Baird on CTV's Question Period

On CTV's Question Period today, co-host Craig Oliver asked Environment Minister John Baird about his doom-and-gloom forecast if Canada commits to meeting its obligations under the Kyoto Protocol:

Oliver: Canadians can be forgiven if they don't know exactly who to believe on this issue. Disaster, if we do, disaster if we don’t. We're joined by the Minister of the Environment, John Baird. Mr. Baird, looked to me like you've built in assumptions and then, basically, you got exactly the report you wanted.
Baird: We took the Liberal private member's bill and said, if we wanted to strictly follow the bill, the letter of the law, we'd have to, we'd have to set in various measures that would begin to meet the targets in eight months. But people don't realize is Kyoto actually kicks in 2008. It's an average between '08 and 2012, and the reality is the Liberals seem to be, and Stephane Dion seems to be trying to replace ten years of bad environmental policy with ten years of bad economic policy.
Oliver:: But you know, this is now Sunday afternoon. You've had the weekend to think about it. Reaction in the country doesn't seem to be over the top. But it seems that your report, wouldn't you admit, was a trifle over the top? I mean, recession?
Baird: I think if you look at the economists who validated the report, one of them came out and said maybe he was a little bit light, it could have been worse than what he had signed off on. The reality is that the choice is not between Kyoto strictly adhered to or doing nothing. We'll come forward with a tough approach, a balanced approach, a approach that will allow us to make meaningful cuts in the greenhouse gases that are harmful, destroying the planet, and also being cognizant of keeping Canadians working.
Oliver:: Now obviously this Liberal plan that you said would lead to the kind of economic disaster that you claimed it would, if it became law, would be unacceptable to the government. You would have to make this a no-confidence vote if it ever went in to the house, correct?
Baird: Well, it's already cleared the house, and it's being debated in the senate now.
Oliver:: If it came back from the senate.
Baird: The report is a little bit too cute by half. What it requires is what passed into law is that the government would have 60 days to study it. Then they would send it off to the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy for more study, and it would come back to the house for further debate. We're not going to wait for the senate to act. We’ve already been rolling out a really ambitious agenda to reduce harmful greenhouse gases.
Oliver:: So that bill is never going to see the light of day?
Baird: Well, we'll see what the senate does.
Oliver:: You’re not going to bring it in.
Baird: We'll have to obey the law, but we've brought forward the plan that the bill calls for, and the Liberals don't have a plan. That’s why they asked us to develop one under their criteria for them. The reality is that there was no cost to implementing the protocol, and the Liberals would have done it years ago. You know, Dalton McGuinty, Buzz Hargrove, you know, virtually everyone in the country acknowledges there'll be a substantial cost. I think Canadians are prepared to pay. Canadian industry will have to contribute, but it'll be done in a balanced and meaningful way.
Oliver:: What about C-30 by the way? There's the other bill, which originally started as a government bill, the clean air act, and then was added to when you made a deal with the NDP for a short time. Is that bill ever going to see the light of day? Will that ever come into the Commons?
Baird: We'll see. Jack Layton, I think, tried to make the Parliament work by saying, listen, if we debate this bill right off the go before it was even debated in the house. We sent it to committee. You know, Conservatives on the committee supported amendments from all three of the opposition parties, but the Liberals together with the Bloc Quebecois really didn’t, weren’t particularly cooperative. They put the Liberal campaign platform into the bill, which is not even compliant with Kyoto to begin with.
Oliver:: When are we going to find out what your plan is? We've heard enough about Liberal plan, NDP plan. When are we going to finally find out what you're promoting?
Baird: Well, we've put a lot of initiatives on the table, programs, things in the budget. Things like transportation. Things like car strategy. Things like renewable energy. We also have brought forward a partnership with the provinces. We've got all the provinces now rolling together towards cleaner air and reducing greenhouse gases. The final part will be the industrial emissions strategy. We're going to be for the first time in Canada regulating industry.
Oliver:: When?
Baird: And we'll be coming forward very shortly with that.
Oliver:: I've been hearing “very shortly” since the beginning of March.
Baird: Well we're just about done. I mean this is, this is the most ambitious regulation I think any federal government has ever done. We’re going to regulate the entire industrial sector for both greenhouse gases and for our pollution. We want to make sure it's tough.
Oliver:: Why can't you give us a date?
Baird: We'll be coming forward with it very shortly, Craig, and we'll invite you to come.
Oliver:: Okay. Now, essentially though, it looks to me like you're not ready to make any major compromise, and neither are the Liberals, on how we approach global warming, so basically we're going to eventually go into an election campaign, whenever that is, with two different versions or Canadians are going to have to decide. This is going to be little bit like the free trade debate. Would you say that's true, and would you welcome that?
Baird: I would hope, I would hope long before an election is held that our industrial regulatory strategy is unveiled and is working for Canadians. I think it would be wrong to simply punt it off to the next parliament. We're going to act. You know industry has been fighting tough regulation for years, and being very successful with the Liberals. Environmentalists want perfection. Do you know what? The debate is about to end. The Canadian government's going to act.
Oliver:: Let me finally ask you something that's a little bit away, quite a ways away from what you're discuss, but you're a friend of the Prime Minister and one of his ministers. What about this image consultant who's also said to be a psychic? What's going on there? What do you think of that?
Baird: Well, it's, it's absurd. It's absolutely ludicrous to think that the Prime Minister would have an image consultant or a psychic on staff. That's simply silly. He wouldn't waste his own money, let alone the taxpayers' money on that. What this woman does is she's part of his tour team, a hard-working tour team. Every Prime Minister has had a tour team. In fact, the Prime Minister's is actually smaller than his recent predecessors, and I just think it's silly season here in Ottawa.
Oliver:: Okay, Mr. Baird, thank you.
Baird: Good to be here.
Oliver:: And we look forward to very soon. We've been hearing very soon for so many weeks. I don't know how you put a time on very soon.
Baird: Well it will be shortly, short order.

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