Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I don't know where to start. There have been quite a lot of thoughts shared with respect to this motion.
First, I want to ensure that it's on the record that it is our view that the Senate is independent. They have a democratic right and a professional obligation to ensure that all legislation passed by the House of Commons gets a sober second look and full consideration.
My colleague from Wellington—Halton Hills, the Honourable Michael Chong, who is a good friend of mine, has said that this is a tax bill and ought not to have been considered by the Senate in this regard, but the Supreme Court did actually indicate that carbon pricing does not qualify as a tax, so unfortunately, he's wrong.
Not only is he wrong, but the insistence that the Senate do our bidding is also wrong. My colleague said that he's unfamiliar with the way that the Senate does their business. That's fine. It's not up to us. We don't need to become familiar with how the Senate does their business. It is their business and not ours. On this side, and on every other side in the House, we're not going to be telling the Senate how to do their work.
By the way, the only senators who sit in a political caucus are the Conservative ones, and they still do. We don't have senators at Wednesday morning caucus. You do. The Conservatives do, so you ought to have a conversation with those senators. We don't have senators sitting in our caucus, but the Conservatives do.
On the Conservatives, I need to remind them that they ran on a carbon tax scheme with Erin O'Toole in the last federal election in 2021 that would have imposed the same price on pollution that we have now. If they're so against it after two years, hypothetically, if they had won the last federal election, would they have had the same revelation two years after that? They committed to a carbon price similar to ours that would have been imposed on farmers in the same way that ours was, to slowly nudge along innovations with respect to things like grain drying.
Irrespective of the fact that the vast majority, 97%, of farm fuels are exempt from carbon pricing, there remain a few as per Bill C-234 that are not exempt from carbon pricing, and they include some of the fuels used for grain drying. However, our governments also invested almost $1 billion in farmers to make grain drying more efficient and reduce its emissions.
I like baking sourdough—