intention of acting, we took the unprecedented step of drafting our own opposition white paper. While Stephen Harper ran attack ads, Stéphane Dion presented “Balancing Our Carbon Budget”, an aggressive and innovative plan to meet the challenge of real and substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

My work over the past two weeks has been to take the solutions that Mr. Dion presented into the Clean Air Act, and get enough support to pass them into law. We have done just that. The Clean Air and Climate Change Act now endorses a National Carbon Budget, based on our Kyoto targets and reaches out to 60 to 80% reductions from 1990 levels by 2050. It requires the government to put in place a hard cap for large emitters and uses this hard cap to create market incentives for deep emissions reductions.

Businesses have been looking for the guidance and certainty that this law would provide for years. When the bill passes Parliament, it will allow companies to plan their investments in green technologies, reward early action, and help us avoid the most dramatic climate change scenarios.

I am proud of our work, but there is much more to be done. The next step is to ensure the government does not ignore the special legislative committee’s amendments. As Liberal Environment critic, and your representative, I will continue to pressure the government to act as soon as possible.