Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Good morning, members of the Standing Committee on the Environment and Sustainable Development; my name is Steven Guilbeault and I am a campaigner for climate and energy with Greenpeace Canada. I have been with Greenpeace since 1997, but have been involved in climate change since 1994. In 1995, I attended the First Conference of the Parties in Berlin, I was in Kyoto in 1997, and I have organized more than a dozen international negotiation meetings on climate change over the past 10 years.
This morning I would like to discuss three aspects of the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol in Canada. First, there is the carrot and stick approach as represented in the measures that have been implemented to date. In our opinion, it is essential that we have measures on which to build the future. Of course, there is the Kyoto Protocol, but, internationally, there is already talk of what happens after Kyoto, in other words, future agreements that will follow the Kyoto Protocol. Finally, we feel that a long term plan is important. I will explain that further in a few minutes.
On the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol to date, it is apparent that the Government of Canada has adopted the carrot approach. Incentives have been offered, and there are programs, often voluntary, for various sectors of the Canadian community, particularly industry. More recently, with the One-Tonne Challenge, the people of Canada have been asked to do their share. We now have a host of measures and incentive programs, but they are often unrelated when it comes to insuring any long term effectiveness. Many Canadian newspaper articles have recently stated that even the officials in Ottawa are now acknowledging that the voluntary approach will not help us to meet our targets, something that we, as environmentalists, have been saying for quite some time.
In the Rio Framework Convention on Climate Change, an international commitment was made to bring our greenhouse gas emissions back down to the 1990 levels by the year 2000. At the time, the only measures that were put forward to meet this target were voluntary, and we all know what happened. In 2000, our greenhouse gas emissions were about 20 % higher than in 1990.
Of course, there can be voluntary measures, and we agree that incentives are necessary, but the carrot cannot work without the stick. Regulatory measures must be implemented. There must be laws to force various sectors to meet the Canadian emission standards. That is unavoidable.
This applies to many of the sectors with heavy greenhouse gas emissions. Take, for example, the large final emitters that are responsible for 50% of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada. There is also the transportation sector, which accounts for about 30% of emissions. So far, very few measures, if any, have applied to the transportation sector. This aberration must be corrected without delay.
There is also the construction industry. I believe that Mr. Ribaux, from Équiterre, will touch upon that briefly. The National Building Code is a number of years old. The provincial codes, none of which is very recent either—for example, Quebec's code was published in 1981—have not really been updated, despite the introduction of new construction techniques, new materials, new technologies such as geothermics, which is becoming more popular in Canada, even though it is not yet widely used, to reduce emissions. To date, these measures have, for all intents and purposes, been ignored or used very sparingly.
Speaking of geothermics, there is a very interesting project underway in Winnipeg, where 10,000 entirely geothermic housing units will be built.
This leads me to my second point, namely, the necessity to have measures on which we can build to not only meet the Kyoto objectives, but to go beyond them.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCG, as it is called in English,
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
clearly states that for a country like ours, and for all industrialized countries, emissions will have to be reduced by 60 to 80% over the next decades, by about 2050, if we want to avoid a global climate catastrophe. Even last week, these conclusions were confirmed at a meeting sponsored by British Prime Minister Blair, held at Exeter University.
The introduction of tax measures in various sectors of Canada's economy will be one way to institute structural measures. This would require a complete overhaul of Canada's tax system which, even today, tends to encourage the type of activity that greatly encourages greenhouse gas emissions while acting as a disincentive to activities, technologies and investments that would reduce or create few greenhouse gas emissions. That goes against our Kyoto Protocol objectives.
In closing, I would say that part of our problem resides in the fact that Canada has yet to have a global view of the environment issue. Whether in Rio in 1992 or Kyoto in 1997--I was there--we held to our negotiating position, without really knowing what to expect. We should look to what is being done elsewhere to prepare these action plans for decades to come. We might think of Great Britain and its white paper on emission reduction. The British government has committed to a 50% reduction of their greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. I mention Great Britain, but I could also cite a nearby state, Maine, which has undertaken, in a similar exercise, to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 70% by the year 2050. An American state, under George Bush, which is moving forward with very proactive measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Who would have believed it?
We must not lose sight of the environmental limits, even if, so far, they have been completely ignored. How close are we coming to witnessing a global climate catastrophe? With that in mind, the European Union acknowledges that we must, by whatever means possible, avoid raising the climate's worldwide temperature by more than 2 degrees Celsius. Some countries, among them Great Britain, have already done that. Atmosphere concentration levels have been set in order to avoid going beyond that level. It is already part of Britain's climate change policy. And the European Union is about to do the same. I sincerely hope that Canada will undertake this type of exercise, and define this type of long-term objective. This will provide for a much more organized approach as we move forward in the coming decades. Everyone will know what to expect, which has unfortunately not always been the case. I will leave it at that, and would like to thank you for your attention.