Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to respond to the Minister’s statement on some of the progressive energy initiatives that this government is showing, and I want to compliment them on that. I look forward to contributing to those further and to reviewing them through our climate change committee and so on.

But, Mr. Speaker, we really need to follow these initiatives within a context, and that context is: how did we get to this situation? We have an economy, a system of government, something here that has failed us and allowed this to become a critical situation. It’s not just here; it’s around the world. To me that tells us that we not only need to restructure some energy initiatives, but we need to restructure our economy and how we do business to improve the services to our people. For example, we need to pursue one that really is more concerned about our local economies, one that deals with our societal and environmental well-being and the opportunity for every individual to fulfill his or her potential.

We don’t want to just deal with these issues through subsidies and by shipping the cost onto government, obviously. What would a restructured economy look like? To me, we should know by now that as a basic environmental issue, we should be carbon neutral in all our development activities. This is entirely possible. I think we will be hearing more about that. We want to be increasing local self-sufficiency and skill levels. Again, there are many opportunities here. We need to see that basic needs — food, energy, shelter and so on — are provided increasingly through largely local production using regional resources.

Mr. Speaker, there are many opportunities for this sort of thing. I think that until we commit ourselves to restructuring our society and the way we pursue these initiatives, we won’t achieve our goals. We are going to be moving from crisis to crisis, as we are with our energy. Water, for example. We have a lot of serious concerns coming up. Our food and energy prices are going up. Our housing is going up. Our youth are crying out for leadership. Let’s provide it and do a comprehensive restructuring approach towards systems that actually work for our people.