Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I'm afraid I cannot support sending this bill to committee because I believe this bill could not accomplish the goals or solve any of the concerns that Members in this House and members of the public have been raising about the carbon tax. I fear that by sending it to committee, far from creating policy clarity we will be causing even greater confusion and chaos amongst the general public, community governments, and industry stakeholders about what is happening with the carbon tax, and that this could cause more harm than good.
The first problem is that the title of the bill is the Carbon Tax Repeal Act, so people could be forgiven for thinking that the carbon tax will be repealed and therefore they won't have to pay the carbon tax anymore. But this is not true. The carbon tax will continue to exist until the federal government cancels it. The GNWT cannot change how much people in the NWT are charged for the carbon tax. So let me just repeat that for clarity. This bill cannot change anything around how much carbon tax people in our communities have to pay. All that this bill can change is who collects the tax. It will mean that Ottawa collects our money instead of the GNWT.
I have not heard any of my constituents asking for this change. And for the life of me, I cannot understand why we would go to all this trouble, spend the resources and the time of Members and staff, so that we could have less control over the same carbon tax.
Now if committee wants to examine aspects of our system around rebates or offsets that need to be changed, they are free to do that without this bill, without handing the power over tax collection to Ottawa. If committee wants to examine how we might ensure that our carbon tax would disappear in the event that the federal government eliminated the carbon tax requirement, they are free to do that without this bill. I myself would certainly support stopping any net carbon tax revenues from going into the general revenues of this government. I would want to ensure that they are spent rather on renewable energy projects to mitigate climate change. But this bill takes us in the opposite direction from that. We would not have any net revenues left to go toward renewable energy alternatives in the NWT.
This could also cause particular financial uncertainty for the mining industry because the NWT has taken a significantly different approach in how we apply the carbon tax and rebates to industry versus the federal government's backstop. Mining operations in the NWT have made their financial decisions and plans based on the existing NWT approach, and I don't see the point in pulling the rug out from under them at this point, or even speculating about changing things at this point. I haven't actually heard anyone calling for our system of carbon tax on large industrial emitters to be studied again or overhauled. I have heard Members saying that they want to provide an environmental certainty for industry, and this does the opposite of that.
So what I've heard from movers of this bill is that for the most part they want to keep the status quo system of offset payments in our system for large emitters. They just want the federal government to administer the same system that we already have instead of the GNWT. The problem is that as soon as we repeal our carbon tax, the federal government is in control. And they don't have to agree to administer the system we already have. We would have to plead with them. We would have to spend significant time and resources and political capital to try and convince them to bring us back to where we already are now. And there's a real risk that they would say no. And that's not about poor relationship between our government and the federal Ministers or our Ministers and the federal Ministers. It's about the fact that the federal government officials have finite time for us. And of all the things that we need to be talking to them about, negotiating with them about, I don't think this should be high up on the list.
So due to the risk of confusion and uncertainty and wasting of our political capital, I do not support us going any further down this path that this bill would lead us. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.