Mr. Speaker, I am glad the member appreciated the quote from President Kennedy, who said, “We choose to go to the moon.” We do not choose to tackle climate change. It is our obligation and we have no choice. If we do not tackle climate change, we will have no clean planet to leave for future generations.
Economists tell us about the most efficient way of tackling climate change and its market failure of negative externality. When I produce a good and impose a cost on all of us, a diffused cost, in the environment which all of us bear, including future generations, and I do not bear it as the producer of that good, then there is a market failure. We correct that market failure by making sure that we impose that cost and internalize the externality. That is a conservative principle that is an economic principle.
The answer is a price on carbon. If we are concerned, and I am concerned, about single parents who are taking their kids to baseball practice and are having to pay a higher cost, the answer is simple because the answer has been in front of us in a Canadian context for years. We have taken revenue to ensure that we internalize that externality, that people are paying for polluting and we make sure we take all that money and we pay it back to citizens at the end of the day so that it is revenue neutral.