I know that this committee will be studying this bill in more detail, but let me take this opportunity to say that my priority is to give Canadians a bill that will be effective in protecting species on the ground, not something that works only in the classroom or the court room. To create a bill that is effective, we have to consider and balance all stakeholders - environmentalists, landowners, provincial governments, aboriginal communities, and individual Canadians, and find ways for them to work together. We are relying on voluntary and incentive measures such as stewardship to encourage landowners and other stakeholders to cooperate in preserving species, but the federal government also retains strong enforcement powers that we will not hesitate to use if necessary. I think this bill strikes this balance and will help bring people together to actually save species. My third major priority is coordinating Canada's response to the threat of global climate change.
Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to our quality of life on a global basis.
Thanks to increasingly accurate scientific knowledge of weather trends, we know that 1997 and 1998 were the warmest years since temperatures began to be scientifically measured around 1860, and climatologist say that 1998 may have been the warmest in the last 1200 years. The 1995 International Panel on Climate Change estimates that global climate could rise 2 degrees Celsius over the next century, and the most recent estimates, including Environment Canada's climate model, one of the world's most accurate and sophisticated, put this figure even higher. This could mean a temperature increase for Canada of about 4 degrees Celsius. To put this in perspective, during the last ice age global temperatures were only 4 to 6 degrees colder than they are today. These changes are even more pronounced in the Arctic.