...but, Mr. Speaker, someday I hope to be that old. The fact is, I can tell you I'm only 35 and I've seen a lot of changes. I can remember being a young man who worked at The Bay cleaning up the front and back in the days when we had boardwalks instead of sidewalks. We'd clean up the front yard and in June and July, when there was no school, we'd move them around and stuff so we could clean up and there would be frost there and you could see that there was permafrost in the ground in July. I mean I can tell you right now, this doesn't happen any more. Things have changed in my lifetime. I've seen bugs in my yard that I've never seen before. I used to be a kid who'd collect critters and the things are not the same anymore. My office here at the Legislative Assembly, last summer I watched a magpie build a nest; I've never seen a magpie up until the last couple of years. Things have changed, Mr. Speaker. The vegetation is shifting and...It's our philosophy.
I think when people often say, you know, the sky is falling on this problem, it truly is. The world has changed. People accepted certain lifestyles and accepted that they didn't have any responsibility for the things they were doing. Again, I remember growing up and watching people burn their garbage and they didn't worry about tomorrow and now people are recycling it. It's all a bit of way we need to move forward and realize that sometimes we need to do good things before crisis gets here. Is this the signal we need before we get to a crisis? I certainly hope that we react before we're forced to, because who knows what we'll have to do.
I don't know if one of my honourable colleagues here had mentioned it, but we were reading a news clip not that long ago about Australia has reached a point where they
have to recycle water. I hope that never is the day here in Canada. I hope that is never the day here in the Northwest Territories.
Mr. Speaker, this is no different than the little story about the starfish where the guy is picking up one and saving one and they say, well, geez, you can't save them all. But they're saying let's start saving some of them and do something. I think this motion speaks to the issue, which is we have to start doing something or nothing will get done. By the point that it becomes a crisis, as I talked about just earlier, it may be too late; we may be forced to make dramatic decisions. So what does it take? We are the action heroes of tomorrow, Mr. Speaker. We can bring forward the legislation and the plans and we can do something about these issues.
Mr. Speaker, if it takes the provinces and the territories to lead in order to catch the attention of the federal government, maybe that's what we need to do. Maybe we need to lead and maybe it's time that the federal government sees how important this issue is. I'm convinced that, yes, the precautionary principle is the right way to go because if we're wrong, our environment is a much healthier and safer place to be. As I said today in my Member's statement, I really think that industry needs to play a role. I mean industry and transportation, when you add their percentages up, they commit 70 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions. That's a phenomenal amount, Mr. Speaker, when you look at a household only contributes 5 percent, all our households in the Territories. Mr. Speaker, multinational corporation are afraid of one thing: our legislation. That's our one tool of getting their attention. You know, yes, there are great corporations out there that do their part and there are some fabulous ones that promote great commercials about how they take care of the environment, but the thing is it's up to us to make that decision and say, look, let's get some legislation in there and make sure if they're not doing it willingly on their own, they will.
Mr. Speaker, in closing here, science may be right on this that we're going into an area we don't want to and if we don't get on board to do something to protect our water, to protect our environment, who knows where we'll be? But then again, if it's just treated as a cycle and science just misunderstood the problem, what did we do? We cleaned up the environment a little more. I mean what's wrong with that?
Lastly, Mr. Speaker, I once read many years ago about Ben Franklin and he talked about...He said if we don't hang together, we'll certainly hang separately. So I think this is certainly our job and our point in time that we all hang in together because as a team we can do something. I think as a territory and as a government and as a Legislature, we need to take strides. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.